Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (31 page)

Another point to bear in mind is that the bacon should be pretty well cooked before it is enclosed in its covering of dough. It will not cook very much more once it is insulated from the heat by the dough.

Ordinary white bread dough can be used instead of brioche dough – and it should be noted that the dough described above is a very simplified and very easily mixed version of a true brioche dough.

Unpublished, December 1971

A version of the recipe for a Spiced Herb Mixture to Spread on Baked Gammon to which Elizabeth refers the reader is given on
page 96
. JN

John Nott

The receipts collected by John Nott into his own very personal idea of dictionary form were those of the published books of the second Stuart age, let us say from approximately 1650 to 1715. Many were revised or slightly rewritten versions of receipts which had appeared in
The Compleat Cook
of 1655, and in Robert May’s
The Accomplisht Cook
first published in 1660, the year of the Restoration. Others come from Sir Kenelm Digby’s posthumously published collection entitled
The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened
, 1669, and
A Perfect School of Instructions for the Officers of the Mouth
, 1682. This was a translation by Giles Rose, one of Charles II’s master-cooks (brother, perhaps, of his head-gardener, John Rose) of
L’Escole parfaite des officiers de bouche
published in Paris in 1662 and again in 1682.

No doubt Nott drew on many other sources, including works
by his more immediate predecessors. There had recently been quite a spate of books written or compiled by men who had worked for rich noblemen and in the royal kitchens. Among the latter was Patrick Lamb, whose name was attached to a collection called, with brevity and authority,
Royal Cookery
. This was published in 1710, after Lamb’s death. He had some right to the title, having spent fifty years in the palace kitchens at St James’s and Whitehall, serving Charles II, James II, William III and Mary, and Queen Anne. Another royal cook, or rather, confectioner, whose little work was published in 1718,
¹
was Mrs Mary Eales ‘confectioner to her late Majesty Queen Anne’. Several other professionals, following the contemporary fashion of naming illustrious former employers on their title pages, had produced cookery or confectionery manuals.
²
On the whole they were repetitive and derivative, and Nott’s most important contemporary source appears to have been
The Court and Country Cook
, published in 1702. This was the translation of the 1698 edition of François Massialot’s famous
Cuisinier Roïal et Bourgeois
which had first appeared in Paris in 1691. Combined with the original work in this translation, by one J. K., was a version of Massialot’s second book, dealing with preserves, confectionery, cordials, lemonades, syrups, and the distilling of the aromatic waters then fashionable at the court of Louis XIV. Known as
eaux d’Italie
, these were increasingly often frozen and served as part of the dessert, and at the open air collations and fêtes so beloved in French royal and aristocratic circles. Directions for freezing were given by Massialot, and taken up – at any rate in print – by English practitioners, including our John Nott.

In 1723, the very same year that Charles Rivington published the first edition of Nott’s
Dictionary
, another of the ex-royal cooks, a man called R. Smith, published a work entitled
Court Cookery: or, The Compleat English Cook
, naming the Dukes of Buckingham and Ormond and the French Ambassador as having been among his exalted employers. This must have been annoying, to say the least, for John Nott who had contented himself with the comparatively modest announcement that he was ‘Cook to his Grace the Duke of Bolton’. So here was a potential rival to Nott and his publisher, an author naming one of the very noblemen for whom Nott himself had worked. (The 2nd Duke of Ormond, undoubtedly the one concerned, had been implicated in the 1715 Jacobite plot. He was impeached for high treason and his estates
confiscated. He then retired to France, so it must have been some years since Nott and Smith had worked for him. His daughter, Lady Mary Butler, had however married the 3rd Baron Ashburnham of Ashburnham in Sussex, so possibly it was on leaving Ormond’s service that Nott moved to Lord Ashburnham’s.)

Nott’s omission of Ormond’s name, and those of other exalted personages in whose kitchens he had worked was remedied when, in 1724, Rivington brought out the second edition of the book, and the string of imposing names on the title page henceforth gave it extra appeal. From the wording, it looks as though Nott had in the meantime either died or retired. ‘Late cook’ could have meant ‘lately’, or ‘late’ in the modern sense.

