Tag Archives: Shakespeare

Around the Table Podcast: Cooking in the Archives with Marissa Nicosia

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

Sarah Kernan has a conversation with Marissa Nicosia, an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. Marissa speaks about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. Follow Marissa on Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Facebook for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen

Folger Early Modern Measurements

The Sifter

John Locke’s pancakes recipe tested by Marissa

Sage Pudding recipe tested by Marissa at Pottsgrove Manor

Penn State University Libraries Eberly Family Special Collections Library

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:08

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:01

I am so excited to welcome Marissa Nicosia to Around the Table. Marissa is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at Penn State Abington. She teaches, researches, and writes about early modern English literature, food studies, book history, and political theory. In addition to a voluminous body of journal articles, book chapters, and essays, Marissa has also co-edited two collected volumes and in 2023 published her monograph, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660. Today, though, we’ll be speaking about her work making and updating early modern English culinary recipes, especially for her public food history website launched in 2014, Cooking in the Archives: Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen. In it, Marissa curates, transcribes, and updates recipes from early modern English recipe books, including historical information alongside detailed step-by-step instructions and photos of the updated recipes. I’m thrilled to speak with Marissa today about her wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about early modern recipes. Marissa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Marissa Nicosia 02:17

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah. I love talking about this work with other people.

Sarah Kernan 02:22

Can you share how Cooking in the Archives started and how it has evolved or changed over time?

Marissa Nicosia 02:29

So, Cooking in the Archives started with paleography, the practice of studying historical handwriting. I was a PhD student in English literature, and I was learning to read secretary hand, and also round hand and italic hand, the kind of dominant forms of sixteenth-, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century handwriting. And one thing that we read a lot to practice learning these letter forms that looped below the line in strange ways or had interesting abbreviations, we learned by transcribing, copying out each letter of recipes.

And recipes were great because you get excited about seeing sage or chicken, or you’d have, like, interesting verbs like mingle. And there were also numbers in there. So, they were really good for learning how to read handwriting that you would encounter doing archival research as a literary scholar, as a literary historian.

And me and my initial collaborator on the Cooking in the Archives project, Alyssa Connell, we kept saying, oh, this sounds tasty. Oh, maybe we could try to make this. So, we applied for an internal grant at the University of Pennsylvania where we were studying for interdisciplinary innovation. And we said we would like to innovate by actually cooking these historical recipes instead of just reading them to practice our handwriting skills and all of that.

So, we were awarded this grant, which was excellent because we needed a way to pay our rent in the summer of 2014. And we dove in. And at this point, my research had been in book history and manuscript studies and in thinking about Renaissance temporality and history. So, I felt like this recipe recreation was a different kind of time travel, but I wasn’t quite sure what. And, while I knew a lot about early modern manuscripts, I didn’t know that much about food studies, food history, or culinary manuscripts in particular, because that hadn’t been like one of my major fields of my research at that time.

So, we started feeling our way through what it was like to read and research and prepare these recipes, Alyssa and I initially. And now I’ve continued that practice by reading and learning so much for people in the broader community, of historical reenactment, of food studies, of chefs who practice, scholars who practice, about how to take historical recipes and make them today in all sorts of different ways.

Sarah Kernan 05:04

That’s a great segue into the next topic I’d love to talk about. How do you approach that process of identifying what recipes you actually want to prepare and then researching and cooking and updating them? What all goes into that for you?

Marissa Nicosia 05:20

The process always begins with me reading something and saying, ooh, that’s interesting. It might be that I want to taste it, or I’ve been reading a menu, or a household account book where a dish gets mentioned and now I’m like, oh, there are this is a recipe for smelts. It’s not just that that household was buying smelts.

So, there’s always something that piques my interest. And I’ve to date never done a project where I’ve cooked through an entire recipe book. I’ve always just kind of been more of a gadfly about it. I go with what is interesting to me. And that’s part of what’s enabled the project to last for eleven years and for me to not get bored with it or burn out on it. So, I start with something that’s interesting, either because I want to taste it or I want to know about it.

And at this point, eleven years into this work, I find that if there’s a recipe I’m curious about, I have to cook it. Even if I’m not going to be publishing a recipe for it in, say, the journal article I’m writing, I feel like I need to know about it through cooking. I need to use my embodied method, my practice as research method, to fully understand what it’s saying. Because I found that like I don’t exactly understand what the difference between peeling or not peeling the mushrooms are until I’ve tried it. Or, using sugar instead of honey. Or, white wine instead of red wine. All these kinds of variations that I’ve seen in recipes. I know what they mean a little bit more through the process of trying it. And I wanted to speak a little bit to updating as well. But I wonder if that gets into the question of historical accuracy too.

Sarah Kernan 07:06

Absolutely. Obviously, like anyone who tries preparing historic recipes of any kind, there are real challenges with translating that to the modern day. So how do you balance historical accuracy with the practicalities of modern kitchen and dining settings? I mean, it’s a very different environment than what was available the early modern period. So how do you handle that?

Marissa Nicosia 07:33

I begin from a position that what I make will not be authentic, but it will be in a open dialogue with that original recipe. So, if the recipe calls for flour, butter, sugar, and cloves, like a recipe for cakes that I’ve made before and that I’ve been writing about recently. The strains of wheat and the strains of sugar that are cultivated now are not the same as the sixteenth-century ones. The cloves have gone through different production processes. The climate is different. The milling and the processing is different. The butter is from a different breed of cow that’s also like fed in a different environment.

And, I’m also constantly dealing with the fact that I am based in Philadelphia and North America and my specific climate and foodways. And the recipes I’m talking about are English recipes most of the time. So, there’s also that removal. So very simple ingredients like butter, flour, sugar, and cloves raise all of these ways we already can’t get back to what they would have been like in 1616, or thereabouts. But we can still get something that is the modern equivalent of that thing.

And then I’m baking them in my oven. I’m baking these cakes in my oven. And that is quite different than the bread oven that’s described in the recipe. So, this particular recipe describes drawing your brown bread out of your bread oven, which could have been a kind of beehive bread oven, or it could have been one of the pocket bread ovens on the side of a hearth, but it would be some more enclosed baking space. So, the recipe has a lot of information about how to watch the cakes so they don’t over bake using that kind of radiating heat technology. And that’s something that they’re telling the cook to use instinct, but also use observational skills to do it.

And there, it’s a little different than me setting my oven to 350 in a timer. But, like as a historical recipe recreator, I’m using my like I’m like, is it getting too brown? Are they setting? Like, has the, am I seeing the signs that I was supposed to look for in the bread oven?

So that’s one way that these forms of attention translate across early modern cookery practices and my recipe recreation practices. So, in many ways, I see myself as a person in a long line of recipe users who is adapting what I’m doing to the current realities of my situation in a way that’s trying to honor the many people who prepared, compiled, circulated, and preserved these materials to bring them to us today.

