Category Archives: Series: Lady Anne Fanshawe

Early Modern, Manuscripts, Series: Chocolate, Series: Hannah Wolley, Series: Lady Anne Fanshawe, Series: Transcription, Tools and Techniques

Teaching Chocolate from the Bean to Drink

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By Amy L. Tigner

Making chocolate from bean to bar has become fashionable both in cottage industries, such as the delightful husband and wife shop, El Buen Cacaco, in Idyllwild, California that creates a wickedly hot Ghost Chocolate Bar made with bhut jolokia (aka ghost chili). In 2016, Carol Wiley listed 183 bean to bar chocolatiers on her website, but I would imagine there are even more artisanal chocolate businesses popping up every day.

Making chocolate in the classroom from “bean to drink” also seems to be gaining traction, as least in the early modern recipe world. Amanda Herbert posted her experiments with “teaching with chocolate tasting” which you can read here and John Kuhn and Marissa Nicosia talk about theirs here.

For my own part, I have been interested for several years in the historical aspects of chocolate as it made its way across the Atlantic, and in earlier blog posts, I have written about Hannah Woolley’s mid-seventeenth-century chocolate recipes in her printed cookbooks here and here . The most interesting recipe that I have come across is in the cookbook manuscript by Lady Ann Fanshawe (Wellcome MS 7113), who lived in Madrid in the 1660s as her husband was the English Ambassador to Spain. The recipe, dated 1665, is especially intriguing first because Fanshawe attached a drawing of a “chocelary potte” and a whisk or molinillo and secondly because it is entirely scratched out with large loops. One of my graduate students did quite a bit of transcription magic and was able to recover some of the recipe underneath and ever since that point, I had wanted to try to make the recipe.

Last fall I had the opportunity when I was teaching a senior seminar and graduate seminar on “Early Modern Women’s Writing and Literary Practice.” The class was designed to incorporate as many material practices as possible as we were transcribing women’s letters and recipes from the seventeenth century. Early in the semester we had made ink, as I describe in this blog, but I really wanted to try to make chocolate from the bean, as Fanshawe had done. But because there were still some lacunae in the Fanshawe recipe I thought I had better consult one of her contemporaries, Penelope Jepson, who also has a chocolate recipe in her manuscript cookbook (Folger V.a. 396).

To make chocolato

Take a pound of the cacao nuts finely beaten or searsed, half a pound of hard sugar finely beaten or searsed, an ounce of cynamon, half an ounce of nutmeg, half an ounce aniseede, half a dram of long pepper, as much of Jamaica pepper. Beat and searse all those spices, then put in two stickes of vanillas beaten and searsed (two drachms of Achiote beaten and searsed) with ambergrise as you like to taste. When all those are pounded and well mixt, roast them in an earthen pan till they are as hot as you can endure with finger in it. Keep it well stirred that it burn not then put it into a mortar and beat it very fast till it begin to oile, so as it will work like paste, then make into paste.

As class time was limited, I did most of the preparation beforehand and was struck by how much labor was involved, especially peeling away the outer shell of the cacao after it is roasted. About 2 months in advance, I researched fair trade beans and bought them from Santa Barbara Chocolate.  Jepson’s recipe has quite a few spices, most of which are familiar, except perhaps the achiote and the ambergris. I was able to locate the achiote in a Fiesta Supermercado, which are fairly common in Texas, but I left out the ambergris, which is incredible expensive, since it is used in perfume, and a little bit gross, as it is a secretion from the bile duct of sperm whales. I also bought a traditional Mexican molinillo and chocolate pot, which looked quite amazingly similar to Ann Fanshawe’s drawing.

To facilitate easy recipe assembly, I pre-ground all the spices and the chocolate separately (and I cheated by using a spice grinder). On the day of the class, students combined the various ingredients to make the chocolate mix, and then one student rolled the molinillo in the ceramic chocolate between their hands as another student poured in boiling water.

Though Fanshawe’s recipe specifies china cups, students brought their favorite coffee mug from which to drink their chocolate. Students were surprised by the grainy texture, the bitter taste, and its wateriness, but they tended to like the spicy flavor (perhaps because we are in Texas and Mexican spices are ubiquitous here). We discussed how industrialization and global trade has influenced and changed our taste in the last 400 years. In the words of one student, “I really enjoyed the smell of the cocoa beans and the drink itself, but it was difficult to believe that there was half a pound of sugar in it. Like we mentioned in class, people really like sugar.”

