The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain
Page 35
Creative thrift extends to cooking methods, to compensate for the lack of utensils and fuel. Celia Fiennes might be shocked at the lack of firewood, but ordinary people up and down the country have been dealing with the problem for decades. Perhaps the most important efficiency in this respect is cauldron cookery. In a large cauldron of brass or iron, several things can be cooked at once. Meat can be inserted in an earthenware jug with herbs and salt (hence ‘jugged hare’) and cooked alongside vegetables in a net within the boiling water, with the juices adding to the cauldron water to make a pottage broth. Puddings too can be cooked in this way, and they can be made with almost any form of ingredients. Cauldron cookery is especially useful where charcoal or coal is the only available fuel: the acrid coal smoke prevents broiling or roasting but does not harm the food in a simmering cauldron. Iron fire-baskets are developed to facilitate the use of alternative fuels. Baking also reduces the need for firewood, as the oven is heated through burning dried undergrowth. Thus, rather than roasting a piece of meat, it can be encased in pastry and baked in a pie, cutting the cost.
For the poor and the ordinary household living near the sea, fish are a staple part of the diet. Oysters are eaten by everyone, rich and poor alike, although for the poor they may constitute a meal in themselves. A little further inland, pickled sprats and herrings and salt cod remain affordable but, as you travel further from the sea, the costs of carriage put them beyond reach. In Scotland, haddock and whiting are dried and smoked over seaweed fires on the shore by fishermen’s wives. But for the majority throughout Britain, for whom meat is a rare or unaffordable luxury, the most important staple foods are bread (or oatcakes) and cheese. With respect to the latter, soft cheeses made with full-fat milk tend to be expensive but hard cheeses, made with skimmed milk, are cheaper and last a long time. As for bread, wheaten loaves from a baker are costly, but if you can bake your own with barley, rye, oats or maslin (a mixture of wheat and rye), you can cut costs significantly. Make it with a mixture of peas, beans and oats or barley, and you can reduce costs still further. For this reason it is important to have your own oven. This is one of the reasons why so many cottages have their fireplaces rebuilt at this time, with the addition of a bread oven. Take your fuel, such as dried gorse or bracken, and keep shovelling it in till the fire is roaring, heating the bricks or stones, and, when the oven is hot enough, sweep out the fire and ashes and insert your loaves in their troughs on a long-handled peel. Close up the oven with its oak door or slab of stone, and seal it with clay or mud. And if there is sufficient heat left afterwards, use it to bake pies or pastries, which require lower temperatures. 53
What to Drink
In listing all the drinks available in England in 1676, Chamberlayne mentions ‘wines from Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Greece … brandy, coffee, chocolate, tea, aromatic, mum, cider, perry, beer and many sorts of ale’.54 He could have mentioned many other things too, such as mead, which is enjoying something of a revival among the gentry (as an alternative to wine in the mornings); and metheglin, a herbal variation on mead, which remains popular in Wales. One drink Chamberlayne does not mention is water. This is not because it is so common that it goes without saying; rather, because it is rarely drunk. Its ‘coldness’ in medicinal terms means that physicians warn against drinking it, even if it is purified by boiling. Although many cities in the Restoration period – including London, Norwich, Exeter, Edinburgh, Leicester and Shrewsbury – have water piped from their rivers to the yards of wealthy people’s houses, it is not for drinking purposes but for cleaning and cooking. London’s pumping wheel, installed in 1656, can raise the water 93 feet, and an artificial channel or ‘new river’ supplies water to a reservoir in Islington and from there to houses in the north of the city; but these services are expensive and the people who can afford them are not the sort who drink water.55
ALE, BEER, MUM AND CIDER
Ale, brewed from malted barley and water, has been the traditional drink everywhere in Britain except the Highlands of Scotland for centuries. It continues to be drunk in great quantities, and in various forms. The problem is that it only lasts a few days after brewing. Beer, which includes hops, keeps for much longer, so this is the most common drink in England. Mum, a heavy ale brewed from wheat, flavoured with aromatic herbs and left to ferment for a couple of years, is another variation. But this general classification conceals a great number of regional differences. Herbal ales are popular in the north of England. In Cheshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall, ale is made with malted oats as well as barley, and in parts of Kent it is made with a mixture of the two.56 Welsh ale or cwrw is made from kilned barley, which imparts a smoky flavour. Suffice to say, wherever you go, the local beer will be distinctive.
