White Currants and Elderflowers

Some Culinary Footnotes

In my Northern garden the white currants are just ripening as the last of the elderflowers are opening

For those of you who research the history of food these days, you have a much easier time finding sources than I did when I started getting a taste for the subject in the early sixties. Nowadays there are many online scanned and transcribed texts of period recipe collections, as well as modern reprints and facsimiles. If I wanted to consult one of these rare works I would have to go to the British Library and look at an original copy. The trouble was I was only thirteen when I first got interested, which was too young to have a reader's pass. So the only alternative was to buy originals with whatever pocket money or holiday job wages I could muster. The first cookery book I ever bought was John Nott's Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary (London: 1723). I found a good working copy for about 75p ($1.00). When most of my friends were spending their spare time listening to the Beatles or the Stones, I was trying to learn to cook out of this masterpiece of baroque gastronomy. I thought I had discovered a golden age of British food and just had to learn more. So, once I had learnt how to seek out and buy books of this kind, I spent every penny I had on acquiring more, and more, and more! Armed with a copy of Arnold Whitaker Oxford's bibliography, I started hunting out some of the key works he describes in what became my bedside bible.* 

I was lucky. With not too much outlay, by the time I was sixteen I owned good original copies of works by Gervase Markham, Joseph Cooper, Kenelm Digby, Hannah Wooley and a few other Jacobean cookery writers. In 1967 I cashed my £40 premium bonds to buy a perfect copy of John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (London; 1640). This teenage obsession grew into a lifelong passion, the result of which is a lovely and incredibly useful book collection. An early purchase which really tickled me, was Mr Oxford's own copy of T. Hall's The Queen's Royal Cookery. It was an imperfect one with a note in Oxford's hand explaining that the last page of the text was missing, but it only cost me half a crown (twelve and a half new pence)! I have since found a better copy, but I had to pay a lot more than that for it.

By the time I was in my twenties, I became particularly interested in works on confectionery. The very first I acquired was a second edition of Borella's The Court and Country Confectioner (London: 1772). It was this marvellous little book that kindled an early interest in ice cream and I was soon attempting to learn how to make ices using the methods described by this head confectioner to the Spanish Ambassador .

I remember buying this particular book in July when the elder bushes were in flower, so I had to have a go at making his Muscadine Water Ice, a lemon sorbet flavoured with elder flowers. This was the very first period ice I ever made. I used salt and ice in a bucket and an old milk can because I did not at the time own a sorbetiere. Once I had figured out Borella's rather confusing instructions with his cross references to other recipes, I got it to work really well. What amazed me was the incredible smoothness of the finished ice - no detectable ice crystals and a silky feel on the tongue. In a brief footnote to his recipe, Borella (we do not know his first name) explains that a variation on the theme was to make the ice with white currants.

This is a sorbetiere and spaddle, the equipment Mr Borella used to make his muscadine ice. I prefer this to any modern ice cream maker. It is usually quicker and makes wonderful smooth ice creams and water ices

This unassuming little N.B. is one of those treasures that occur from time to time in our culinary literature, where in a brief note a truly wonderful masterpiece of a dish is delineated. I managed to get hold of a huge basket of white currants from a friend in Sussex and had a go. What a revelation! This was in 1971, when many considered British gastronomy to be in a trough of despond. Not in my London flat it was n't! I fed my flatmates with this icy nectar and they were truly astonished. Marine Ices had been open for a few years down the road in Chalk Farm, at the time about the only place in London where you could get decent ice cream. But as nice as their ices were, Mr Borella's Muscadine Water Ice with elderflowers and white currants was on a much higher plain.

Mr Borella's White Currant and Elderflower Muscadine Ice made in a Georgian fluted mould

I had a lot of the currants left over and with them made another eighteenth century delicacy, white currant shrub, from Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773), though delicate is probably the wrong adjective to describe this fiery high octane liqueur. Again, the recipe is in the form of a very brief note, the use of white currants just an alternative suggestion to red ones. I made about a quart with my currants - again a superb forgotten use for these translucent, pearl like fruits.

* A. W. Oxford,  English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 (London: 1913).