And it’s important to me that most of what I put on Cooking in the Archives can be prepared with ingredients from your local grocery store, plus rose water. Because I can’t eliminate rose water and be truthful to the foodways. But a lot of the other things I want you to be able to buy at your big box supermarket, because I think people have a right to be able to access this kind of material, that it shouldn’t just be for people who can buy specialty products or have immediate access to specialty products.

Sarah Kernan 10:51

Yeah, making these recipes more accessible to a broader audience, in addition to translating them for a modern audience, but making them accessible for anyone to be able to cook. Yeah, I think that’s really important and kind of helps you understand the historical moment a bit more and have a grasp on that, no matter your ability to go to all these specialty markets or order food online.

Marissa Nicosia 11:14

Yeah, I mean, maybe I could try roast swan, but that would be very difficult for me to arrange. So, it would be very difficult for most of the Cooking in the Archives readers to arrange, although perhaps maybe someone will write in and say, I have a line on roasting swan, give me a recipe.

Sarah Kernan 11:31

How do you go about researching and filling in some other aspects of recipes, some of the trickier parts? There’s always missing pieces and recipes. How do you figure out the things that are left unsaid, like the ingredients, quantities, or the timing? What are ways that you fill in those gaps?

Marissa Nicosia 11:52

Yeah, there’s variation or implied knowledge in amounts, in methods, in temperature, and in timing. So sometimes there’s something like a reference for using a porringer or something like that. And then I consult resources like the Folger’s amazing, like weight and measurement resources, to figure out like, well, maybe a porringer is about three, I think it’s about three quarters of a cup.

But porringers also vary wildly. So, a person’s porringer in their house might not be what a porringer is in another house. Or a posnet, like a little three-legged cooking pot that you would use to make a posset or something like that. So, for some of these, there’s a material culture of cookery implements that we can turn to for some information. And there are certain resources I now know to go to for that.

There’s also, spice prices sometimes become really important. So, I found some resources for deciphering spice price rates. There’s occasionally putting the spices on top of a coin, as well. So, it’s sometimes unclear if it’s the price or the coin that’s being called for in those situations. Those are a little tricky.

If I have a sense from when I’ve prepared the dish, if I’m like, oh, that actually is like a meringue, or that actually is like shortbread. Then I turn to modern recipes that tell me what’s a good temperature for a meringue to go into my oven, what’s good temperature for shortbread to go into my oven. And I look at the timings on those modern recipes. And I set a lot of timers. I set so many timers when I’m recipe testing. If I have something going on the stove, I always have a stopwatch going.

But it’s interesting how there are certain descriptions for preserves that you can kind of approximate to candy height or other kinds of things you might see on a modern candy thermometer. There are descriptors like a gentle fire or a soft fire. And there you’re putting your pot just over like a kind of low flame. And learning what that method vocabulary is like is interesting. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Oxford English Dictionary, not just looking up ingredient nouns, but also looking up some of the verbs, to think about what is this? Is there a sense here in this word that I’m not totally getting?

I’m trying to remember the name of this particular resource. Oh, The Sifter. The Sifter also is a place where I sometimes look up cooking implements and that sometimes has volumes on it as well. It’s a great resource.

Sarah Kernan 14:31

Could you talk about any surprising or interesting recipes you have found while working on Cooking in the Archives?

Marissa Nicosia 14:40

One of the most fun recipe recreations that I’ve done started with a social media post that a bunch of people sent me. So, a scholar who works in political philosophy, was doing research in the John Locke Papers at the Bodleian. And he posted to social media a recipe for John Locke’s pancakes from the Locke Papers.

And a bunch of people sent this to me. I was very excited to see it. And I prepared this recipe and they’re really luscious, crepe-like British pancakes with a lot of cream in them, and also orange blossom water, and butter, and half a nutmeg grated into the batter.

So they are extremely expensive pancakes because nutmegs were very expensive during Locke’s lifetime. And I did the recipe recreation. And after that, I had the opportunity to go to the Bodleian and look. And it looks like he’s actually working through a couple of different recipes, one of which he received from a social connection to develop this kind of peak recipe. And the recipe that I shared with half a nutmeg is his, like, edited, best version. So, it’s just such an interesting way to come at the life of this very important historical thinker who’s had a lot of impact in the modern world, to see that he also was interested in this negotiation of developing the best recipe in the kitchen for this kind of dish.

And there’s something funny about it being up pancake, right? It’s not like a roast beef. It’s not a celebration piece, but maybe it is a, it maybe it was a celebration piece being served at a special occasion, but it doesn’t have the grandeur of certain other historical recipes. It’s a pancake, but oh boy, is it delicious.

Sarah Kernan 16:34

Yeah, I’m really intrigued now. I saw those posts and I saw you working on that recipe a while back, but I haven’t recreated those. And the fact that it has half a nutmeg in it really piques my interest. That is probably a pretty intense flavor.

Marissa Nicosia 16:48

It’s also one of the few recipes I can say that I’ve actually cooked using slightly more historical materials. So, Anne Mumenthaler invited me to Pottsgrove Manor, and we prepared that recipe on a flat surface over a brazier of coals, which is likely how that kind of pancake would have been cooked because you can do more detailed work over a brazier of coals than you can with other kitchen heat setups. It was one that we got, I got to try using a more historical technology than I normally have because everything I do is for the modern kitchen.

So was fun to see this recipe that I’d updated for the modern kitchen taken back into a historical kitchen and used. And the people who came to that event at Pottsgrove Manor really enjoyed these pancakes cooked in that way. We were surrounded by wood smoke, so that changed the sort of ambiance of eating, which was nice. It was very delicious. I can’t say if they were more delicious in my kitchen or in that kitchen, but both were delicious.

Sarah Kernan 17:46

Well, I think we’ve kind of hinted at this in a couple of my questions and your responses. Could you talk a little bit about what role you think food and recipes, this historic food and recipes, plays in understanding or at least connecting to moments in the past, the history, cultures of a specific time and place. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Marissa Nicosia 18:11

People really care about food. Because it’s something that they have to deal with every day. It’s something which they already have a history with through their family, whether their family is a like robust food traditions family or not. Food isn’t so important, but they’ll have a memory, whether it’s like a highly advertised snack or a traditional family recipe that links them to time and place.

So, I love showing people recipes from a more distant history because there’s an immediate connection with like, yes, I also eat food every day. I also have to think about these things. I also have some sense of food traditions, right? Whether that is like a favorite mass-produced drink or a family dish.

I think with something like jumbles, or these kinds of historical cookies, or the historical hot chocolate that I’ve made from later seventeenth-century manuscripts, people are like, oh, that’s like a thing that I have consumed, but this is a very different version of it. And it makes sometimes the historical lessons go down a little bit more easily or people leave with something that they immediately want to go tell someone else.

