Tag Archives: Bethan Davies

Culinary History, Education, Food and Drink, Modern, Summer 2024

‘An Extravagant Touch’: Emscote Primary School’s Charity Cookbook

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By Bethan Davies
Rootling through my mother’s files in the midst of moving house last year, I came across ‘The Emscote Cookery Book’, a recipe collection created by a group of teachers in the late 1970s as a community fundraiser for their Warwickshire primary school. My maternal grandmother Betty Richards was headmistress at Emscote Primary School and contributed multiple recipes to the collection. Gently flipping through the 18 pages which had been modestly stapled together to form a book, I saw a beautiful calligraphic font which detailed over 30 sweet and savoury recipes for food and drink, alongside careful illustrations of kitchen utensils, platters, and foodstuffs. 

Image 1 The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 1: The Emscote Cookery Book front cover. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2 The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.
Image 2: The Emscote Cookery Book title page. Image courtesy of the author.

Beginning to read the recipes, I discovered the community collection to be a tantalising glimpse into culinary trends of the 1970s and the gendered expectations around domestic economies at the time. All of the contributors to this collection, bar one (a Miss Gent) were married women, working both as teachers and as homemakers. The style of many of the recipes are curt, providing the reader with detailed yet precise instructions for culinary success. Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for a ‘Quick Dessert’, which involves boiling some apples and mixing with lime jelly, a dish that could be whipped up rapidly, suggests these women straddled professional and domestic life and possessed strategies for fulfilling the demands of teacher, homemaker, and hostess. The relative sparsity of detail of the personal resonances of these recipes aligns with the cookbook’s role within a boundaried school environment, and is a reminder of the often intensely personal nature of recipe knowledge and exchange, repurposed here within a professional community. There are hints of women’s culinary and domestic responsibilities in moments when the professional façade slips, a Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’ amusingly notes in her recipe ‘there will still be a slurp [of Guinness] to put the cook in a good frame of mind to tackle the washing up’, a tongue in cheek moment which gestures towards 20th c. British women’s multifaceted roles within the home. 

Image 3: Mrs Heelis’ recipe for ‘A Guinness Cake’. Image courtesy of the author.

Most striking were the clues that suggested that this communal cookbook, despite its overt function as a fundraiser, worked as a compact textual marker of social display and a register of class co-ordinates. This evidently gave teachers power to self-fashion and construct their identities as women of economic means, belonging to part of a larger familial structure that could afford to experiment with recent culinary fashions, which include the protean fusion of Anglo culinary traditions with global ingredients and European recipe cultures. A recipe for ‘Biskotta’ (Mrs Charlesworth) is an English take on tiramisu, and the magnificent ‘Spaghetti Platter’ (Mrs Wigmore) specifies the use of ‘long Italian spaghetti’ but also calls for a tablespoon of Branston pickle, a quintessential English relish. A detailed illustration of said platter indicates spaghetti’s relative novelty on the culinary scene. Other recipes are intriguing both for their use of foreign ingredients and for their relative expense, indicating some teachers’ desire to signal their ability to buy such rarefied goods, and perhaps representing a form of exclusion for those who could not afford to buy such ingredients. Mrs Jackson’s recipe for ‘Hummus’ provides the interpretative tag ‘chick peas’, alongside instructions for where to find ‘tahina’, ‘a paste from sesame paste available from delicatessens’, suggesting hummus’ new-fangled nature and its potential expense. 

Image 4: Mrs Wigmore’s recipe for ‘Spaghetti Platter’. Image courtesy of the author.