Then there are the specialist ales and beers. Cock ale is famous on account of it supposedly being a cure for consumption (tuberculosis). The basic drink is brewed from ordinary malted barley: the distinct ingredient is the cock, which is parboiled, steeped in sack and then left to soak in the ale with raisins, dates and spices. Alehouses that sell it are often named after the drink – for instance, ‘Cock-ale Tavern’. Old Pharaoh is another distinctive ale that gives its name to the alehouse where it is sold in Barley, Hertfordshire; Ned Ward describes it as ‘a stout, elevating malt liquor’.57 Margate ale, otherwise known as Northdown, is a strong drink favoured by Pepys for getting unsuspecting people tipsy. Coloquintida is small beer flavoured with colo-cynth, the bitter cucumber.58 On top of these specific brands you have generic ale recipes. Buttered ale is boiled with butter, sugar and nutmeg and thickened with beaten eggs. Aleberry is similar, but thickened with oats and drunk in Scotland; and caudled ale is mixed with honey or sugar and egg yolk, which is recognised as a restorative for ill people. Lambswool – ale mulled with eggs, spices, sugar and the pulp of roasted apples – is a popular drink on Halloween, Christmas Eve and Twelfth Night.
Beer is not generally drunk out of glasses. Unless you are in an upmarket establishment, where pewter vessels might be used, you’ll drink from a wooden tankard. The range of beers and ales available, and their sensitivity to their storage conditions, means that travellers remark on the quality of the beer and ale rather as modern British people talk about the weather. Schellinks remarks on the ‘very good beer’ kept in the caves below Dover Castle and the ‘excellent beer’ at the Dolphin Inn in Sandwich.59 In Nottingham, ale and beer are stored well in cool cellars cut into the rock beneath the town.60 Beer generally retails at 2d or 3d a quart (two pints). Ale is slightly cheaper. Small beer, which is weak and meant for children, is cheaper still. Yorkshire ale is very strong and thus more expensive – ‘it will always cost you a groat [4d],’ says Celia Fiennes.61 Bottled beer has improved greatly since its introduction in the reign of Elizabeth (when the bottles would often explode) and may be found in small towns as well as cities. Most brewing is still done in people’s homes, however; the difficulties of transporting beer any great distance mean that large breweries are a thing of the future.
Cider is most famously produced in Herefordshire, Somerset and Devon, although it is by no means confined to these regions. French cider too is imported and available in London. Varieties are generally named after the types of apples that produce them. In Herefordshire, a premium is set on cider made from Scudamore apples. Redstreak cider is also highly prized, being very strong. Prices tend to be higher than those for ale: Thomas Baskerville pays 6d a quart for cider in Herefordshire in 1673; bottled cider retails at 6d per bottle in 1693.62
WINE
If you are a wine connoisseur, you have come to perhaps the most exciting time ever in the history of wine production. And the English play a major part in the story. This is not because of any developments in the production of English wine. Although there are a few domestic vineyards (on Lady Batten’s estate at Walthamstow, Essex, for example), English wines are almost never offered for sale.63 Rather it is due to the fact that the emerging London bourgeoisie treat wine as a status symbo
l and thus create a considerable demand for it, leading to the development of fine wines in Bordeaux and new methods of making wine in Burgundy.
To understand all the excitement, you need to know something about how wine is bought and stored. First, it is illegal to sell it in bottles, due to an Act of Parliament of 1636. Yet bottling wine is the most convenient way to keep it and take it from your cellar to the dining table or banqueting house.64 Gentlemen thus buy wine by the barrel and bottle it themselves. You place an order with a bottle-maker for dark-glass vessels with attached glass discs that include your initials, crest or coat of arms and the date. Note that these are expensive – a dozen can cost as much as 4s 5d – so you do not bottle up any cheap rubbish.65 At the same time as this move to bottled wine is taking place, consumers are starting to use corks to close the bottle, instead of plugs of oiled hemp or glass stoppers.66 They have not yet realised that by binning wine (laying it on its side so that the cork remains damp) they can improve it while it is in the bottle, so the majority of wines are still drunk while ‘green’ or young. When you go to a wine tavern, however, you will probably not see any sign of this oenological revolution. The cellars are full of casks and barrels, each one marked with the wine’s place of origin. And when it is served, it will normally be brought to your table in a flask or jug and poured into wine glasses. The bottling and recording of the vintages of wine are entirely a private obsession of the rich.
