Elbow to Elbow with my Elizabethan Sisters
Historical Cookery as Writing Research
Quick Notes
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So much of writing historical fiction doesn’t happen on the page. Some of it must be sensory.
My focus right now is the Elizabethan woman in her kitchen. My focus in on that special domestic legacy - the elizabethan receipt book - and what it can tell me about the every day lives of women existing in the autonomy of their domestic realms.
All writing is created through the lens of the personal. How do I build a simile for an action I have never made? How do I know what the basic Elizabethan spice combinations smell like, how far the scent of a particular pudding might seep through the house, how the skin of the hands might carry the taste of preparation afterwards? How else but to, in my own small, modern way, live it.
When I begin my first Elizabethan recipe it is with a nervous self consciousness. I am cooking blind. There is no image that I can find of what I am about to make. I have to trust that my own legacy of kitchen familiarity, passed down through generations of women in my own family, counts for something. I am cheating a little, taking a recipe from Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book by Hilary Spurling. Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book was transcribed by Hilary Spurling in 1986, from an original manuscript which had been passed down through her husband’s family. If you are at all interested in early modern cookery, this is a fantastic place to start reading up.
During my research as a Folger Fellow I’ve noticed there are foods and recipes that regularly come up in early modern receipt books, but as a beginner to practical food research the Spurling book is a solid resource as so many of the recipes are tried by Spurling herself. She also gives fascinating insights into a more general food history as well as the history of the Fettiplace family. Elinor Fettiplace was born in 1570 and died in 1647. Her receipt book manuscript is dated from the 1600s, but was likely started when she was living at hime with her mother in the 1500s.
Because this isn’t purely a fun project, I need to gather information that I can return to. Writing the novel has been an interesting test of my research gathering skills, finding the line between the natural, flow state of writing and the need to put facts and experiences into a research gathering system.
I have gone down the research route of having lots of different notebooks for different areas of research. For example, because I’m learning how to transcribe Elizabethan handwriting I have a notebook for palaeography, and this book is also the notebook where I record lists of occupations of the time, names and information about random people, the background people who make interesting side characters. I have notebooks for recipes, foods, interesting Elizabethan food slang (medlars are called ‘open arses’ in Elizabethan England, a fact that is now unforgettable) and then I have a big A4 notebook for my practical cookery research. In this notebook I put the recipe I’m testing, and the sensory notes from that practical research. This is a way for me to create scaffolding for the story that I am trying to tell.
Elinor Fettiplace calls what I am making a ‘foole’. It bears very little resemblance to what I think of as ‘fools’ which are a creamy desert with pureed fruit. Elinor’s recipe uses bread as a thickening agent and has no pureed fruit in it. But research tells me this sort of fool is similar to a ‘Norfolk Fool’ as featured in the 1660 cook book The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May.
At this time bread is the main carb source, a lot of everything is served on what are called ‘sippets’ which are thin pieces of toasted bread. Remember this the next time you disparage beans on toast - the English desire to put mostly anything on toast has a very long legacy.
In the foole recipe we use thin slices of ‘manchet’ a kind of wheaten bread, made in huge quantities in the Elizabethan Manor Houses. Elinor soaks them in boiled spiced cream, or what she refers to as ‘the top of the morning’s milk’. and this is where I get my first sense of the smell of the Elizabethan kitchen, like a low Christmas smell. If you think about the sort of fruity rich seasoning used in Christmas puddings, varieties of this spice complex are what the (wealthy) Elizabethans used as the base notes for their cookery. Gentle English herbs alongside imported dried fruits and spices, lemons and oranges. What I find is that it isn’t overwhelming, it is a much more gentle spiced mix.
There is a great deal of time spent waiting for things to soak up other things, which makes me think this sort of pudding is the sort that is made while making other things. I imagine the kitchen then, another dish prepped while the foole is soaking its manchet slices, the planning and organising that a big kitchen might need to make so many dishes at once, all served at once.
Then there is the sieving. Smooth puddings and clear coloured jellies were the absolute epitome of kitchen skill, highly prized and the cause of quite a lot of competition in Elizabethan kitchens, so I sieve the pudding for authenticity, and let me tell you, Elizabethan kitchen workers had good muscle tone. It is hard work, it takes forever. But the result is incredibly pleasing.
Elinor’s instructions here are that the consistency should be no thicker than batter. I’m very proud of my sieved pudding consistency. And then currants are added (raisons in this case as I had no currants) and into the oven it goes to bake for a long time, one and a half hours, which made me very nervous. But reader, it worked.
The top was crisp and sweet, the middle was light and fluffy and the fruit and the sherry and the spices were layered along the bottom in a sweet, rich, strata. I was very impressed by this natural layering of the pudding. The taste was somewhere between a bread and butter pudding and a clafoutis. A familiar and at the same time unfamiliar consistency.
What went into my writing from this exercise?
The scent complex of the kitchen
The strength of the cook
The smell of spices on the skin long afterwards
The sense of multitasking in a big kitchen
The pride of a recipe that works well.
And something else, something less definable: the feeling that to stand here in my little modern kitchen and cook this Foole pudding was to stand elbow to elbow with the elizabethan cook, especially the women in the kitchen, passing along the legacy of the receipt book.
Until next time
x
Love this Wendy. Years ago I used to buy biscuits from a bearded guy on a French market made from recipes from Hildegard de Bingen. He also ran medieval banquets and wore a black tunic covered in flour dust and I can still taste the dense, peppery, spiced biscuit. It was unlike anything I’d tasted before or have tasted since.
This sounds fabulous. I'm a hopeless cook but I love learning about food and cookery history. I keep going back to Townsends 18th century cookery on YouTube (American, but many of the recipes were brought from Britain or adapted from a British version) and I read last year an enormous book by Colin Spencer about 1000 years of British food, and there's something about food that takes me directly into someone's home and everyday experience. I would never have thought of it for novel research though, and yet it sounds like it gave you unique insights.