Mrs Hammond is an individual keen to demonstrate both her expensive household appliances and her rarefied tastes. She supplies a recipe for ‘Microwave meringues’, using the flashy appliance of the microwave which was only just starting to become affordable for domestic use in the late 1970s. Mrs Hammond also has an indulgent recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’, an adaptation of the Black Forest Gateau, which calls for copious amounts of After Eights and whipped cream, and involves an intricate decorating scheme which would rival that of any British Bake-Off contestant today. In a moment of seemingly false modesty, she instructs that one can add crème de menthe into the layers of the cake: ‘an extravagant touch’, a phrase belying the evident richness of her cake even without the addition of liquor; her recipe is rich both in terms of taste and cost. While this is a community and charity cookbook, it is evident that the teachers are creating specific personas through their recipes which are deeply invested in social and class structures.

Image 5: Mrs Hammond’s recipe for ‘Chocolate Peppermint Gateau’. Image courtesy of the author.

Moving for a final moment from the communal to the personal, it is the memories of my grandmother, which are held within the cookbook’s pages, which encourage me to revisit the recipes. Her recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’, a kind of coconutty Florentine biscuit, is easy to make and designed to please a crowd, a reminder of her happily hectic life in multiple roles as headteacher, mother of three, and vicar’s wife. The pages sticky from golden syrup and sugar, this cookbook constitutes a living familial heirloom, and an emblem of family community and continuity in the present day.

Image 6: My grandmother Mrs Richard’s recipe for ‘Coconut Clag’. Image courtesy of the author.

Bethan Davies is a final year PhD student at the University of Roehampton in the Department of English. Her studies are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Her research looks at the global and domestic intersections between sugar and women in English culture at a time when colonial economies were in their nascent stage of development. She has recently worked as a researcher on the BBC history podcast ‘You’re Dead to Me’, and collaborated with The National Archives to produce resources on sugar, tobacco, global trade, and intoxicants for schools and audiences beyond the academy. 

Related Recipes Project blog post: ‘Astonishable Composed Posset’

Early Modern, Family and Household, Food and Drink, Ingredients, Manuscripts, Material History

“Astonishable composed posset”: Comestible, Curative, and Poison

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By Bethan Davies

We might think of posset as an early ancestor of eggnog. Posset was made by pouring hot and spiced cream over eggs, sugar, and alcohol. The receipt book of Ann Fanshawe (1651-1707), well known for containing an early recipe for hot chocolate, contains many variant recipes for possets. One recipe for ‘sack posset’ was judged by her to be ‘the best that is’. It calls for ‘12 eggs…half a pound of sugar’ and ‘a pint of sack’ heated until it is ‘bloud warme’, before ‘a quart of creame’ is added. As Ann’s recipe demonstrates, given posset’s staggering fat content, the mixture was likely to curdle. In fact, well-made posset was defined by its many layers. The strong and syrupy alcoholic liquid settled at the bottom. In the middle was a smooth and spicy custard. The upper layer, known as ‘the grace’, formed an airy crust. Special posset pots were made for this sweet treat. The upper two layers were consumed as a spoon-meat, and the rich liquid was drunk through the spout of the posset pot.

A receipt ‘Mrs Fanshaw of Jenkins, her receipt to make a sack posset. the best that is,’ from the receipt book of Ann Fanshawe (1651-1707). Image © Wellcome Library, London, MS.7113, p.320.

Many recipes for possets survive in both manuscript and print, and there are many references to the drink in diaries, letters, poetry, and plays. These textual sources give us an insight both into posset’s many uses and its material imaginative life in the early modern period. Possets were a part of everyday life, with ingredients varying depending on individual budgets and tastes. While the poor made possets with local English produce such as ale and bread, the wealthy perfumed their possets with exotic and expensive ingredients such as musk, nutmeg, and ambergris. Katherine Palmer’s ‘A Poetical Receipt to Make a Sack Posset’ (1699) playfully signals her awareness of the posset’s outlandish ingredients: ‘From fam’d Barbadoes only Western Main / Fetch Sugar half a pound, fetch Sack from Spain / A pint and from the Eastern India Coast / Nutmeg the glory of our Northern Tost’. Even as the posset was defined as a distinctively English culinary creation, Palmer signals to the global trading networks supporting the posset’s concoction in this playful reworking of the recipe form.