Let us begin with champagne. You have no doubt heard the story of Dom Pérignon, the legendary wine grower at the abbey of Hautvillers, who is said to have invented the sparkling drink. It isn’t true, sadly. In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Pierre Pérignon is indeed the treasurer at Hautvillers (from 1668) but his self-appointed mission is to eradicate the bubbles, not add them.67 In the Champagne region, located in the cooler north of France, cold spells regularly halt the fermentation process in the barrel, so a second fermentation starts when the temperature rises. This creates an unwelcome effervescence in the red and white wines of the region. Thus, if you go to Hautvillers, you’ll find Dom Pérignon devising methods of pruning and spacing out his vines and storing the wine in appropriate conditions, in order to increase the chances of the wine maturing normally, without any fizz. Meanwhile a local landowner, the marquis de Saint-Évremond, is in London, living it up in the city following his exile from France. Of course he has his own wines sent to him, and he and gentlemen of his acquaintance have it put into bottles. As it happens, English bottles are stronger than French ones, and when the second fermentation takes place inside, many of them are able to withstand the pressure. Champagne as we know it then quietly develops, in the darkness of English cellars. The well-to-do soon start talking about this special new drink: in 1676 the playwright Sir George Etherege declares his taste for sparkling champagne in his comedy The Man of Mode.68 Demand quickly exceeds supply. Champagne growers rub their hands with glee. Dom Pérignon may be aghast but the rest, as they say, is history.
The other hugely significant development in this period is the move to import fine wines from Bordeaux. In the mid-1650s managers of vineyards start to think more scientifically about wine production: how many vines should be planted per acre, how hard the pruning should be, and so forth. One of them is Arnaud de Pontac, whose Haut-Brion estate yields some exceptionally good red wine. No doubt Charles II is already familiar with it as a result of his years in France for, very soon after his accession, he sets about acquiring it in considerable quantities.69 The king’s example is followed by many Londoners: Pepys cannot resist finding out what all the fuss is about and heads to the Royal Oak Tavern in Lombard Street on 10 April 1663 to try it for himself. His verdict is that Haut-Brion has ‘a good and most particular taste that I never met with’.70 Arnaud de Pontac notes that his order book is filling with London clients and sees a great opportunity. In 1666 he sends his son François-Auguste to open a wine tavern in London to push the wine. Known as ‘Pontac’s Head’ or simply ‘Pontac’s’, it sells Haut-Brion to the rich dining set and quickly becomes the most prestigious place to eat in the capital. John Dryden, John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift all dine there. The philosopher John Locke is so impressed that he visits the vineyard in 1677. Of course as soon as you have won over the literati, your publicity takes on a life of its own. So successful are the Pontac family in this respect that in England their name becomes synonymous with fine claret, even after the other great ‘new clarets’ – Margaux, Lafite and Latour – have started producing comparable wines.71
Dozens of other wines are available in London and, to a lesser extent, in the other major wine-importing centre of Bristol, and from these places they are exported all over the country. The range covers the full A to Z – from ‘A’ for Alicante, a Spanish wine, to ‘Z’ for Zante, a Greek one. The most common red wine is ordinary claret, imported from Bordeaux. If you want white, the easiest to obtain is Rhenish, from the Rhine. Malmsey is imported from Greece, Canary from the Canary Islands, Candy from Crete, Vernage from Tuscany and La Ribera from Spain. Italian Chianti makes its first appearance in the English market, in both its white and red forms.72 Rumney is a sort of sweet wine made in the Greek style but imported from Spain. The delightfully named Brown Bastard is a sweet blend from Portugal. Sack we have already encountered: it takes its name from seco, the Spanish word for ‘dry’. This is one of the few wines you might be able to taste in an aged state: Pepys tries a thirty-year-old Malaga sack in 1663 and considers it ‘excellent but more like a spirit’.73 Another significant development at this time is the introduction of Iberian wines to the British market. Sherry starts to be imported in quantity from Jerez but as yet it is still not fortified. Port, too, is beginning to make its way to England in an unfortified state: in 1692 Job Bearsley starts a port business, taking strong red wines from the Douro valley to the port of Oporto and then to London (the company is still going in the twenty-first century, under the name Taylor’s).
