Tag Archives: Ann Fanshawe

Teaching Chocolate from the Bean to Drink

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.

Of Hedgehogs, Whale Vomit, and Fire-Breathing Peacocks

rotfling hedgehogs
Hedgehogs from a 13th-century bestiary. British Library, Royal 12 F XIII, fol. 45r. Found on the “Discarded Image” Tumblr

By Jennifer Sherman Roberts

I told my children we were making hedgehog pudding for Halloween.

They were horrified.

So was I when I read the title of an entry in the recipe book of Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625-1680), “To make a Hedg-hogg.” (I’ll admit to some hypocrisy in this. Why it would be more viscerally disgusting to eat a hedgehog than, say, a pig has to do with mere custom and perceived adorableness. That and the question of what to do with the sharp, prickly bits.)

The kids were relieved, as was I, to learn that the hedgehog in question was made up of only a few ingredients, and hedgehog wasn’t among them:

To make a Hedg-hogg

Take 3 pints of sweet creame, and boile in it some Nutmegg and Mace and when it boiles put in being very well beaten five Eggs white and all, and so stir it and let it boile and when it is turned to curds and whey poore it into a strainer and so hang in up to drayne for 6 or 8 houres when the whay is runne all out take halfe a pound of Almonds blanched and very finely beaten with Rosewater and temper them with the curd and sweeten it well with Sugar, and put some Rosewater and Ambergreice into it and soe make it up in the fashion of a Hedghogg and put in two Currants for the eyes and stick all Almonds all over the back of it, and put it into a dish and into the dish put white wine & Sugar or raw Creame and serve it to the table. (303)

This hedgehog, then, is not just food: it’s food art. It’s also an excellent example of the early modern period’s preoccupation with making food look like something it’s not, turning the gustatory experience into a visual pun or trick–nourishment for the eyes as well as the palate. Ken Albala, writing about the banquet in Europe between 1520 and 1660, discusses this predilection for spectacle: “a meal [was] a form of theater . . . replete with an audience, stage sets, props, and interludes.” He goes on to note that “if abundance and variety itself could no longer impress, then culinary virtuosity, wit, and allusion take their place” (12).

As the wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608-66), ambassador to Madrid, Lady Anne Fanshawe’s table would have been such a place of political theater, a stage for displaying power, wealth, position, and intention.

An examination of the rest of Fanshawe’s recipe book, however, finds that the entries tend more to the useful, practical, and every day. In this, it is an example of the growing popularity of cookbooks for women in this period. Sara Mueller notes that “prior to the late sixteenth century, elaborate banquets . . . were prepared by professional male chefs for royal, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical households. However, beginning in the late sixteenth century and continuing throughout the seventeenth century, cookery books featuring banqueting receipts began to be published on a large scale” (107).

Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipe collection was not published; rather, like other early modern receipt books, it was a highly personal and eclectic assortment of instructions for things as diverse as making laudanum, concocting a powder to aid in miscarriage, and stewing a lamb’s head.

But like those banqueting recipes in the published cookbooks, the inclusion of this recipe points to a common theme in early modern aesthetics: the interplay of art and nature. In this case, that intimate connection is implicit in the cooking process: like other fields of artistry, raw materials are transformed by skill, by techne. Mueller provides an extraordinary example of this preoccupation with culinary transformation that highlights the maker’s artistry:

After giving a detailed receipt for cooking a peacock that will look even more striking dead than it did alive—a feat achieved by carefully killing the bird, removing the flesh from the still-feathered skin, roasting the flesh, and then sewing the cooked flesh back into the raw skin—the English translation of Giovanne de Rosselli’s receipt book, Epulario, or The Italian Banquet, published in England in 1598, gives instructions on how to make the dish even more spectacular: ‘If you will have the Peacoke cast fire at the mouth, take an ounce of Camphora wrapped about with Cotton, and put it on the Peacockes bill with a little Aquanity, or very strong wine, and when you will send it to the table, set fire to the Cotton, and he will cast ore a good while after. And to make a greater shew, when the Peacoke is rested, you may gild it with leafe gold, and put the skin upon the same gold, which may be spiced very sweet.'(106)

Lady Fanshawe’s homey little hedgehog pudding was not intended to compete with the grandeur of the transformed (and reformed) peacock described here, but as disparate as they are, the two dishes share an emphasis on transfiguration and display.

As for our little hedgehog pudding, the kids and I agreed that we would leave out the ambergris. None of us wanted to hunt down a source for expensive whale vomit, which in any case is for the best. I’ve since learned that it’s illegal to possess ambergris in the United States. I bought some rosewater at a local Lebanese restaurant/store, and I cooked up the curds and whey while the kids were at school. Our final creation was a bit squat, a bit formless, but identifiable as a hedgehog. It tasted sweet, the rosewater a faint scent that I imagine would have been overdone by the distinctive, earthy ambergris. Overall, it was a conditional success… It worked, but I wouldn’t do it again.

hedgie
Here’s the homely, humble little hedgehog we made. He’s a bit formless, but he made up for it with very yummy prickles.

I do not think we’ll be attempting the gold-leafed, fire-breathing peacock for Thanksgiving. Turkey will do, thank you very much.