I’ve had students in class where I’ve made historical hot chocolate, have all sorts of different connections to other hot chocolates that they’ve had in their lives and tell me, oh, I need to go tell X family member, X friend, that I had this recreation of a seventeenth-century hot chocolate in class.

So, it really gets people excited. And I think it’s an amazing touchstone for showing people why the study of the past is important and what purchase the past might have on what we do now, and how we think about food now and how we think about history today.

Sarah Kernan 20:14

Well, you just mentioned preparing some of this food for your classes, or students preparing it. Do you do that very regularly? Do you incorporate historical cooking and recipes into many of your classes? How do you put the process of making into your own teaching and your own research outside of the Cooking in the Archives project?

Marissa Nicosia 20:36

It’s grown and grown and grown. So, it started out with, I end up talking about food more when I’m teaching a Shakespeare play, or a Margaret Cavendish poem, or something like that. And then it became, well, why don’t I have my students transcribe a little bit in class? Or we’ll read something from a manuscript in the round so they can see the handwriting.

And then I’m like, well, I can get this little grant and I can buy goose quills and then we can write out the recipe together. And then, oh, I have this other little pot of funding that’s connected to some undergrads who I have now transcribing. I’ll buy a hot plate. I’ve made historical hot chocolate in the classroom a lot in literature classes. And I taught a Shakespeare in the Kitchen class about my book in progress where we made strawberry preserves on a hot plate in the classroom. That was a little more involved.

And I’m now teaching, most semesters, classes where students are transcribing from mostly eighteenth-century, later seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century, recipe manuscripts that are held in Penn State Libraries, Eberly Family Special Collections. That collection has grown over the ten years that I’ve been a faculty member at Penn State through long-term collaborations with special collections, with curators, with the people who work in the digital library, digital collections side of special collections.

So, at this point, I’m teaching out of my food history work and out of my Cooking in the Archives work every semester. But in the beginning, I wasn’t. I had to learn a lot more to be ready to teach like that.

Sarah Kernan 22:11

Do these practices go more into your research and writing as well as your teaching?  Do you find that all this has become very interconnected on that side of your professional life as well?

Marissa Nicosia 22:24

It really has. So, I think I said earlier that I don’t want to write about a recipe unless I’ve tested it, even if I’m not actually like publishing the recipe test as part of the article. Like if I write an article where I’ve tested a recipe, I’ll test the recipe and I’ll put that up on Cooking in the Archives when the article gets published to say, hey, I wrote this thing over here that maybe you want to read, maybe you don’t. But here’s the recipe recreation for anyone who wants it.

And all of this work over the last decade or so has led to me writing a book called Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’ve been cooking the historical recipes for Cooking in the Archives, I’ve been writing these other pieces., and I’ve also been teaching Shakespeare pretty much every semester over that period of time. So, I have written a book that has ten recipes in it. And in the chapters, I use those recipe recreations to show that Shakespeare’s food metaphors are not just fun linguistic work, that they’re connected to this larger culinary culture and that preparing the recipes in the kitchen has a lot to teach us about these food references in Shakespeare’s poems and plays.

So that’s the project that I’m finishing right now. I never would have written a book like this if I hadn’t started Cooking in the Archives in 2014. And I’m really excited for this book to be material that I get to teach in the classroom because each chapter is written with the idea that I’d want to give it to undergraduates when I was teaching them the play.

Sarah Kernan 23:59

Do you want to tell us exactly when the Shakespeare book is coming out? Anything you want to plug?

Marissa Nicosia 24:05

I believe Shakespeare in the Kitchen will be coming out in 2026, but I will update you all with a fresh link and at a true date once I, once I’m clear with the press about exactly when that’s happening.

I’m also writing a number of different articles and book chapters that think about the seasons, and the way that seasons change, and how different literary works and different recipe works reference the changing of the seasons. So that’s something I’m very interested in, and it kind of links all my work about temporality into my work about recipes.

And I’d also note that Cooking in the Archives has been a little quieter over the last couple of years, in part because a lot of my recipe testing efforts have gone towards my Shakespeare in the Kitchen project But I have a lot of other ideas about food references in Shakespeare that I did not have a chance to deal with in Shakespeare in the Kitchen. So, I’m thinking about continuing a sort of complete works of Shakespeare in the Kitchen on Cooking in the Archives in the coming years, where I’ll get to share some of the recipes that that didn’t make it into the book and that were exciting to me in a shorter format than what I’m doing in my book chapters. So, there’ll be more material adjacent to that huge exploration I’ve done in Shakespeare in the Kitchen coming to Cooking in the Archives soon.

Sarah Kernan 25:40

Wonderful. Well, I can’t wait to see that, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be very excited to see that as well. Marissa, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Marissa Nicosia 25:48

Thank you so much, Sarah.

Sarah Kernan 25:51

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

 

 

Around the Table Podcast: British Food History with Neil Buttery

By Sarah Peters Kernan

Listen here, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts!

A content warning. Please note that this episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.

In this episode, Sarah Kernan speaks with Neil Buttery, a historian of British food. He is an award-winning author of several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Neil blogs at British Food: A History, is the host of The British Food History Podcast, and collaborates on another podcast, A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. Follow Neil Buttery on Bluesky and Instagram for updates.

Music

Frédéric Chopin, Etude Op. 10, no. 5 in G flat major

Provided by Musopen.org through Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0

Mentioned in the Show

The British Food History Podcast

A is for Apple Podcast

British Food: A History

Neil’s Amazon UK Author Page

Jane Grigson’s English Food

Neil Cooks Grigson Blog

Neil on Steak, Kidney, and Oyster Pudding

Neil on Eels

Museum of Royal Worcester

Delicious Legacy Podcast

Serve it Forth Festival

Transcript

Sarah Kernan 00:00

A content warning. Please note that today’s episode contains a detailed description of the death of eels in preparation for a meal.

Sarah Kernan 00:17

This is Around the Table, a podcast from the Recipes Project. I’m your host, Sarah Kernan. Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.

Welcome to Season 2, dedicated to “making.” In each episode this season, we will feature interviews with guests who describe what making means to them. For some, it is recreating a historic recipe as closely as possible. For others, it is creating something new in a modern setting. However imperfect the process or the outcome, making historical recipes offers a powerful methodology for connecting with and understanding the past in a direct and tangible way.

Sarah Kernan 01:11

Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Neil Buttery, a specialist in British food history. He has extensive experience cooking food from the past as a professional chef. He is also an award-winning author, blogging at British Food: A History, and writing several books, including A Dark History of Sugar; Before Mrs. Beaton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper; The Philosophy of Puddings; and Knead to Know: A History of Baking. Neil is also the host of a very successful podcast, the British Food History Podcast, and has even been collaborating on a new one, A is for Apple: An Encyclopaedia of Food & Drink. I am so excited to speak to Neil today about his wide-ranging experiences cooking and writing about British food history. Neil, thank you so much for joining me today.