It is at any rate sufficiently clear from Nott’s choice of receipts and from his instructions generally that he was already an elderly man when he compiled his
Dictionary
. His heyday would have been that age when great noblemen, city magnates and East India merchants were building new country mansions, laying out parks and gardens, creating artificial lakes and waterfalls, stocking new fish ponds fed by running water, planting fruit orchards and kitchen gardens, growing orange trees in heated orangeries, constructing ice wells such as had been common in Italy for a century or more. It was the period of scientific discovery, of the great Royal Society, of burgeoning knowledge in every field. It was also, as we are sharply reminded by some of the receipts, the period when smallpox and the plague regularly decimated the population and medicine was primitive to a degree now hard for us to envisage.

Given all the circumstances, Nott’s
Dictionary
cannot but be of the greatest interest, particularly so to anyone who had been enchanted by the diaries, the travel journals and the memoirs of the time. Nott’s employers were familiar figures in late Stuart society, some of them at least were known to John Evelyn (James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormond, formerly Lord Ossory, was the son of that Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, who had been one of Evelyn’s dearest friends).
³
Celia Fiennes of travel journal fame visited or wrote of their houses. She would have known all about the dishes Nott describes. So would John Evelyn. Over and over again in Evelyn’s absorbing record we find references to the ingredients, the dinners, the feasts, the extraordinary arrangements of sweetmeats, preserves and fruit which made up what in Evelyn’s day was still called the banquet or banquetting course,
but which by the time John Nott put his book together was more usually called the dessert. It was still of course an elaborate affair, requiring much skill and taste on the part of the confectioners, pastrycooks, and often the ladies of the house, who made or ordered the different components and put them together in such charming displays. Nott’s instructions concerning this art, given right at the end of his book, with a simple diagram, are clear and well written. They could almost be followed today.

As for the kind of houses in which John Nott worked, and indeed some of the duties of a cook of the time, they come most vividly to life in John Evelyn’s writings. Here he is describing the grounds and gardens of one recently created by his friends, the 2nd Earl of Clarendon and his countess.

The date is 23 October 1685, the place Swallowfield in Berkshire. Evelyn has journeyed there by coach from London, stopping on the way for ‘a plentifull dinner’ at Mr Graham’s Lodge at Bagshot. Arrived at Swallowfield, Evelyn finds the house is built in the ancient manner but ‘the Gardens and Waters as elegant as it is possible and Lady Clarendon extraordinarily skilled in “the flowry part” of the garden’. His lordship had displayed great diligence in the planting of trees and ‘there were delicious and rarest fruits’, and an orchard of a thousand golden and other cider pippins. ‘The Nurseries, Kitchin-garden, full of the most desirable plants; two very noble Orangeries well furnish’d; but above all, the Canale & fishponds, the One fed with a white, the other with a black-running water, fed by a swift & quick river: so well and plentifully stor’d with fish, that for Pike, Carp, Breame, & Tench; I had never seene anything approching it: We had Carps & Pike of size fit for the table of a Prince, every meale, & what added to the delight, the seeing hundreds taken in the drag, out of which the Cooke standing by, we pointed what we had most mind to, & had Carps every meale, that had been worth at London twenty shill a piece.’
⁴
(Pike also was expensive. It was sold by measurement. In 1691 six 28 in. pike, for example, cost the Earl of Bedford at Woburn 12s. apiece, while three 30 in. specimens were 15s. apiece.)
⁵

This, then, was the kind of establishment in which our John Nott would have worked, the contemporary reliance of such households on fish from their own ponds being attested by his twenty-five receipts for pike – today it would be surprising to find more than three or four in a similar compendium – fourteen for
carp, eleven for tench. Orchard fruit is equally well represented in Nott’s work. There are no fewer than ten receipts for making cider, and a curious one for
Mure
which turns out to mean the
marc
or husks of the apples. For quinces, apricots and cherries there are respectively twenty-two, twenty-seven and twenty-five receipts. Those go back to the earliest Stuart days and are among the most delightful in the book. Here are all those solid marmalades, the preserves and the jellies so much loved by the English ever since the cultivation of fruit trees, the import of cheaper sugar from the colonies and the establishment of sugar-refineries in English ports had brought such delicacies within reach of a comparatively wide range of households – albeit always fairly wealthy ones. A ‘marmalade of cherries sharp tasted’ made with two quarts of redcurrant juice to 8 lbs of cherries is a lovely receipt, ‘cherries booted’, ‘cherries in Ears’ and ‘cherries in Bunches’ are all from the Massialot book. So are apricot ratafia and apricots again ‘in ears’, while ‘codlins like mango’ is a receipt reflecting the contemporary interest in home-made imitations of the pickles and chutneys brought home by returning East India merchants.