Now for the bill – and you can see why wine is a status symbol. An Act of 1660 lays down a maximum retail price for wine: Spanish and sweet wines must sell at 1s 6d or less per quart; French wines at no more than 8d; and Rhenish wines at not above 12d per quart. The penalty for breaking this law is £5 but you can guess how effective it is likely to be, especially after Pontac’s opens its doors to a wealthy clientele. There you will have to spend about 7s for a bottle of Haut-Brion and 2s for lesser wines. Elsewhere, a quart of your standard claret is normally about 1s, sherry about 1s 8d a quart and Canary 2s in the 1670s.74 In London, at a good wine tavern, expect to pay about 2s 6d for a quart of sack.75 Most wealthy gentlemen buy wine by the cask, hogshead or tun: for example, the earl of Bedford pays the famous London wine merchant James Houblon £10 for two hogsheads of port in 1664.76 In 1678 the importation of French goods, including wine, is forbidden, forcing merchants to turn to Spain and Portugal to make up the shortfall. The balance swings back to French wines in 1685, when the ban on imports is relaxed, and although wine tariffs on French wines are increased by £8 a tun, the duty on other wines increases by £12, making French wines more affordable again. In 1689 there is another embargo on French wine, which is lifted in 1696, but then the duty placed on it is increased by a massive £25 per tun, making it ridiculously expensive – and worth smuggling into the country illicitly.77 Even drinkers of Haut-Brion blink at the prices charged by London wine merchants after 1696. But oenophiles tend not to compromise on quality, even when prices are so high, and the new clarets all remain in demand.
SPIRITS
Distilling is an ancient art but unknown in Britain until the late Middle Ages. Even then it was not employed for recreational drinking but for medicinal purposes. Apothecaries distilled concoctions in which plants had been dissolved in order to obtain their essence. Sometimes they produced ‘strong water’ or aquavitae, which is close to pure alcohol. It was the Dutch who gave us our first recreational spirit. In the late sixteenth century people (including English soldiers in the Low C
ountries) took a liking to drinking genever (gin) distilled from the juice of juniper berries. Now the popularity of spirits is spreading – not least because you are able to distil as much hard liquor as you want without having to pay punitive taxation rates. People accordingly experiment with distilling anything and everything they can lay their hands on: malt, molasses, fruit, snails and chickens. Yes, you may be offered ‘cock water’ as well as cock ale: this is not a synonym for urine (but you may wish it was). The thinking goes like this: if cock ale is so good for you, surely the distilled essence of cock should be even better. Likewise snail-water, which is snails distilled with sack and herbs. If you have any taste, you will eschew these for good old brandy. Sir Edward Dering declares in 1670 that brandy drinking in Kent has ‘grown of a sudden to a very great mischief, it being now sold generally in every village, and the sellers despising the authority of the justice of the peace, as thinking themselves not within the statutes for selling ale and beer’.78 Obviously those with money are not content with home-distilled drinks but seek out the best French brandies. These cost 3s 8d per gallon if you are buying in bulk, or 1s per bottle.79
At the same time as brandy is sweeping England, the practice of distilling corn-based drinks is spreading in Scotland, so that men and women there give up drinking water, milk, buttermilk and whey and start drinking whisky every day. Making whisky remains a family affair, however, so little of it makes its way south of the border. As a result, it is Irish whiskey that first comes to the attention of the English. Another imported strong drink is rum – short for ‘rumbullion’. It is also known as ‘kill-water’, which gives you an inkling of its potency. Other strong drinks that you may be offered include punch – which is served in a bowl with a piece of toast floating on top (hence ‘to drink a toast’) – and arrack, which is a mixture of brandy, cider, fruit juices, water, spices and sugar.80