Neil Buttery 02:03

Thank you very much for asking me to come on.

Sarah Kernan 02:05

You have a very interesting background outside of food history. In many of your podcast episodes, you’ve talked about your life as a scientist and a secondary school teacher. What inspired you to switch gears and delve into British culinary history and start cooking historic recipes and start blogging about British food?

Neil Buttery 02:27

Well, yes, I had been a secondary school teacher, science, biology, specifically. So nothing really to do with food or history. But I did want to go back to university. I got interested in evolutionary biology and ecology, conservation biology, and things like that. So I went back. I did a Master’s, and then I was very lucky and very pleased to get on a PhD course. But then, I was terrified of having to write. You know, the fear of the flashing cursor in the top corner. So, I thought, well, how can I practice doing this? And it being something that’s got nothing to do with the new day job of being a PhD student, because I knew that’s going to be quite intense.

So, I wanted something that was going to be a bit lighter. A friend of mine had bought me Jane Grigson’s book, English Food, and it sat on my shelf for a few years, unread. But I was looking through it and I thought, brainwave, thinking I was being very original, I hadn’t heard of Julie and Julia, oh, I know, I’m going to cook every recipe in this book. It’d be a good de-stress, good project. I’ve always been a hobbyist.

Then a friend of mine says, oh, well, why don’t you blog each one as you go? And then you’re practicing the writing. And of course, knowing that you’re putting it out there onto the internet, I wasn’t expecting very many people to be reading it, but I thought, well, that’s just upping the ante. It’s going to make me try a little bit harder.

Neil Buttery 04:04

So, that’s how it started. I didn’t know what the blog was going to be. It was just me basically cooking the recipe and saying what I thought the recipe was. A couple of paragraphs, and it developed from there. And without realizing it, I was popping in more history.

I got more interested in people who were writing the recipes because Jane Grigson always provides lots of information in her cookbooks. And it went from there really, and I became obsessed. I ended up getting a postdoc position after the PhD in the US. I was in Houston, Texas. And then I was a little bit further up in St. Louis in Missouri. And I was continuing cooking all this English food for my American friends who hadn’t ever eaten the jam roly-poly pudding or something before.

And it all went down really well because we eat weird food, right? We Brits, going to America without toad-in-the-hole and toast. Turns out, not that weird. And that’s really when the penny dropped, and I moved, I basically resigned from my job in the sciences because I like got a little bit disillusioned with it. And yes, two weeks after I moved back, I did my first artisan market stall because I hadn’t realized I’d taught myself how to cook all this traditional stuff. That was 2012. And I kind of haven’t stopped since, really.

Sarah Kernan 05:21

Do you think that your background in the sciences has shaped how you approach these recipes and looking at food in a certain way?

Neil Buttery 05:32

Certainly from the point of view of organizing myself. I can use a spreadsheet. That’s very useful. Things like number skills is very useful. You know, there’s all these weird conversions, different imperial measurements that change through the centuries. The size of pints change, the weights of pounds changes. So, of course we go into metric only just recently really in Britain compared to the rest of Europe. So, it really helps with that. And I convert everything into metric now because it’s just so much easier to do, especially if you’re multiplying up or if in some cookbooks you have to really reduce the size of the thing that you’re cooking.

So, from that kind of sort of day-to-day skills, really useful. And then I suppose what when I started moving on to writing books, writing papers really helped. Because there’s usually a lot of information, you don’t have many words to get that information across in, and it’s usually a complex thing. So it’s basically a storyboard. What direction is all of this going in? And I could apply that organization, really, especially when you’re in the beginnings of writing a book and you’re just overwhelmed with information. It can be overwhelming.

I mean, the downside is being in the sciences. Well, I suppose it’s the same all of academia, really. But being in sciences, everything you write has got to be so watertight. So, I’m very used to be saying, oh, this is wishy-washy. This needs development. No, you can’t say that conclusion. You can’t say that. That hypothesis is true. What you found out isn’t it actually backing it up. So I’ve learned, don’t always get it right, but I’ve certainly learned to let the research determine what I’m saying rather than already deciding what I’m going to say and bend the research to fit my own hypothesis or idea or sometimes misconception.

Sarah Kernan 07:25

When you are sitting down and tackling some historic recipes and you’re deciding to cook something for the first time, how do you go about figuring out what you need to do to actually cook the recipe?

Neil Buttery 07:39

Well, I rewrite the recipe usually in my own words in the notebook to say what I’m going to do. There’s a lot of gap filling in. I think I’m lucky in that cooking through Jane Grigson’s cookbooks, she’s a fantastic recipe writer and she’s very concise, but she wouldn’t get away with those recipes today.

It would not be detailed enough. But for me, it’s the right amount of detail. I think more, the problem with a modern recipe is where it says, oh, cook this for two minutes, this for three and a half minutes on this heat. It doesn’t help you become an instinctive cook. You might have cooked the food and eaten and it was nice, but you probably really haven’t learned anything.

It’s bit like when you’ve got a satnav, a GPS telling you where to go. You often don’t remember the route because it’s just telling you what to do. You learn the route when you’ve got a map. So, it’s helping you get to where you’re going, but you have to fill a lot of it in yourself. And I’m very lucky in that with Jane Grigson, I had to fill in a lot myself. Didn’t realize I was doing it. But now when I went to older cookery books, it’s the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, the gaps were bigger, but it didn’t seem so scary a task to fill in the gaps.

Sarah Kernan 08:55

Makes total sense. Since your initial foray into food history was through cooking, and then you got interested in bigger themes and bigger ideas and topics, I think you’re in a really great position to talk about this. What role do you think food plays in how we understand history and connect with history?

Neil Buttery 09:16

Well, from the basic point of view, everybody eats. Simple as that, really. And of course, it’s not just keeping us alive, although sometimes when there’s not enough food, it’s just as interesting as when there’s lots of food.

But it tells us so much about the social standing, age, gender. Was it a good harvest year? In the case of Britain, of course, it’s a lot about empire and how that empire was functioning. How prices change. All this stuff that’s kind of boring when you sat in a history class. I don’t care about how expensive corn was in the early nineteenth century. You don’t when you were a kid.

But suddenly when you’re actually are having to research this for a reason, suddenly it all becomes very exciting. So, it is important. The problem is it’s fine if you are looking at things like corn or tea or sugar, which is really, well, the commodity products now, but you know they are run, they’re a good measure of how well a country is doing. What it’s buying and selling, how it’s treating its customers, how rich it’s becoming. But it’s all kind of fits into economics and stuff about taxation and stuff like that, which I’m not necessarily interested in.