Jaune Mange

Charlotte Mason's 1773 Jaune Mange made in the form of the sun

When I was a child in the 1950s, a common sweet served at our school dinners was blancmange, a milk pudding thickened with cornflour, or more likely made up from a commercial packet mixture. We all hated it, probably because it usually had the same pink colour as the surgical plasters of the period. Without any knowledge of French, it never occurred to us that its name implied it should actually be white. Little also did we know that this despised dish had a remarkably long history with numerous extant recipes dating back to the thirteenth century. It was a dish that seemed to know no national boundaries. Recipes were included in cookery texts written in every European language. Early versions usually contained minced capon breast, or even fish (or fish spawn) on days when meat was outlawed. Its other common ingredients were rice, almonds, milk or cream, rosewater and sugar. It could be a bland food for invalids or an ornamented dish for gracing the tables at major state events. The early fifteenth century English version below belonged to the latter category and was 'flourished' with red and white anise comfits and almonds. 

A recipe from  The Forme of Cury for Blank Maunger. This is a page from a c.1420s version of the text - courtesy John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. The original text dates from the 1390s. This early English recipe, just like its continental cousins includes shredded capon's breast. Here is a transcription,

Blank Maunger. XXXVI. Take Caponis and seeþ hem, þenne take hem up. take Almandes blaunched. grynd hem and alay hem up with the same broth. cast the mylk in a pot. waisshe rys and do þerto and lat it seeþ. þanne take brawn of Capouns teere it small and do þerto. take white grece sugur and salt and cast þerinne. lat it seeþ. þenne messe it forth and florissh it with aneys in confyt rede oþer whyt. and with Almaundes.

Versions with meat no longer survive in modern Europe, though in Turkey a sweet set pudding called Tavuk göğsü is still very popular. Like the older European incarnations of blancmange this is made with chicken breast, milk and rice flour. It is so similar to medieval blancmange that it must be linked in some way. It is delicious and refreshing. In eighteenth century Britain, where the chicken breast and rice started to be omitted in the early eighteenth century, the dish was more usually thickened with isinglass. By the second half of the eighteenth century blancmange borrowed the name of a native set pudding called flummery, which was originally congealed with oatmeal. In the culinary literature of this period the terms flummery and blancmange are usually interchangeable.  Flummeries and blancmanges were frequently allowed to cool in moulds and turned out in a remarkable variety of decorative forms, with an important industry producing both wooden and ceramic moulds for making them in. 

Much has been written about blancmange, mainly regarding its history in the medieval and early modern period.* But very little is ever said about a close relative called jaunmange or jaune mange, a dish, which despite its French name, seems to be an entirely English creation. As its name suggests, it is yellow in colour due to the inclusion of egg yolks in the composition. Despite a long and thorough search, I have found no versions of this dish in French recipe collections. The earliest printed recipe I know is in Charlotte Mason, The Lady's Assistant (London; 1773). I am currently searching eighteenth century manuscripts for the dish, but have so far not found any that predate Mason's recipe. Here it is.

From Charlotte Mason, The Lady's Assistant (London; 1773)

A Staffordshire salt glazed stoneware mould c1760. I used this to make the jaunmange above. 

Charlotte Mason not only gives a recipe, she also offers a table plan which features the dish

There are many later recipes for Jaune Mange. Both English and American recipe collections in the nineteenth century frequently include at least one. J. H. Walsh in The British Cookery Book (London: 1864) gives three -

J. H. Walsh in The British Cookery Book (London: 1864)

Mason's recipe employs Seville orange juice as a flavouring, while most of the later authors substitute this with lemon juice. I have made it with both and prefer the Seville Orange version. It should have a light set and a really delicate mouth feel, so if you make it with gelatine, be very sparing. 

* Three noteworthy essays on the early history of blancmange are,

Gillian Goodwin, ‘Blancmange.’ History Today 35, no. 7: 60, 1985.

Allen J. Grieco – ‘From the Cookbook to the Table: A Florentine Table and Italian Recipes of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,’ in Du Manuscrit a la Table, edited by Carole Lambert, Paris: Champion – Slatkine - 1992.

