Top 10sFood and drink booksFrom ‘quaking puddings’ to ‘syrup of tobacco’ and the first fry-up, the novelist serves up a feast of appetising reading
I've spent the past three years researching and writing a novel set in the time of Charles I about an orphan who becomes the greatest cook of his age. John Saturnall's Feast takes place in the vast subterranean kitchens of the (fictional) Buckland Manor where John learns his craft.
I had thought the cookery of the time would prove crude, heroic rather than sophisticated. But as I read deeper, I realised the early 17th century had been a golden age for English cooking which gloried in such dishes as "Quaking Pudding" and "A Smoothening Quiddany of Quinces", in sauces called "Egerdouce" and "Bukkenade", in mad concoctions of marchpane and gum tragacanth.
I discovered these wonderful dishes in the recipe books of the time and in the works of later writers. Here are 10 of the most mouth-watering, and weird.
1. The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Open'd
Sir Kenelm was the son of one of the gunpowder plotters who tried and failed to blow up James I. Perhaps surprisingly, his execution proved no hindrance to a friendship between the sons. He was a Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles I and a great collector of recipes, particularly of "Meath". The Closet contains more than 100 recipes for fermented honey-based drinks along with recipes ranging from wild boar to boiled eggs. His recommendation that "collops of bacon with eggs" make a good breakfast is the first reference, I believe, to that staple of English cuisine, the fry-up.
2. Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book
Hilary Spurling edited this collection from a handwritten book passed down in her family dating from 1604. The recipes, remedies and preserving methods had been gathered over many years, almost like annotations in a family Bible. Spurling not only organises the recipes seasonally, she also tests many, a heroic undertaking in a modern kitchen. She only baulks at Syrup of Tobacco (contributed by Sir Walter Raleigh), originally made from the tobacco grown in large plantations all over the west country. The preparations range from a method of preserving samphire to Syrup of Roses which took either three or 27 days depending on how Lady Fettiplace's eccentric punctuation is interpreted. Tinctures are distilled, delicate cat's tongue biscuits are baked and light sauces and liaisons whisked up: a sophisticated cuisine but presented as typical of the time.
3. Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris by John Parkinson
The title of the greatest of the 17th-century herbals is a pun on its author's name (Park in Sun); its pages purport to describe and illustrate every plant cultivated in Britain. Thirty-three varieties of cherry are included (though there were more, so many kinds that "I know not well how to express them unto you") and 50 kinds of plum. Two hundred pages are devoted to bulbs. Parkinson was the first man in England to cultivate rhubarb and he describes how he did it. The woodcuts are beautiful (some are reproduced in John Saturnall's Feast) and as a record of the herbs, fruits, roots and leaves available to a cook the book is unsurpassed. Unfortunately it cost a fortune on publication in 1629 and hasn't got any cheaper since. Happily, Anna Parkinson (John's ancestor) has written a biography, Nature's Alchemist, which describes the great work well.
4. Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry by Thomas Tusser
Tusser was a small farmer in Suffolk in the late 16th century who wrote a very long poem in rhyming couplets about farming and rural housekeeping. No one in their right mind would read Tusser for his literary merit but there are local pleasures. Tusser's 10 common faults attributable to cheese is a justly famous list and the verses are a fund of anecdotes on how people filled their bellies. But it is terribly dull.
5. The Accomplisht Cook by Robert May
May was the Mrs Beeton of his time. His book is a vast compendium of recipes for just about everything from beef stock to "subtleties" (mad food sculptures themed to honour the highest-ranked guest) with advice on carving thrown in. The book was published in 1660 but the recipes must have been collected long before. May trained in Paris and in his preface he complains of the French cooks who "by their Insinuations, not without enough of Ignorance, have bewitcht some of the Gallants of our Nation with Epigram Dishes". So there.
6. Acetaria John Evelyn
Evelyn is better known for his Diary and more respected for his wonderful treatise on trees, Sylva', but his Acetaria (or "Things fit to be spiced with vinegar") is packed with information on "sallets". These were vegetable dishes in general, not just salads. Evelyn lists more than 70 leaves as fit for consumption and one substance – sylphium – that had been extinct for several centuries (but that does not stop him supplying a scholarly history). Sylphium seems to have resembled asafoetida.
7. The English Housewife by Gervase Markham
"Markham's literary reputation has never been high" writes his modern-day editor, but this was on of the great bestsellers of the early 17th century. Markham describes how to prepare remedies against fever, perform simple surgery, distill perfumes, clarify cloudy wine, weave wool, make butter and cook roasts, puddings and pies. A "complete woman", Markham asserts, could do all these things and more. All she had to do was read his book.
8. Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, being the Diary of Celia Fiennes
Celia Fiennes rode around England in the late 17th century, staying with relatives (she was a grand-daughter of Viscount Saye and Sele) when she could and in verminous inns when she could not. Her journal is not a cook-book but Fiennes' habit of recording the smallest detail, no matter how banal, affords a glimpse into the practicalities of feeding oneself on the road. The lobsters and crabs caught near Poole are very sweet, she tells us, and Somerset cider is plentiful, although she disapproves of the way the orchardmen "press all sorts of apples together". It seems there were "cuvées" of cider in Celia's day.
9. Food in England by Dorothy Hartley
Hardly a 17th-century book but a classic account of English food that begins with what fuel to use, takes in dining-table design and specifies edible seaweeds before describing the bacteria necessary to make cheese. A vast, chaotic wonderful book.
10. The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne
Why Browne decided to compress the whole of human learning on the subject of formal and ancient gardens into 60 pages of dense convoluted syntax, I do not know. The late WG Sebald once told me that not even he could decipher all its sentences. But this strange tract stands as a monument to an age's fascination with the cultivation of the fruits of the earth. After all, however good the cookery, you first had to have something to cook.
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