It’s much more difficult to find the minute details because no one bothered writing that stuff down. No one thought it was worthwhile writing down what servants were doing. It happens behind the closed doors. We’re not interested in that and servants, usually are either too busy to write any of that down, and why would they even bother writing it down anyway?

Neil Buttery 10:51

Possibly some of them couldn’t read anyway. And a lot of the skills we’ve lost, especially when it comes to dairy. Yeah it’s very different in Britain compared to France, where everything’s meticulously written down. Over there, people can trace their cheese recipes centuries and centuries, whilst we can look back about 150 years, because everything before that was done by illiterate young women.

And it’s just lost. So going back to your question about filling in gaps, sometimes you have to go, okay, I’m going to make an educated guess here because I’ve done this kind of thing before. And sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and going, do you know what? I’m just going to do this. I don’t know if it’s going to work. So therefore, at the end of your bit of research in the kitchen, the thing that you’ve made might not be very much like the original thing. And you’ll never know that. But I try not to get too worried about that. Whether that’s a problem or not, I don’t know. Some people would say it is.

Sarah Kernan 11:56

I think if you’re honest about it and, you know, saying you’re not entirely sure if this is how it was or not, then that’s totally fine and appropriate.

Neil Buttery 12:07

But I think sometimes it, in the fact that it isn’t valued, maybe at that time or sometimes by academics today, tells you a lot in itself, tells you lot about the attitude. So sometimes a lack of information actually tells you quite a lot.

Sarah Kernan 12:25

As you have continued to cook and prepare all these different historic recipes from a wide range of different time periods in Britain, how has that impacted what you decide to write about and what you decide to talk about on your podcast?

Neil Buttery 12:43

When it comes to the podcast, I really like to get… Actually, I suppose when it comes to research, especially on the blog, because if I wasn’t doing the blogs, I wouldn’t be doing what I am today. I very much like to fill in the gaps in my knowledge. That’s what I find most exciting. I start getting a bit tetchy if I’m staying in the same place for too long. So I like to learn about a wider variety of things as possible.

And the same, to some degree, goes with the books as well. Of course, they’re bigger topics, so you have to know a bit more because you have to write book proposal and things like that. But usually the reason that I’ve got interested in them is because I didn’t know much about it.

And then the penny will drop. Usually because, oh, I want to find something out more about whatever it is that I’m reading and find, oh, nobody’s written a book about it, which is what happened with the Elizabeth Raffald book. I assumed somebody would have written a popular history book about her and there wasn’t anything there. So yes, it comes from a place of not knowing.

And I quite like that. I like that journey. It’s a little bit like, what’s the saying? Yeah, it’s more about the journey than the destination. So once I’ve arrived at the end of a project, yeah, it’s time to move on to a completely other subject.

Sarah Kernan 14:05

Understood. I think we all get that feeling once in a while. This ties in rather nicely to one of the next things I wanted to ask you, which was how has your understanding of British culinary history evolved as you’ve gained more experience cooking and researching? Have you just become more and more interested in filling in all those gaps, as you’ve said, and trying to understand the entirety of it? Or has this just been leading you in different, more distinct directions?

Neil Buttery 14:35

It’s kind of a mixture of all those things. It’s the great thing and it’s the bad thing about looking to food history, because largely anyway, apart from a couple of maybe Master’s degrees across the world, there are no, there’s no course. There’s no one-on-one food history course that you can do. There’s no textbook. There’s no curriculum or anything like that. So you have to come from your own direction. So it means you’ve never been told how to think about something like we are when we’re in a classroom. You know, but we haven’t been taught how to answer exam questions on this subject or anything like that.

So, we’re always learning because, at least from my point of view, even if it is a subject I know something about, it’s always useful to see other people’s perspective. I don’t think you can be an expert in anything until you’ve heard everybody’s perspective. You can learn the facts. Fine. But that’s not the interesting stuff. It’s assembling it all and interpreting it.

And different people do that in different ways. So, yeah, it doesn’t matter whether I’m broadening my knowledge and skills or whether I’m focusing on one very small, tiny thing. It always feels diverse because like I said, you’re not done learning until you’ve heard everybody’s opinion. And you’ve and you can never achieve that, which I think is an amazing thing.

Sarah Kernan 15:55

That really explains quite a bit about your approach, I think, to the podcast in particular, and how you how you structure some of your seasons. You choose a range of guests and they’re often getting at the same kind of topic from a lot of different approaches. Or, you’re asking their opinions on the same sort of theme or idea. So that’s really interesting that that’s filtered into so many different aspects of your of your work.

Neil Buttery 16:22

Well, but my favorite question is, I guess, something that we’ve sort of been getting at today is, I love to ask people how important authenticity is. And usually I’m met with them rolling their eyes at me. Oh, this question again. Because it’s funny, I never care about authenticity. I think even if you get twenty percent of the way there, you’re going to learn something really important. Usually something you weren’t expecting. Maybe it’s just something as simple as a flavor combination or a technique that you’ve ever used.

I don’t worry about getting one hundred percent there that because that’s not achievable. So, some people I speak to, and this is very broad brushstrokes here, I guess they had to fall into my category of, oh, just have a go, it’s fine. So you’ll learn something. Whereas some of the people go, no, there’s just no point in doing it because the animals are different. They’re farmed in a completely different way. It’s not comparable. There’s no point in doing it. So they’re never going to get more than zero percent then, in their score, authenticity score. Well, I’d rather spend a whole day wasting my time making something inauthentic that just gets me ten percent of the way there. Because you’re going to learn something.

And the thing that I most commonly use is, especially when it’s something that sounds a bit strange, is, oh, that’s quite nice. Food from the past is actually really quite delicious. And food today, it’s a shadow of its former self, really. Yeah, we think the food of the past is awful. It’s probably moldy, or rotten, or gross. You know, it’s all eyeballs and pig’s tails. All this kind of stuff, you know, stuff we wouldn’t eat and we’ve progressed so much, but it’s not the case at all.

Sarah Kernan 17:59

I would actually love if you could delve into that a little bit more. Could you talk about some of your favorite or most memorable, maybe, cooking experiments with historic recipes? You’ve mentioned a few throughout your podcast, and I would love to hear more.

Neil Buttery 18:18

The memorable ones are ones that fall into two categories. One is a bit like what was talking about before, something I was expecting to be awful, but was delicious. But, you know I’d signed up to cooking all these book, all these recipes in this book by Jane Grigson. So, once I say I’m going to do something, I do it. But it did mean I was going to have to have calves’ brains. And it did, I wasn’t very good with shellfish, with seafood, anything bivalvy, like mussels and oysters. Not, so I really had to get over a bit of a mental hurdle with a lot of this stuff.