Constance B. Hieatt - Sorting Through the Titles of Medieval Dishes: What is, or Is Not, a ‘Blanc Manger,'' in Food in the Middles Ages: A Book of Essays. Edited by Melitta Weiss Adamson, New York: Garland : 1995

Mary Midnight's Bubble and Squeak

When I was a child in the 1950s one of my favourite dishes was 'bubble and squeak', made by my mother from potato and cabbage left over from the previous day. She fried the ingredients in a little beef dripping saved from the Sunday roast, creating a piping hot slush of brassica and mash trapped within a crisp browned crusty jacket. Sometimes she cooked it in bacon fat, which was even better. This humble dish is the stuff from which my earliest food memories were forged. Never mind Proust's dainty madeleines - just the thought of a pile of bubble and squeak infuses my whole being with a poignant yearning for those breakfasts of more than half a century ago. Sadly, I am now always disappointed with the dish as it never lives up to my nostalgia-driven expectations. 

The closest to my mother's I have experienced is Nigel Slater's excellent recipe. However, like most other modern versions this requires a non-stick pan, a luxury unknown in the 1950s. As a child, it was those crunchy, not quite burnt golden flakes of potato that had to be physically scrapped off the bottom of an old black cast iron frying pan that gave the dish its character. Without them it was bubble, but sadly deficient in squeak. 

Essential tools for bubble and squeak - a 19th century scrapper and cast iron frying pan

The off-set handles of these knives allows the ingredients to be chopped and scrapped in the pan as they cook

The process of making bubble and squeak required as much scrapping as it did frying. A specialised tool called a bubble and squeak scraper (above) was once used for making the job easier. However, the true purpose of these beautifully designed utensils has now been entirely forgotten. As well as having a sharp edge for scrapping the crunchy bits that stuck to the pan, they also allowed you to chop the vegetables as they fried. Their craftily designed handles enabled you to use them without being obstructed by the sides of the pan. 

Bubble and squeak choppers or scrappers

The English have also forgotten that the very nature of bubble and squeak changed radically at some point in the twentieth century. This favourite dish has been around since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, but for the first hundred and eighty years of its existence it was made by frying together small slices of meat, usually beef, with boiled cabbage. Potatoes did not even get a look in until the late nineteenth century. I suspect the meat got dropped from the recipe during the course of the Great War, but the jury is out on that one. By 1951, The Good Housekeeping Magazine Home Encyclopedia declared that 'in the modern version of bubble and squeak the meat is usually omitted'. This modern version is the one I remember from my childhood breakfasts and which is still cooked today.

In the 1890s the great Victorian chef Theodore Garrett, described bubble and squeak as, 'a favourite domestic réchauffee of cold meats and vegetables, variously compounded, according to what materials are at hand, or to fancy.' This is quite close to the modern concept of the dish, a kind of fried mish-mash of any vegetables left over from a previous meal. But Garrett's recipes all contain meat, so in the late Victorian period it was quite a different dish to the bubble and squeak the British enjoy today. I have appended Garrett's article on bubble and squeak at the very end of this posting.

Christopher Smart aka Mary Midnight, the author of the first printed recipe for bubble and squeak

As far as I know, ‘bubble and squeak’ first gets a mention in literature in 1752 in an issue of The Drury-lane Journal, by Madam Roxana Termagant. This was a scurrilous magazine, in reality written by the poet Bonnell Thornton. Thornton was a member of the Nonsense Club, a gathering of literary figures and artists, which included William Cowper among its members. The earliest recipe I know was published a year later in 1753, not in a cookery book, but in another irreverent collection of satirical verse and prose called The Midwife, or Old Woman’s Magazine by one Mary Midnight - again a pen name, this time used by the eccentric poet Christopher Smart (1722-1771). 

Title page and frontispiece of Christopher  Smart's The Midwife. This is the first number of October 1750. Mary Midnight's recipe for bubble and squeak was printed in Vol III in 1753.

Mary Midnight's style of writing is peppered with juvenile humour, much of it downright silly and often outrageous - a kind of Georgian Monty Python. The recipe had probably been around for decades and may have originated as a sailor's way of dealing with salt beef or pork. It is quite fitting that a recipe for a dish with such a ridiculous name first appeared in such an absurd journal. Mrs Midnight's 1753 recipe, reproduced below, is really a spoof, a satire on the life style of the Oxford and Cambridge students of the day, but it does work. 

The earliest 'recipe' for bubble and squeak -  made with salt meat.

