Dorothy Hartley - Food In England

Published by Little, Brown

ISBN: 9780-34940177-5

Copyright 1954 by Dorothy Hartley

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Little, Brown

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

E NGLISH cooking is old-fashioned, because we like it that way. We do enjoy foreign dishes and admire Continental cooks, but when we cook the foreign dishes, the dishes, like the foreigners, become naturalised English.

So this book is for English cooks, and belongs to English kitchens.

The kitchens are more modern than the cooking, because we are a race of mechanics and often amenable to reason, but even our kitchens are modernised in rather an old-fashioned waynot streamlined in the transatlantic manner; and some of our best English cooking is still done in kitchens that have neither electricity nor gas, and are only just considering enclosed combustion stoves. Chaucers alchemist used a pressure cooker, and we always used to put a flat-iron on the saucepan when we wanted anything to cook quicker; but these excellent inventions are less appreciated in old kitchens where the fire burns gently day and nightand Somethings ready for them when they come inand dear knows when that will be! for in the country household you cannot regulate the consumeronly the dinner. So please consider this book as an old-fashioned kitchen, not impressive, but a warm friendly place, where one can come in any time and have a chat with the cook. And here, at the very beginning, I want to thank all the kind cooks who have talked to me, and taught me, and helped me to make this book. For them I wish it was a better book; but they will know that the faults are all mine and the kindness all theirs. So I hope they will take the book as their own with all my gratitude. May I also thank the officials of the British Museum, where the history was studied and from where most of the original plates were obtained.

Now a word about the history bits. I have already done six volumes of history, so will historians please forgive me that these bits are for cooksnot historians. Historians will see that the quotations are not those most urgent to history, and the generalities in the short condensed notes omit much of importance. Professional historians will sympathise, for they will understand the difficulty, but the general reader deserves a word of explanation.

So many well-worn quotations have been used so often, for so long, that they have become accepted as fixed facts upon their subject. But the more you study, the fewer facts become fixtures; and for every quotation giving one aspect, there are usually a dozen modifying it and capable of giving quite a different impression. Realise that for centuries the swiftest transport was by horse (or water), and the only instantaneous communication was by beacon! (and that would not convey much culinary information beyond Victorious soldiers celebrating, so you kill the worst cow before they eat the best one; or Not victoriousfleeing, so you take the ham out of the smoke hole and leave home).

People travelled about, but districts remained distinctive, so that there was far more regional variety, and it was harder to generalise.

Another wrong impression is that food was sharply divided for two classes: the poor, who starved on beans and black bread, and the rich, who surfeited on peacocks and cockatrice. These were two extremes. For every professional cook whose fine recipes reached the crackling parchment and fame, there were masses of working households who lived on the land and off the land, and cooked for their families because they had to and because they loved them. These poor people cooked as well as they couldprobably very well indeed. The paintings of the Early Masters show that rickets and deficiency diseases were rife, but much of this work was done in cities, and our undoubtedly improved health and larger growth today is more likely to be from our knowledge of what we ought to eat than any change in the basic materials available. That these materials made a dull diet, lacking our variety of imports, can be modified by the many pungent and powerful native spices and herbs and various plants which they used and which we have now forgotten.

Another impression is of monotonybut it is we who level out the year into monotony by demanding the same food all the year round!

Mediaeval people pickled and potted and dried food to preserve it, but they did enjoy the enforced variety of the seasons! Also, the cook was only part of the communal household. It was the gardener who said in spring, Now you eat Rounceval peas; or, glumly, in autumn, Theres no cabbage nor neps. It was the shepherd who decreed when there was to be mutton; and as he ate with the other workers, it behoved him to fatten up his old crones, or his mates would find fault. In winter it was the swineherd, at last convinced that all his sows were safely in the family way, who announced, Now you may eat the boars head! and the dairywoman, all flooded out from dairy to hafod, who ordered junkets, curds and whey, milk cheeses and, maybe, veal. Even the woodboy shared the general responsibility, for though all servants at night bring in wood or a log, cooking fuel required selection, and many a joint that would have roast had to be boiled because the wood was damp, or the wrong sort. (Then the mediaeval cook would have a word to say to the woodboy, exactly as the cook today speaks to the coal merchant about the boiler fuel!)

So let any cook who enjoys our ancestral heritage begin at the material end and study the fuel and methods first, and remember that some cooks were old-fashioned and some used the most modern appliances. Because they put down some unexpected result to a miracle, and you give it a scientific explanation, does not change your attitudesyou are both believing what you were taughtor trying to do so. The fact remains they were people like ourselves, doing their jobs as well as ever they couldfor we English cooks (including pleasurable importations now completely naturalised) have always been our excellent selves, under all conditions in all centuries. So come now into our own English kitchen and meet friends! Here is Tusser, just back from market, at Ipswich; here a twelfth-century butler, who will mix you hyprocras; or a Yorkshire farmer, who will brew you a drink to take to bed. Captain Perry, of the North-West Passage, is poking round the stove to see how the boiler works; a couple of Elizabethan sailors are wolfing clouted cream. Haclutt is talking to the gardener; and Gervaise Markham, after a prowl round the stables, is joining Fitzherbert in the orchard. A Scottish agricultural expert brings in a sack of oatmeal; a Lancashire weaver cracks potatoes for a hot pot; a woman author brings piety and pot pie from her New England kitchen; even the mediaeval hound comes to the door for his bone. All are friendly together and make you very welcome in the kitchen they have all loved so longthe English kitchen. It is not a very tidy kitchen, because, like this book, it has been in use so long; and so many different people have worked therein, putting things into different places, so that the author does apologise to cookspast and presentif anyone has slipped out during the blitz or turned up in the wrong recipe, for