And this is when I realized, oh, the food of the past is amazing. And the first time that happened was when I made the steak, kidney, and oyster pudding. Because not only does it take forever to make, not only is it a steamed pudding, which I hadn’t really made much in the past, it had oysters in it, which I’d never eaten because they looked terrifying. And it was absolutely delicious. I just thought, oh, this is a thing.

And going back to podcast, actually, because done all this on my own with my mates from work or whatever and friends. It was just so nice. It’s so nice to do the podcast because I get to meet with the other people, which I hadn’t previously done, which is probably the best thing about the podcast, really. So, yes, and so there’s that there’s that first category of stuff, the penny dropping.

Game is another one, especially woodcock and snipe and things like that, you know, things that I would just never have dared try and absolutely delicious. So those are the memorable ones.

Neil Buttery 19:41

And then the other memorable ones are the disasters. Or things that wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster, but there was some kind of trauma attached to it. And the one that stands out is the first time I cooked freshwater eel, because that was just traumatic for everyone involved.

Yeah, because I remember asking the fishmonger for some eels, and he just said, nobody eats eels anymore. But he says, I’ll see what I can do. He phoned me back about ten days later saying, I’ve got a friend who’s caught some eels. I’m off collect them. So I went to collect them. And when I arrived, he said, I know I’m a fishmonger, but everything arrives dead. I’ve never actually had to kill anything.

And he pointed to three eels swimming around in a sort of polystyrene box. So I had to take those home with me. I didn’t drive, so I was in a taxi on the way home with these eels on my lap, sloshing around. It didn’t even have a lid, sloshing around in this taxi. I can’t believe they let me in. My friend came round earlier in the day to dispatch the eels and friends were coming around later to eat them. And they would they just wouldn’t die.

It was awful. It was, we were crying. It turns out later, actually, because I thought, got to be humane about this. I did my research. Nothing told me, oh, when you whack their head, they carry on moving for a couple of hours. So I thought we were whacking them and weren’t dying, but I think they were dead. They just move around, because you take the skin off, you take the guts out, you take their head off, and they’re still swimming around.

Sarah Kernan 21:25

Oh my goodness.

Neil Buttery 21:26

It was awful. Yeah.

Sarah Kernan 21:27

Yeah. After you had that experience, have you paid particular attention to eel recipes when you’ve come across them to see if they talk about this at all?

Neil Buttery 21:39

I did find it. And you know, I did find them after the event, but not in the places you would expect. And this is about what I was saying before, actually, about coming from different, everyone coming from different directions. So, I relatively recently found out that there’s a quote in, I think, King Lear, Shakespeare, by Shakespeare. And there’s a line in there about people making eel pies and the fact that the eels are still moving under the pie when they put it into the oven. So there were little references there, but for some reason not in the cookery books, where they should have been. But it was a thing where that people did know about it because, obviously, Shakespeare’s plays were going be watched by everyone, so it was going to be something that everybody could understand and know what it meant by a phrase.

So yeah the wriggling eels, yeah, that was a thing that everybody knew, but we don’t kill things anymore, or most of us don’t kill things anymore, and none of us really eat eels in this country anymore, either, so. But now I do know and that’s the other the amazing thing is you you’re learning these tricks and I guess hacks you’d call them now, that people have passed on orally throughout the generations that have just vanished and I like to think I’m doing my little bit anyway in trying to, yeah, just try and have us reconnect with the food of the past. Because the route the food to the past is delicious. It’s not weird. It’s great. And it’s our problem that we think it’s weird. The people buying the cookery books and eating the food from those cookery books ate that food because they liked it.

They weren’t doing it because it was weird. They were doing it because they liked it. In fact, cookery books a few hundred years ago were very expensive. So this was good food. And you got to get over that mental hurdle. If you went to a different country and reacted in the same way as people do to historical food, or what they think historical food is going to be like, I mean that would be so offensive. And I think we should apply the same rule in time as well as in space. That’s very Doctor Who.

I mean, mostly I don’t think about it. It’s only because you’re asking me these questions, I think about it. So there’s not some philosophical…I’m not sat in my ivory tower there doing some kind of food philosophy. It’s just, I’m just doing the stuff that I find is interesting at the end of the day. And that’s what informs me what I’m doing.

Sarah Kernan 24:01

Do you find that a lot of your readers and your listeners get in touch with you with their own hacks and tips and things that have been passed down in their families after they’ve heard episodes with you? I know occasionally that’s referenced in the postbag editions that you do, but does that happen on a fairly regular basis?

Neil Buttery 24:26

People send things in all the time, sometimes whole handwritten book, manuscript books that they’ve scanned in for me, or just book ideas, things that their parents did. All the time. And those are the things that are really interesting because especially when it comes to people’s own household that they grew up in or things their parents or grandparents told them and little tricks they were doing or recipes they were doing that have just completely died out now and we wouldn’t necessarily know anything about. It’s just so interesting.

It’s the minutiae, I guess. You know, if you are looking at the history of corn, like the corn laws, no one cares about the minutiae of what was going on in the kitchen, but that’s what I find really interesting because it helps you imagine what it was like for those people to be in that house, whether it was good or bad.

And if you can somehow recreate it, I think that’s closest you can get to being in some kind of time machine. Now there are cynical people who go, no, that’s not true, because you can’t control everything. But I think it definitely is true. Although, I’m as authentic as I can be, I don’t sit there, try to source the equipment for years. But if somebody does tell me some information, then I can integrate it in and be more authentic.

Sarah Kernan 25:50

I’m just really interested by this idea of, you have become this receptacle in a way, I guess, for other people’s historical food traditions. And I wonder if you’ve thought of doing anything with that beyond integrating certain things that are applicable to whatever you happen to be working on.

Neil Buttery 26:11

Yeah, I have. It’s one of those things where what I really would like to do is essentially write a book, certainly nothing like a memoir, but I’ve been sent such a rich amount of stuff or I’ve been told such a rich amount of stuff, that I feel like, you know, taking the of the best of what I’ve learned in the podcast or being sent by listeners or readers of the blogs to try and assimilate that together into something.

It is something I thought about. But it’s so big and sprawling. I’m not quite sure how I would tie it all together. It would be really nice to revisit things in maybe a book form where there’s more space. I restrict my blog entries. No more than a thousand words, which is three pages of handwritten. I write everything out longhand because I’m from the past. So it’s three pages of A4. That’s the amount of space I have to write a blog post. So it would be nice to go into things in a bit more depth. And a lot of the stuff I wrote ten years ago, I know so much more now. So it would be nice to bring back a kind of, maybe like a best of the blog or an elaborated version of some elements of the blog.