Bubble and squeak naturally lent itself to comedy and features regularly in humorous poetry and prose during the second half of the eighteenth century and beyond. Peter Pindar's marvellous evocation of it noisily cooking in the pan, surely explains the onomatopoeic origins of its name -

What mortals Bubble call and Squeak 

When midst the Frying-pan in accents savage, 

The Beef so surly quarrels with the Cabbage. 

The first directions in an actual cookery book do not appear until 1773, and then only in a footnote to a recipe for boiled beef in Charlotte Mason's The Lady's Assistant (London: 1773). The dish seems always to have been of a homely nature. In his marvellous  Slang. A Dictionary (London: 1823), Jon Bee offers this definition - 'Bubble-and-squeak - a vulgar but savoury kind of omnium gatherum dinner of fried scraps, the scrapings of the cupboard.'

Although synonymous with plain living and making do, bubble and squeak had some surprising fans. According to Fraser's Magazine (1837 Vol. 15. p. 375), George IV, when Prince of Wales, was introduced to it when he dined with Sir Robert Leighton at Loton Hall in Shropshire - 

‘Sir Robert, being a batchelor, was unused to giving so large a dinner as this occasion called for; and his cook, being rather at a loss to fill all the numerous side-dishes required, decided on fried beef and cabbage for one of them. “What have you got in that dish?” said the prince to a gentleman before it happened to be placed. “That sir,” answered Sir Robert, “is a favourite dish in Shropshire, called bubble and squeak.” “Then give me some bubble and squeak,” resumed the prince; and he ate heartily of it. Thus far I can vouch for what I have said; but it was currently reported that this homely dish was afterwards frequently seen at Carlton House.’

To me, this is the whole point of bubble and squeak. George was a prince noted for his love of extravagant dining. He employed Antonin Câreme for a short while and ate the most sophisticated French cuisine off the grandest gilt service ever made in the history of English silversmithing. But he could still take pleasure in such a homely dish.

In a similar fashion, it is a common experience that after over indulgence in the rich foods of Christmas dinner, our jaded appetites can still be revived by this 'vulgar but savoury kind of omnium gatherum dinner of fried scraps', in other words the Boxing Day bubble and squeak made from the leftovers. Englishmen of every class have had a long lasting love affair with this most basic, but tasty of dishes.

The last word on the matter must go to the anonymous versifier who wrote the following lines for an edition of Punch magazine published at the height of the Crimean War.

BUBBLE AND SQUEAK

I am a man who dwells alone,

Save only that I keep a dog,

Who eats my scraps up, orts and bone,

So that the creature shares my prog.

I had a boiled salt round of beef

On Monday, all to my own cheek,

Wheron my hunger sought relief

From day to day, for near a week.

Of cold boiled beef the daily round,

After a while begins to tire,

One longs for something nicely browned,

Or steaming from the genial fire.

And then the beef was getting dry;

But food away I never fling,

What can be done with it? thought I:

Bubble and Squeek, sir! – that’s the thing.

KING GEORGE THE FOURTH was not a dunce

At least in gastronomic lore;

Bubble and Squeak he tasted once;

And then he ate it evermore.

The King had oft on turtle dined,

As I have sometimes chanced to do,

We both, to think I am inclined,

The less enjoyed it of the two.

So large with what it fed on grew

My whetted appetite’s increase,

That ‘twas as much as I could do

To leave my dog a little piece.

And even when I gave him that,

I muttered in a doubtful mood,

“is this quite right now – what I’m at,

In giving you, Sir, Christian food?”

The dish at which I’ve pegged away,

So that it my interior fills,

Would that they had it this cold day,

The Brave on the Crimea’s hills!

They in the cannon’s mouth do not

The Bubble reputation seek,

But Glory find; their onset hot,

Leaves to the Russians all the Squeak.

But Bubble, not of empty air,

And Squeak that’s more than idle sound,

Soon may those gallant heroes share

At mess on Russia’s conquered ground!

Anon. Punch 1855. vol. XXVIII, p.10

Theodore Garrett's article on bubble and squeak. The Encyclopaedia of Practical Cookery (London: nd. 1890s)

Bubble and squeak made with beef and cabbage arranged on the plate as in Garrett's method above

A nice recipe for modern bubble and squeak by Nigel Slater (though not as good as my mum's!