All posts by amytigner

Liquorice: “The Spoonful of Sugar that Helps the Medicine Go Down”

By Sandra Jergensen

Licorice 1If you wish “To make Juise of Liquorish in the beginning of Maye” à la Jane Baber you need to do some advance planning.[i] Chances of finding suitable fresh liquorice root are slim; you will most likely need to grow your own. By starting prep work immediately you should be ready for juicing, roughly three years from now. While recipes often have many steps and tedious wait periods, just acquiring the ingredient list for “Juise of Liquorish” makes a month-aged fruitcake appear as petty convenience food.  Even though growing proper liquorice, a small leguminous plant, takes “three summers for the roots to grow to full size,” it is worth the investment.[ii] Good, fresh liquorice tastes as good as it is for you. In fact, it may just be the “spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down” that Mary Poppins advocated.

Liquorice has been cultivated on a large scale in England beginning in Pontefract, Yorkshire in the seventeenth century. Even before the Reformation, the region’s monastery popularised liquorice, turning this area into what is still the center of English liquorice tradition as the home of the ever-beloved Pontefract cakes. These coin-sized disks of candied black liquorice stamped with a castle and an owl may have been made as early as 1614.[iii]  While I am unaware of the location where Jane Baber’s seventeenth-century Book of Receipts was written, her use of the “juise of licquorish” is strikingly similar to a recipe for making Pontefract cakes.[iv] The inclusion of such a similar recipe at the time of her manuscript production in 1625 seems downright trendy including considering the fashionable status of liquorice at that time in England. The connection is not just the use of liquorice, but an almost identical preparation of the ubiquitous confection.

While I realized that while neither recipe advertises candy, they both produce it. Baber’s technique, like the recipe for Pontefract cakes, direct the cook to make a combined liquorice root, water and sugar to be cooked and thickened, and shaped into rolls. The Baber recipe also calls for the addition of hyssop, rosemary and colesfoot for added flavor or medicinal use. Even without the precision of a candy thermometer, Baber’s candy-making instruction is spot-on for reaching a “soft-ball” stage of candy making where the liquid has boiled out and the sugars have begun to harden into a tacky, sticky consistency that would allow you to “see the bottome of the bason [while you are] stirringe it very still.” If you follow the directions as written, you should end up with the classic chewy sweet we expect liquorice to be, and the ever-popular Pontefract cakes still are.

Licorice 3In its purest form, Glycyrrhiza glabra, or liquorice, trumps cane sugar’s sweetness fifty times over. Yet the foil is in the bitter flavor it also possesses, which inhibits some tasters from recognizing the intensity of the plant’s sweet flavor. Oddly enough, the sweetness also depends on the way in which liquorice root is cut. The thicker the cut, the sweeter the root seems, while a thinner cut tastes saltier and a bit bitter. Unfortunately I don’t know the result of stamping them all together in a mortar as Baber directs in the recipe. Even so, she covers her bases, calling for the addition of the “three or fower ounces of redd suger Candy.” Although sweet with candy, and perhaps sweet like candy, the classic English treat (Allsorts, anyone?) had more value than a pleasing, sugary sweetness on the tongue: it was most likely intended as medicine.

While liquorice was also a frequent flavoring for stout and gingerbread in early modern England, liquorice was primarily used medicinally. It was a common remedy to treat ailments such as inflammation, mild constipation and the “rume” (excessive mucousal secretions), as Baber’s recipe recommends. Liquorice’s popularity rose, becoming a go-to flavoring for medicine rather than just the medicine itself. Cough lozenges, teas, tonics and ticcatares could be infused with liquorice to cover up less pleasant tastes.

It was most likely in that shift from medicine to medicinal flavoring and candy-like medicine to candy that the original usage was largely forgotten. Yet, all those who enjoyed the flavor du jour, may have not be cognizant of the benefits–that the “spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, in a most delightful way.”  Jane Baber’s medicinal receipt “To make Juise of Liquorish in the beginning of Maye” may have not been a recipe for her favorite candy, but it yielded dry noses, happy bowels, and surprisingly eager recipients.

 


[i] Baber, Jane. Book of Receipts, 1635. MS 108. Wellcome Library, London, f. 21v.

[ii] “Liquorice”, The Oxford Companion to Family and Local History, ed. David Hey, (Oxford University Press, 2008;  Oxford Reference, 2009), date Accessed 8 Apr. 2013 <http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.uta.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532988.001.0001/acref-9780199532988-e-1128>.