Amy L. Tigner teaches in the English Department at the University of Texas, Arlington.

British Studies, Early Modern, Networks of Knowledge, Remedies, Series: Lady Anne Fanshawe, Series: Paleography and Marginalia, Women and Gender

Ill Composed: Sickness, Writing, and Recipes in Early Modern England

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By Olivia Weisser

weisser.bookWhen we get sick, it is fairly common to look to others’ experiences to make sense of what ailment we have, where we got it, and when we might recover. The interesting thing about the 1600s is that women made these sorts of comparisons more frequently than men. There are several explanations for this pattern, which I explore in my book, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2015). The explanation I want to discuss here involves recipes (of course!). And that’s because recipes taught users to compare themselves to other people.

Wellcome Library, London, Lady Ann Fanshawe, Recipe Book, MS 7113.
Image credit: Wellcome Library, London, Lady Ann Fanshawe, Recipe Book, MS 7113.

Some inserted the name of the person who provided or recommended a recipe. Ann Fanshawe’s book lists names next to recipes for treating all kinds of conditions, such as bloody flux and the bite of a mad dog. On this page of Fanshawe’s book, for instance, Lady Beadles, Kenelm Digby, and “My Mother” are written in the margins. (On the authorship of these inscriptions, see this post.)

We also see Fanshawe’s own name, which suggests that she tested her recipes to see whether they were worthwhile. As Elaine Leong has discussed in another post, Fanshawe crossed out the recipes that didn’t work.

Image credit: Wellcome Library, London, Lady Ann Fanshawe, Recipe Book, MS 7113.
Image credit: Wellcome Library, London, Lady Ann Fanshawe, Recipe Book, MS 7113.

Some women noted others’ experiences alongside recipes in even more explicit ways. Writing in 1674 in a book now held at the Folger Shakespeare Library (MS V.a. 215), Susannah Packe included the following note below a cure for convulsions: “Approved by Ma:Sa: for all her Children was very successful.” Assigning authorship or naming someone who benefited from a recipe proved its worth, and also provided a way for readers to evaluate their own conditions. Packe and Fanshawe compared their own experiences to those of the men and women listed in the margins of their books.

When Elizabeth Hastings learned that her sister-in-law was sick in 1731, she penned a letter almost entirely devoted to the healing properties of snail water. This letter is now housed at the Huntington Library in California (HA 4741). She included a receipt for preparing the water, which is now lost, but may have involved distilling a pasty mixture of crushed snails, milk, mint, nutmeg, and dates. She also included directions for using the water (one spoonful taken with two to three spoonfuls of spa water) and even sent a bottle in the post so that her sister-in-law could “make a tryale of it.” She also listed people she knew who found the snail water useful. “Lady Ramsden from whom I had it has known surprizing Cases in Wastings of the Flesh,” she wrote. Also, “my Sister Ann’s servant Mrs. Dove is one instance who I believe would not have been now alive but for it.” This communal production, circulation, and validation of medical knowledge taught women to assess their bodies by looking to the words and experiences of others.

Why did women look to others to evaluate their ailing bodies more frequently than men? Recipes were not an all-female genre of writing, after all. Men wrote and collected them too. Recipes, however, are one of the only forms of medical writing in the period that substantial numbers of women authored. While men documented medical matters in all kinds of genres of writing, such as casebooks and treatises, recipes were the prime mode by which literate early modern women recorded and shared medical information. Perhaps, then, recipes helped teach women in early modern England to look to others’ bodies as a way of better assessing their own.

For more about gender, illness, and healthcare in early modern England, check out Olivia’s book: Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England.

Animals, British Studies, Early Modern, Manuscripts, Remedies, Series: Blood, Series: Eyes and Sight, Series: Lady Anne Fanshawe

Pigeon Blood Visine?: An Early Modern Eye Wash

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By Jennifer Sherman Roberts

Close your eyes and imagine a chicken. Now a duck. Now a turkey.

Now a pigeon.

If this little experiment has worked the way I envisioned, when you thought of a pigeon you didn’t just think of a different bird but of a different environment. You likely pictured chickens and ducks and turkeys on a farm or in a natural setting (if not on your table).