I suppose with one thing, I mean, I am working on book ideas at the moment and one of the things from doing the blogs, one thing I’ve really become interested in is the lost course of the savory, which used to happen after the main course, but before dessert, or sometimes instead of dessert. And it’s completely died out now. Although some of the foods we do still eat, but in a very different context. That particular strand is something that I think could become a book. And there’s lots of people who have sent information to me on savories. And it’s one of the most popular episodes that I’ve made for the podcast was the episode on savory, so it’s something that people are interested in. So I think taking separate strands might be the way to go.

Sarah Kernan 28:08

Maybe this would be a good place to kind of wrap things up a bit. Do you have any projects in the works that you would like to talk about?

Neil Buttery 28:18

Well I’m doing season nine of the podcast, so that’s exciting. A nice, good, varied package. I’m very pleased with the group of people that I’ve got to come and talk on it this year. I think it’s the most varied one I’ve got so far. We’re going very posh porcelain in one episode, to Bronze Age, Tudor cheese, really all over the place. Very eclectic. So it’s been really good fun putting that together. We’re between seasons for A is for Apple, but really…

Well, I’m working on a new project with the Museum of Royal Worcester. We’ve done a couple of projects together now, which we’ve completed. So, lots of things that are maybe going to happen. We’re planning some new projects.

Like say, I’ve got six book ideas at the moment I’m trying convince people are good ones. One is about wild fermentation, which of course is very trendy, live ferments. Over in Britain, certainly in England, there’s a lot of people saying, this is weird foreign food. We don’t like it. It turns out that we used to eat wild fermented foods all of the time. We’ve just forgotten that we did.

So that’s one of the books. That’s my main idea at the minute I’m sort of punting around different publishers. So hopefully that will happen. I’ve got a few ideas. Some of that just straightforward popular history books and some cookbooks. I’ve never actually written a cookbook. I’d love to write a cookbook.

Sarah Kernan 29:44

You should. I hope that book idea gets through.

Neil Buttery 29:47

Hopefully. Hopefully. Oh, and also, oh I forgot to say, I’m also involved in a food history festival, online food history festival, October 18th. It’s called Serve It Forth. We thought that was an appropriate name since end of it. Every single historical recipe ends with Serve It Forth. So we’re very excited about that. We’re still working out exactly who our guests are going to be for that, but I’ve been doing that with Alessandra Pino, Sam Bilton, who are my co-hosts on A is for Apple, but also Thomas Ntinas, who’s the host of the Delicious Legacy podcast. And we’re really excited about it. So keep an eye out for tickets and things. Of course, with it being online, of course, anybody in the world can come.

Sarah Kernan 30:26

Absolutely. We’ll definitely put a link in our show notes to that.

Neil Buttery 30:30

Great.

Sarah Kernan 30:31

Well, thank you so much, Neil, for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.

Neil Buttery 30:35

Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Sarah Kernan 30:38

Thanks to everyone for listening today. Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. I’ll see you again next time on Around the Table.

Tales from the Archives: Smelling ‘Violet’ in Renaissance Works

In 2017, The Recipes Project celebrated its fifth birthday. We now have nearly 650 posts in our archives and over 160 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank you so much to our contributors for sharing such a wealth of knowledge on recipes.) But with so much material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. So, the editors have decided that, every now and then, we’ll pull something out of the archives to share with our readers anew.

This month’s we re-feature a post by Colleen Kennedy, first published in August 2013. I think that it fits very well with our conversations this month, don’t you?

Enjoy the spring flowers, everyone!

Elaine

_________________________________________________________________________

By Colleen Kennedy

The violet (Viola odorata) is cited in several herbals and many recipe books as a particularly sweet scented, fragrant flower. Herbals, such as Culpeper’s, describe the violet as a “cold and moist” plant, with many medicinal qualities. It is used as a laxative, and as a treatment of syphilis and uterine complaints; it counterbalances choleric humors, is good for many lung ailments, eases headaches and sleeplessness, and is a general panacea.

Violets are also commonly used in recipes, either as “cakes of violet,” “candied violets,” “conserve of violets,” or “syrup of violets,” as flavoring for metheglins (meads), and to add aromatic qualities to vinegars and other recipes:

To Make Syrup of Flowers:

Take of Violet flowers fresh and pickt, a pound, clear water boiling one quart, shut them up close together in a new glazed pot a whole day, then press them hard out, and in two pound of the Liquor, dissolve four pound and three ounces of white Sugar, take away the scum, and so make it into a Syrup without boiling. (Woolley 6)

Any of Hannah Woolley’s recipe books are a good place to begin to study early modern recipes utilizing violet flowers. Violet’s pleasant odor is also the source of its medicinal powers and cause for its common domestic usage.

Hannah Woolley's The Accomplish'd lady's delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery (1675)
Hannah Woolley’s The Accomplish’d lady’s delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery (1675)

So, what does the violet smell like?  English, alas, lacks a smell-vocabulary, and violet is repeatedly only listed as “sweet” or “fragrant.” Avery Gilbert considers the two distinct “voices” available to modern perfume makers: “Ingredient Voice” (the actual list of and proportions of ingredients) and “Imagery Voice” (“atmospherics, the drama of seduction, passion, and mystery”) (15). It is in that latter voice that we move closer to the more detailed early modern accounts of the aroma of violet.

For example, modern perfume blogger Normand Cardella, in his review of Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris, muses on the smell of violet: “So… what does a violet note smell like?  Well… it’s powdery, a little sweet and decidedly sad.  Musically, a violet note in perfume would be a minor chord.”

Likewise, for early modern writers, the violet is also a sad  and musical aroma. Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Gardens” (1625),  links pleasurable odors and sounds (and much earlier than our modern perfumers): “And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air”. Violet is his favorite perfumed flower: “that which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet”.

The violet’s “imagery voice” is most fully articulated in Duke Orsino’s opening lines of Twelfth Night:

“Orsino and Viola” by Frederick Richard Pickersgill (c. 1850)

“If music be the food of love, play on.

Give me excess of it that, surfeiting

The appetite may sicken and so die.

That strain again, it had a dying fall.

O, it came so o’er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more.

‘Tis not so sweet as it was before.” (1.1.1-8)

Much of the language here that applies to music or love is equally applicable to the sensation of smelling violets,  especially violet’s unique chemical compound and its effect on the sense of smell. As Diane Ackerman describes: “Violets contain ionine, which short-circuits our sense of smell. The flower continues to exude its fragrance, but we lose the ability to smell it. Wait a minute or two, and its smell will blare again. Then it will fade again, and so on.”

The discovery of its isomer ketones did not occur until the late nineteenth century, yet, its affects were all very real experiences for early modern writers, such as Shakespeare, who attempt to distil and capture the essence of violet in distinctly beautiful terms, with the violet “stealing and giving odours.”