[iii] Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 455.

[iv] http://www.wakefield.gov.uk/CultureAndLeisure/HistoricWakefield/Liquorice/recipe.htm

Sandra Jergensen is an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Arlington. She was involved in a class project to transcribe Jane Baber’s recipe book, led by Amy Tigner.

Teaching Recipes

Nearly every year, I teach a senior seminar in the English department at the University of Texas, Arlington (near Dallas) that changes thematically each time.  With the recent proliferation of both cookbooks and books about cooking, I decided this spring to try out a class that focused on literature that features recipes as a major component, and, as a kind of juxtaposition to the literature, I also wanted to consider recipes as a literary pursuit.  Students would delve into texts that exhibit literary, lyrical, and aesthetic sensibilities about recipe-writing and recipe-execution, and that mark particular cultural shifts in food praxis and politics. At the same time, students would study how recipe writing calls upon a host of literary and cultural practices.

The literature that we read was primarily contemporary novels, including Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Nicole Mones’s The Last Chinese Chef, though we also read M.F.K. Fisher’s classic work, How to Cook a Wolf.   For the recipe side, we read Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. But, as I am an early modernist by training, I also wanted the students to be exposed to earlier recipes to understand how recipes have developed and changed in the last four hundred years.

Here the class intersected with my own research interest in women’s manuscript receipt book writing of sixteenth and seventeenth century England and with my involvement with the newly formed digital humanities group, Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), many of whose members write for this blog.  I was inspired by Lisa Smith’s autumn class, “Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” who had worked on transcribing Johanna St. John’s recipe book. (See her blog post “An Experiment in Teaching Recipe Transcription,” April 12, 2013.)  I was also working in tandem with Rebecca Laroche, who teaches at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, as we decided that we would have our students transcribe the same seventeenth-century recipe book, so that the text could be double-keyed.  Rebecca and I chose Jane Baber’s receipt book, available in digitized form from the Wellcome Library, because it was short, only twenty-six pages, and in a hand, we thought, that was not too difficult.  Our students would code their transcriptions in XML on the Textual Communities crowd-sourcing transcription platform, run by the University of Saskatchewan.

With a couple of exceptions, the students in the class were senior English majors so they were used to reading and writing about literature. Reading and transcribing early modern writing, however, was something that they had never encountered before–and the task seemed at first quite daunting.  To teach the skill of transcribing, Rebecca and I had students utilize the online Cambridge handwriting course, which moves progressively through more and more difficult early modern handwriting.  My class met on Thursdays in a computer classroom, and we devoted the class period to transcription.  What I noticed was that students started working collectively on the transcriptions, and such communal learning made all the parties stronger transcribers.

So when it finally came to transcribing Baber’s receipt book, I decided to have them work in groups.  What we all noticed was that the group work allowed everyone a safety net to have the confidence to do difficult work, with as much accuracy as possible. I also learned a lot about transcribing from the students as they experimented with various techniques, such as using a tablet or large T.V. to look at the recipe while writing the transcription on a laptop. Students became tenacious in figuring out what words could be, looking them up in the Oxford English Dictionary or in a Google search.  They also struggled to learn to code in XML and to make everything work correctly on the Textual Communities site.

Throughout the semester, students had to write short, researched analytical commentaries, and in the next few days some students from the class will be posting their discoveries about Jane Baber’s recipes.  I am sure you will enjoy their discoveries, and it is exciting to see such keen interest in these receipt book manuscripts.

 

Jane Baber 1r                              Jane Baber 6r

Chocolate in Seventeenth-Century England, Part II

In The Queen-Like Closet (1670), Hannah Woolley publishes a second recipe, “To make Chaculato,” that is radically different from her earlier one for chocolate in The Ladies Directory (1662) and from those coming from Spain and the New World.[1] The reconfiguration, I think, indicates the development of English trade systems and colonial ventures in America. This second recipe, much more fully than her first one, amalgamates the local with the global, the English with the Continental, and the European with the New World. It thus modifies the entire recipe for the changing English tastes:

To make Chaculato

Take half a pint of Clarret Wine, boil it a little, then scrape some Chaculato very fine and put into it, and the Yokes of two Eggs, stir them well together over a slow Fire till it be thick, and sweeten it with Sugar according in your taste. (QLC 104)

For this adapted New World drink, Woolley’s recipe begins with French claret wine, into which she grates the American chocolate, adds local English egg yolks, and then sweetens the mixture with Caribbean sugar. Beginning in the sixteenth century, England imported a particular red wine from Bordeaux that the English called claret. In the seventeenth century, however, a new tax law against the importation of French wine had made claret more rarified and expensive, and therefore more desirable.[2] Woolley’s use of this wine in particular indicates that her imagined readership would have the financial means to purchase this preferred beverage, especially as they would also be purchasing the rare ingredient of chocolate.