We think of pigeons, however, as urban birds, mobbing together wherever large numbers of people congregate. Some even see them as “flying rats,” nuisances that spread pestilence wherever they go (see this article for an example of the lengths cities will go to in order to control pigeon populations).

It was not always thus, however. In the early modern period and before, pigeons were highly valued birds. They were good for carrying messages and for eating, but the pigeon was also highly symbolic, representing grace, lightness, and spiritual flight. The pigeon does, after all, belong to the same family (Columbidae) as the dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, pigeons were so prized that the right to keep them was reserved for monasteries and estates .

Pigeons were also often used in medieval and early modern medical recipes. The recipes usually involved pigeon dung, but I have also found a sub-strata of recipes utilizing pigeon blood to treat something called the “stroke of the eye.” Given the description in these recipes, I conjecture that the “stroke” referenced is subconjuctival hemorrhage or, put simply, a broken blood vessel in the eye.

This sort of ocular bleeding can occur from trauma or just simply from sneezing or coughing too hard. It is seldom painful.

While a broken blood vessel may sound like a relatively simple problem, the physical presentation of the condition is startling. (In fact, I would recommend NOT doing a Google Image search of this condition before going to bed. Yes, that’s from personal experience.)

James Heilman, MD. Wikimedia Commons
James Heilman, MD. Wikimedia Commons

However disturbing the sight of this condition, however, the remedy was sure to be worse.

In this anonymous medical manuscript of 1663 (Wellcome Collection MS.6812/26), for example, we are instructed to slit the vein on the wing of a pigeon and allow the blood to spurt into the patient’s eye.

For a stroke or pricke if it causeth payne:

Take a pidgeon and let hi[m] blood in one of the winges in the vein & let the blood spinne out of the veine into the eye & it will helpe you yf you use it 5 or 6 tymes.

A recipe for the same affliction from the recipe book of Lady Anne Fanshawe (Wellcome MS7113/25) is almost identical:

For a stroke or Bruise in the Eye:

Take a Pigeon, & let her blood in the great Veine of the Wing, & let the Blood Springe out of the Veine into the Patients Eye. You must dresse it 6 or 7 times.

And again, from Lady Ayscough’s recipe book of 1692 (MS.1026/30):

For A stroke in the Eyes if there Grow pain thereby or if you be pricked in ye Eyes by any thing.
Take of pigion & let her blood in one of the veins of ye wing and let ye blood spin out of ye vein into ye eyes and it will by gods grace cure it this must be done 5 or 6 nights, at gooing to bed.

In humoral medicine, birds were associated with blood, a sanguine temperament (hot, wet) and the element of air. Because of this, we might surmise that a broken blood vessel—and the ensuing red eye—would signal an excess of blood to an early modern physician. The treatment, then, would be oppositional: the patient would need something cold, dry and earthy… like tree roots, leaves, or plants.

Since the eye itself was considered to be a phlegmatic organ (cold and wet), the blood of the pigeon would balance the humors. Buttressing this idea is the recipes’ insistence that the blood be let from the wing of the bird: the seat of airy flight would be the perfect counterbalance to the watery mucus of the eye.

The idea that a pigeon would be salutary to somebody suffering an excess of phlegm or black bile, because of its choleric and sanguine properties, is reinforced in this direction from Sir Thomas Elyot’s Castel of Helth (1541):

Pygeons

Be easily digested, and ar very holsom to them, which are fleumatike, or pure melancoly.*

But whatever the theoretical underpinnings of the use of pigeon’s blood to treat subconjunctival hemorrhage, the lived experience of having bird blood spurting into your eye must have been horrible. And, according to the recipes, it also would have been frequent: the directions, though short, are consistent in directing the patient to undergo the treatment between 5-7 times. By that time, the white of the eye would have returned to its healthy appearance.

Of course, the eye would have returned to normal in about that time without the treatment, too.

Which leads me to the conclusion that (c’mon, you know you were expecting this) . . . this treatment is for the birds.

 

 

*I was pointed to this reference by a note by Michael Robinson in the online version of The Diary of Samuel Pepys.

17th Century, British Studies, Early Modern, Ingredients, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Chocolate, Series: Hannah Wolley, Series: Lady Anne Fanshawe, Series: Spanish Studies

Chocolate in Seventeenth-century England, Part I

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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.