Tag Archives: food and drink

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

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.

 

Novel Liquids: Brandy, Shrub, and Early Modern “Cocktails”

A receipt 'To make Shrub' from a ‘Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c.’, attributed to Sarah Tully. (Wellcome Collection, MS.8687, p. 131).
A receipt ‘To make Shrub’ from a ‘Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c.’, attributed to Sarah Tully. (Wellcome Collection, MS.8687, p. 131).

Tyler Rainford

Everyone has a favourite drink. Whether it’s a pint of pale ale, a smooth glass of merlot, or a certain cocktail for when we’re feeling fancy, we know what we like and what we’d rather avoid. We’re also very particular about how we drink it. Hold the ice. Shaken not stirred. Deviations from the norm can be seen as a form of alcoholic sacrilege, as today’s debates over the merits of the pre-mixed or pre-batched cocktail might indicate. Everyone has their preferences. In many ways, early modern Britons were similarly pedantic, and recipe books from the period indicate an intense interest in what went into any one drink. This was particularly clear following the emergence of distilled alcohols, which we commonly refer to as “spirits”.

Spirits had long played a vital role in the maintenance of household health and wellbeing in the early modern period. Featuring prominently in English receipt books alongside a host of physicks, syrups, and salves, these curious cordials were designed to alleviate the ailing body and bring a physical respite to the suffering drinker. However, as the seventeenth century progressed, their medical function became increasingly opaque. By the early eighteenth century, distilled spirits were also consumed for their apparent intoxicating effects, fiery flavours, and socially lubricating potential. Although not all contemporaries were enthused by the emergence of these new tipples, recipe book writers demonstrated an acute awareness of how these liquors could be crafted to serve individual tastes and personal pleasures.

This newfound taste for distilled spirits was most evident in the case of flavoured brandies, and recipes abound for brandies made from, or infused with, a host of fruits, sugars, and spices. Cherries, raspberries, oranges, and lemons were enthusiastically squashed and squeezed into this heady mix. An anonymous receipt book, possibly kept at Worth House, near Tiverton in Devon between 1714 and 1773, even contained a recipe for rhubarb brandy, combining rhubarb, cardamom seeds, saffron and nutmeg. The author considered it an ‘an excellent receipt’ but suggested no obvious medical benefits.

Another popular beverage, infused with the juices and rinds of citrus fruits, was shrub. Although relatively time consuming, this fruity liquor was easy to make and did not require the use of a still.  An example from the receipt book of Rebecca Tallamy, likely kept between 1735 and 1738, dictated:

To a Gallon of good Rum put a Quart of Juce fresh squees’d & strain’d, two pounds of good Loaf sugar, take half the Lemon rinds & six of Oranges & steep them one night in the Juce & Rum then strain it through a Coarse Cloth or Bag into a vessel or Bottle, Shake it three or four Times a day for Fourteen Days then let stand to settle till it is as water, then draw it off in Bottles Cork them well & hosen them down, besure not to put in any decay’d fruit nor a Sweet one.

(Wellcome Collection, MS.4759, fo. 173v.)

On the one hand, Tallamy’s receipt for shrub was straightforward. It contained three key ingredients – citrus fruits, sugar, and a form of liquor – that were to be mixed, strained, and shaken to produce what we might define as an early modern cocktail. However, beyond these three basic ingredients, there was no one prescriptive formula to be followed. Contemporaries either made do with what they had or adapted receipts to suit their individual tastes and preferences. The only restriction was to avoid using overripe or rotten fruit. Beyond this, the choice was theirs to make.

Another receipt book, supposedly belonging to Sarah Tully (c. 1708/9 – 1736), contained two recipes for shrub, each written in a different hand. One specified it should be made with brandy and three pints of boiling milk, whereas another suggested the reader could substitute the brandy for rum, ‘if you think Proper’, but made no mention of milk. Despite being penned only a few pages apart; these two receipts were considerably different, suggesting there was no one ‘proper’ way to make shrub. Personal preferences were paramount and could change over time. Another receipt book, likely composed by Anne Lisle in 1748, used the juice from ripe currants alongside a gallon of rum, brandy, or arrack, suggesting the choice of liquor was subject to taste. Similarly, a receipt book belonging to Anne Talbot of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire claimed shrub could be mixed with white wine, cider, or brandy. The reader could choose ‘which [they] please’.

Clearly, shrub was a liqueur drunk for pleasure. But how was it consumed? Although some contemporaries might have drunk shrub as it was, it was frequently mixed with water to make punch: an immensely popular beverage with fascinating maritime origins. This choice is understandable. Undiluted, shrub was likely very strong, and very tart. Its zing needed to be tamed and receipt book authors made this clear. Sarah Tully’s receipt referenced above suggested that the liquor could be mixed with water to create an ‘Excellent punch at once’. Another receipt book, attributed to Mary Bent, contained a receipt for shrub with the addendum: ‘In Makeing the punch put two pints of Watter to one of Shrubb’. Shrub could be quickly transformed at a moment’s notice, suggesting it was a highly adaptable beverage.

In this respect, rather than being served as a drink in and of itself, shrub could be compared to an alcoholic squash, or a premixed cocktail. A point that might give some snobbish mixologists today pause for thought. It was bottled, sealed, and stored in keen anticipation of revels to come. Preparation was a fundamental part of this process. The prevalence of shrub in contemporary receipt books provides but one example of how individualised and adaptable the landscape of drink could be in early eighteenth-century England.

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Tyler Rainford is a second year PhD student at the University of Bristol, funded by the SWW DTP. His research explores the role of intoxicants in early modern England, with a specific focus on how distilled spirits informed ideas about the self and society over the course of this period. More broadly, he is interested in consumption, work, and identity in the early modern Atlantic world, c. 1600 – 1800.