As in her first recipe, Woolley’s directions call for grating the chocolate, indicating she likely used a hardened chocolate paste already processed in Jamaica. The process consisted of fermenting cacao seeds, roasting and crushing the shells and beans with a roller, and finally winnowing them for separation.[3] The cacao beans or nibs were then ground in a mill and made into a paste, and, according to Willliam Hughes’s The American Phystian (1672), shaped into “Lumps, Rowls, Cakes, Balls, Lozanges, &c.” This form of preservation was important for it allowed the chocolate to be kept for upwards of a year, thus facilitating easy shipment to England.[4] Furthermore, as with the increased availability of sugar through the colonial practices of the British navy, chocolate also became more readily attainable in England after Cromwell’s forces had defeated the Spanish in 1655 in Jamaica and took over the cacao plantations, where the chocolate was processed.[5]

If in her first recipe the addition of eggs to the Spanish recipe makes chocolate more appealing for the English sensibility, Woolley’s second recipe fully naturalizes chocolate into a specifically English context, essentially making it an ingredient of an already established English drink. Using wine rather than water or milk as the base liquid for her “chaculato” marks the difference in Woolley’s recipe. In essence, Woolley is taking a familiar English recipe for a posset (a hot curdled wine or ale drink) and modifying it with the addition of the foreign ingredient, chocolate. Perhaps Woolley’s choice to put the chocolate into a posset is due to the fact that, as Kate Colquhoun explains: “Hot drinks, apart from possets, were a whole new experience.”[6] Her recipe does fit into the category of hot drinks, as Woolley includes in the following pages three traditional recipes for hot possets, each primarily consisting of the same basic ingredients as her one for chocolate: eggs, sugar, and wine (QLC 106–07). Hence, Woolley’s “To make Chaculato” reveals a chemical process of fusing exotic products into domestic ingredients to make an English drink, and, by application, the cultural assimilation of American substances into the native English body.

Though English recipes had for centuries been incorporating and naturalizing foreign commodities (cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron, for example), the process and significance of Woolley’s chocolate recipe breaks markedly with this culinary history, specifically because of the rising English colonial engagement with the New World. The fundamental difference is that the English in this context are a colonizing body politic, already engaged in the practice of absorbing some foreign other into the self. The drinking of chocolate mixed into an English posset is the physical, domestic manifestation of colonization that was occurring across the ocean. Further, as the English were expanding imperial dominion over both the environments and bodies that produced chocolate (and sugar) in the seventeenth century, recipes like Woolley’s served not just to incorporate but also to “preserve” English bodies with American materials and ingredients; both health and taste were increasingly modified through colonial activities enacted in the home by women.


[1] This post is an excerpt from Amy L. Tigner, “Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet” ” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (Palgrave, 2011), p. 129-49. Hannah Woolley, The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet (London: R. Lowndes, 1670); ———, The Ladies Directory  (London: T. M. for Peter Dring, 1662).

[2] Thomas Pellechia, The 8,000 Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade  (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 70, 119-20.

[3] Penelope Jephson’s manuscript cookbook dated from 1671, (V.a. 396) at the Folger library, contains the recipe, “To make chocolato” that unlike Woolley’s recipe uses cacao nuts in their raw form and gives instructions as to how to process it into a useable paste form.

[4] John A. West, “A Brief History and Botany of Cacao,” in Chocolate: Food of the Gods, ed. Ales Szogyi (Burnham: Greenwood Press, 1997), 109. William Hughes, The American physitian  (London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672), 116-7.

[5] Sophie and Michael Coe Coe, The True History of Chocolate  (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 167.

[6] Kate Colquhoun, Taste: the Story of Britain Through Its cooking  (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 146.