The “dying fall” of Orsino’s sad tune is like the melancholy aspects of the violet, evoking impermanence, transience, and death. Even Orsino’s command to stop the music can also describe the anesthetic properties of ionine.  As Orsino complains though, the scent, the song, the sensations, and so on is “not so sweet as it was before.”

John Gerard's "The herball or Generall historie of plantes" (1633) Chapter 312: Of Violets
John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. (1633) Chapter 312: Of Violets

Orsino’s very mind, in its melancholic state, is affected by sweet airs—whether sad songs or fragrant violets. As the early modern brain was believed to be acutely affected by odors, and the violet emits a particularly sweet and sad aroma, the botanist and herbalist John Gerard’s regard for the violet’s olfactive and affective properties should not be surprising:

[Violets] haue a great prerogative aboue others, not onely because the minde conceiveth a certaine pleasure and recreation by smelling and handling of those most odoriferous flours, but also for that very many by these Violets receive ornament and comely grace …And the recreation of the minde which is taken hereby, cannot be but very good and honest: for they admonish and stir up a man to that which is comely and honest… do bring to a liberall and gentle manly minde, the remembrance of honestie, comelinesse, and all kindes of vertues. (Chapter 312: “Of Violets” 849-850)

Gerard nicely summarizes the memorable, virtuous, affective, symbolic, and olfactive properties of the violet that we have been sniffing out in this brief essay.

Viola odorata

References (in order of appearance)

Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal (London: Arcturus, 2009).

Hannah Woolley, The Accomplish’d lady’s delight in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery containing I. the art of preserving and candying fruits & flowers (London: Printed for B. Harris, and are to be sold at his shop, 1675).

Rebecca Laroche, with Steven Turner, “Robert Boyle, Hannah Woolley, and Syrup of Violets”, Notes and Queries 58 (2011): 390-91.

Avery Gilbert, What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008).

The Norton Shakespeare Based on The Oxford Edition, second edition, Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York, 2008).

Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

Rebecca Laroche, “Ophelia’s Plants and the Death of Violets”, in L. Bruckner and D. Brayton, eds. Ecocritical Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2011).

Jessica Kerr, Shakespeare’s Flowers (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1969).

Richard Palmer, “In Bad Odour: Smell and its Significance in Medicine from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century”, Medicine and the Five Senses, eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

John Gerard, The Herball or Generall historie of plantes, 2nd ed. (London, 1633).

Prick’t By Benedictus: Blessed Thistle and Much Ado About Nothing

Beatrice overhears Hero and Ursula by John Sutcliffe, via Wikimedia Commons
Beatrice overhears Hero and Ursula by John Sutcliffe, via Wikimedia Commons

by Jennifer Sherman Roberts

There’s a playful moment in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that occurs after the darker elements of the play have been set in motion but while the tone is still comedic. Margaret is helping Hero prepare for her wedding, and Beatrice, feeling ill and out of sorts, reluctantly joins them. Hero and Margaret, who have been conspiring to make the marriage-averse Beatrice and Benedick fall in love, begin teasing Beatrice. In response to Beatrice’s declaration that she is “stuffed” and sick, Margaret recommends a dose of a well-known herb, Carduus benedictus (also known as blessed thistle or holy thistle):

MARGARET. Get you some of this distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart: it is the only thing for a qualm.
HERO. There thou prick’st her with a thistle. (3.4.71-74)

Beatrice immediately picks up on the Benedick/benedictus pun and Hero’s naughty “prick’st” joke.

BEATRICE. Benedictus! why Benedictus? you have some moral in this Benedictus.
MARGARET: Moral! no, by my troth, I have no moral meaning; I meant, plain holy-thistle. You may think, perchance, that I think you are in love: nay, by’r lady, I am not such a fool to think what I list; nor I list not to think what I can; nor, indeed, I can not think, if I would think my heart out of thinking, that you are in love, or that you will be in love, or that you can be in love. (3.4.75-84)

(Unabashed Tangent: I love how this scene distills the mixture of giddiness, wit, and affection – with perhaps a touch of cruelty – that prompts friends to tease each other about their crushes. In modern terms, the scene reminds me of this meme.)

While the Benedick/benedictus pun would be hard for a modern audience to catch, it would have been much plainer to an Elizabethan audience, as Carduus benedictus was far better known and utilized. The herbalist John Gerard writes that blessed thistle (also known, rather delightfully, as “wilde bastard saffron”) was “diligently cherished in gardens in these Northern parts.

Painting of Carduus benedictus (holy thistle) & Potentilla reptans (creeping cinque foil) from The Romance of Nature, Louisa Anne Meredith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Painting of Carduus benedictus (holy thistle) & Potentilla reptans (creeping cinquefoil) from The Romance of Nature, Louisa Anne Meredith [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Given the popularity of Carduus benedictus, it is no surprise that it should make an appearance as an ingredient in early modern recipe books. Even so, the properties attributed to it in Wellcome MS 6812, a medical recipe book compiled from 1575-1663, are prodigious, taking up an unusual seven pages of the manuscript. Here is a partial list of the wonders of this plant:

  • If the herb is eaten or the herb’s powder or juice drunk: Good for headache and migraine. Sharpens memory and wit. Helps with sleep and hearing
  • Juice of the herb laid on the eyes: “Quickens” the sight, relieves redness and itchiness
  • Rubbed on a cloth with water: good for strengthening the teeth
  • As a powder: good for staunching the flow of blood from the nose
  • Cooked in wine: good for stomachache; also, “causeth an appetite to meat”
  • Powder mixed with honey: helps void phlegm and “gross humours”
  • Chewed: helps with “stink of the breath”
  • Leaves boiled in water: “provoketh sweat”
  • Powder (as preventative): prevents infection from pestilence; powder (after exposure): “expelleth the venome of the pestilence from the heart”
  • Juice or powder of the herb: combined with covering with hot wool cloth for three hours, causes intense sweating that expels poison
  • Herb boiled in wine: “dries agues”
  • Herb juice with wine: eases aches of all kinds, shortness of breath and diseases of the lungs
  • Herb boiled “in the urine of an healthfull man Child”: prevents dropsy and falling sickness
  • Powder eaten or drunk: eases side stitches and trembling due to palsy, helps with colic
  • Boiled or drunk with wine: breaks up “the stone”; when inhaled as a vapor, helps ease green sickness
  • Juice or powder of the leaves: heals canker sores and “old rotten festered sores.” Bruised leaves help with carbuncles.

This exhaustive list of blessed thistle’s curative powers is echoed in Gerard’s Herbal, where Carduus benedictus begins to sound like a miracle drug (and is even considered beneficial for “the French disease”).

So while Margaret’s comment about Carduus benedictus is meant to prod Beatrice to confess her love for Benedick, it also invokes the powers of an unusually efficacious plant, a trusted remedy capable of curing any malady—except, happily in Messina and the world of the play, the scourge of lovesickness itself.