Posset pot, with a spout for drinking the syrupy liquid (c.1650-1655). Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Given that possets often contained costly ingredients, it is no surprise that they were consumed as a post-prandial treat, especially during celebrations such as weddings and christenings. The diarist Samuel Pepys fondly recalls drinking possets during festive periods of the year such as Twelfth Night. In 1625 Katherine Paston wrote to her son, a student at Cambridge: ‘I hope thou dost not eat of those possety curdy drinks, which howsoever pleasing to the palate it may be for a time, yet I am persuaded are most unwholesome and very clogging to the stomach’.  Despite Katherine Paston’s reservations, possets were viewed by many physicians as a medicinal curative for many ailments.  Invalids could conveniently sip posset lying down in bed from the specially designed spout. Shakespeare’s son in law, the physician John Hall, recommended posset drinks in Select Observations on English bodies (1657). Hall believed possets could cure ‘Wind and Phlegm in the Stomach’ (9),[1] ‘a Feaver with an extraordinary heat’ (26), and ‘Torment of the Belly and Head’ during and after ‘child-bearing’ (138).

Possets were also touted as a miraculous aphrodisiac. It is little surprise that possets were often served on wedding nights to the bridegroom. In John Marston’s The Malcontent (1604), Maquerelle, the old procuress of the Italian court, provides young wives with a ‘miraculously, admirably, astonishable composed posset with three curds’ (II.ii.28-9). The wise woman claims that this posset, ‘according to art compos’d’ (II.ii.2), contains ingredients which surpass Katherine Palmer’s posset in terms of their outlandishness. Maquerelle promises that her posset, made with ‘seven and thirty yolks’, ‘the syrup of Ethiopian dates’, and ‘amber of Cataia’ (II.ii.8-13) will help them deal with their impotent husbands.

However, its miraculous medicinal profile also had a darker side, often being used as a sweet carrier for bitter poison. A new ballad, declaring the great treason conspired against the young King of Scots (1581) recalls an apparent attempt to poison the young James VI: ‘a posset was made to giue the Kinge…it was a poisoned thing’. Regardless of whether this report is factually true, it does indicate posset’s imaginative associations with noxious dealings and underhand plotting. We might recall another Scottish king who is brought down with the aid of possets in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). Lady Macbeth ‘drugged [her] possets’ to give to the ‘surfeited grooms’ (II.ii.6-7), thereby enabling Duncan’s murder. In Macbeth, posset is simultaneously a comestible customarily given to guests by an attentive host before bedtime, a medicine to aid digestion, and a fatal poison. Home-made foodstuffs often blurred the lines between comestible, curative, and toxin. In many ways, possets crystallized latent anxieties around the ‘arts’ of women’s domestic knowledge, and their supposed predisposition to occult practices and witchcraft.

We might think how Ann Fanshawe’s recommendation to heat the sack for posset ‘till it be bloud-warm’ could take on a strange and darker connotative meaning in the context of domestic esoteric bodies of knowledge which carry the potential to heal or harm. Perhaps Shakespeare consciously echoes the recipe form as the female witches in Macbeth add ingredients to their cauldron: ‘Fillet on a fenny snake / In the cauldron boil and bake; / Eye of newt and toe of frog, / Wool of bat and tongue of dog’ (IV.i.12-5).  The language of housewifery and culinary art is here repurposed to serve diabolical ends. We can think of posset as a particular delicacy which possessed an ambiguous imaginative life in the early modern period as a miraculous foodstuff potentially concealing darker and dangerous secrets. Many layered indeed.

Bethan Davies is a second year PhD student at the University of Roehampton, funded by the Techne AHRC consortium. Her research explores the role of metaphorical and material dimensions of sugar and sweetness in the early modern period, and how they intersect, complicate, and ratify contemporary cultural constructions of femininity in dramatic performance, c.1590-1642.