Ingredients new to England in the second half of the seventeenth century were chocolate and coffee, the former still used rather tentatively, in very small quantity to colour and flavour biscuits and creams, and more commonly as a hot drink. John Nott took his receipts for chocolate biscuits and creams from the translation of Massialot’s book, published in 1702. On 10 September of that same year a Bedfordshire lady, Diana Astry, noted that for dinner at Henbury there were for ‘the first corse a calve’s head haished, carps stw’d, a chine of mutton & a venison pastey. The 2
^d
cors a couple of turkeys rosted, samon, tarts, a salver of sullabubs & jocklett crames, and harricock pye the 5
^th
dish.’
⁶
Had the Henbury cook been studying the newly published book?

A harricock pye means an artichoke pie. At the time the word was very variously spelled, one of the most common ways being hartichock. The place of the pie in a final course sounds rather unusual, but the natural sweetness of a number of vegetables, including green peas, parsnips, skirrets, potatoes and carrots were well understood by our ancestors, who often cooked them with currants, dates, prunes and even candied fruit to give additional sweetness and served them as what John Nott calls ‘intermesses’, i.e.
entremets
. These sometimes appeared in between more substantial courses, sometimes as a last course immediately before
the dessert proper. Many such dishes, some sweet, some savoury, some quite substantial are given by Nott, who also lists an artichoke pye in his dinner menu for October, along with ‘Fruit in a Dish, Tarts and Custard’. He writes enthusiastically that ‘artichokes are of very great use throughout the Year, for almost all sorts of Ragoos, Potages, and Side-dishes; so that you should provide good store of them which you may preserve’. He gives two methods of pickling and three of drying them, receipts which must have originated in Provence and Italy where, until quite recent times, artichokes were commonly dried for winter use.

That John Nott thought it relevant to include such receipts in his
Dictionary
and to explain how useful they were does seem to indicate that in the kitchen gardens of the house where he worked leaf artichokes were cultivated in plenty. Among those houses – most of them were in the south and south-western counties – was undoubtedly one called Hackwood near Basingstoke in Hampshire. It was one of the mansions owned by the Dukes of Bolton, and it was evidently the 3rd Duke, Charles Paulet, Marquis of Winchester, who succeeded to his father’s title in 1722 for whom Nott was working when his book appeared in 1723. Hackwood was described by Celia Fiennes in 1691 as ‘another good house and fine Parke of the Duke of Bolton’s’.
⁷
Another great mansion seen by Celia Fiennes on a later journey, 1702 or 1703, was the Duke of Somerset’s ‘newly building’ house at Marlborough (now the nucleus of Marlborough College). She was impressed with the layout of the grounds, watered with ditches and ‘such a cannal which empts itself into a fish pond to keep fish in, then it empts itself into the river, there is a house built over the fish pond to keep the fish in.’
⁸

Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset ( 1662–1748) who was then building his new house, can hardly have been an easy man to work for. Known as the Proud Duke, his habit was to send outriders ahead of him to clear the roads along which he intended to pass so that ‘plebeians’ should not see him. On one occasion a farmer, understandably exasperated by his Grace’s high-handed ways, refused to be prevented from looking over his own hedge. In the spirit of a cat may look at a king, he held up his pig so that he too might see the Duke.
⁹
Another of Somerset’s unlovable whims was to force his two daughters to stand guard over him while he took his afternoon nap. On waking one day to find that one of them had actually dared to sit down he immediately docked
£20,000 from her inheritance. Or so the story goes.
¹⁰
Given such capricious and autocratic employers it would hardly have been surprising if their servants moved from house to house with some rapidity, although how long Nott stayed with the various men on his title page we have no means of knowing, nor do we know where he worked when he entered the service of Lord Lansdowne, although there is a distinct possibility that it was yet another of the great West Country houses, Longleat in Wiltshire.