Chocolate in Seventeenth-century England, Part I

By Amy Tigner

From the 1640s, recipes for chocolate drinks had been printed in English language books about chocolate; however, Hannah Woolley’s “To make Spanish Chaculata” in The Ladies Directory (1662) is, as far as I have been able to discern, the first in a printed cookbook in England. [1] The fact that Woolley identifies this recipe specifically as “Spanish” is significant because she is clearly indicating its foreign provenance and attendant associations; yet, the recipe already shows signs of its acclimation to English taste.

To make Spanish Chaculata

Boile some water in an earthen Pipkin a quarter of an hour; then sweeten it with   Sugar; then scrape your Chaculata very fine, and put it in, boil it half an hour; then put in the Yolks of Eggs well beaten, and stir it over a slow fire till it be thick. (TLD 60)

The call for water as the liquid component most closely associates Woolley’s recipe with those coming directly from Spain. Henry Stubbe, who published the chocolate tome, The Indian nectar, or, A discourse concerning chocolata, in 1662, explains the difference between Spanish and English Chocolate recipes: “Here in England we are not content with the plain Spanish way of mixing Chocolata with water.”[2] Stubbe then relates that the English use milk and sometimes eggs or egg yolks to thicken the mixture. This instance in the Stubbe’s text (and borne out in Woolley’s recipe) reveals the necessity for each culture to naturalize the new commodity of chocolate to its own particular appetite and mode of assimilation. Many Spanish recipes also included spices, such as cloves, cinnamon, and long pepper (chili peppers), that would make the chocolate piquante, which would likely be too spicy for the English tongue.[3] As Woolley adds egg yolks to the chocolate drink but excises any peppery spices, we can see how her recipe is altered for the English palate.

No other recipe for chocolate appears to be published in any receipt book in English until Woolley’s prints her second one in the 1670 The Queen-Like Closet. Anne Fanshawe’s cookbook manuscript, however, does contain a recipe titled, “To dresse Chocolatte,” with an annotation identifying the time and place as Madrid, 10 Aug. 1665.[4]

Page from Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipe book, including a picture of a chocolate pot
Western Manuscript 7113,page 332.  Image courtesy of The Wellcome Library, London

Most interestingly Fanshawe also includes a sewn-in drawing of an Indian chocolate pot and whisk or molinillo; on the drawing is written, “This is the same chocelary pottes that are mayd in the Indies.” As Anne was married to Richard Fanshawe, the English Ambassador to Spain, it is not surprising that she would have had access to a chocolate recipe and to the “Indian” utensils. The recipe, however, is scribbled out with a circular scrawl, making the recipe impossible to read.[5] At the end of the recipe is a sentence that is not scratched out: “The Best Chocolate but that of ye Indies is in Sivill [Seville] Spane,” perhaps indicating that Fanshawe had gone to Seville and tasted what she thought of as superlative chocolate. Unfortunately, the recipe’s illegibility makes it impossible to know the ingredients or particular processes. Nevertheless, even with its large lacuna, we can surmise from the peripheral clues that Fanshawe was actively involved in discovering new tastes and recipes from America; indeed she may have been the Englishwomen closest to the direct source of importation of exotic Indian kitchenware and comestibles into Europe. The lamentable scribbling, however, bars a comparison of Fanshawe’s and Woolley’s recipes, a comparison that might show the progression of English dissemination and/or adaptation of foreign recipes and exotic ingredients.

 

[1] This post is an excerpt from Amy L. Tigner, “Preserving Nature in Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet; or Rich Cabinet” ” in Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, edited by Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche (Palgrave, 2011), p. 129-49. Hannah Woolley, The Ladies Directory in Choice Experiments and Curiosities (London: T.M. for Peter Dring, 1662).

[2] Henry Stubbe, The Indian Nectar: Or a Discourse Concerning Chocolata (London: J. C. for Andrew Crook, 1662), 109.

[3] Antonio Colmenero, A Curious Treatise of the Nature and Quality of Chocolate, trans. Diego de Vades-forte (London: J. Okes, 1640), 8.

[4] I would like to thank David Goldstein for pointing out Fanshawe’s receipt. Ann Fanshawe, “Mrs. Fanshawes Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salves, Waters, Cordialls, Preserves and Cookery,” MS7113 in Recipe Books Project (Wellcome Library, 1651), 332.

[5] Curiously, no other recipe in Fanshawe’s book has been so thoroughly obliterated; most others are simply crossed out with a big X over the whole recipe or a line is drawn through the words.