History
Forgotten Foods By Catherine Rose
In the era of supermarkets, ready meals and worldwide food imports, this month we look at some of the more unusual British dishes that were once common but have now disappeared from our everyday tables. There is no doubt that although many of our staples have remained, the dishes we eat daily have changed drastically over the centuries. Who would now enjoy a bowl of garum? Yet this fermented fish soup was a favourite of the Romans. We tend to think of the medieval era as being typified by banquets overflowing with roast meat and washed down with endless tankards of mead. In fact, there were many cookery books kept at this time and dishes were often surprisingly complex, served with a great deal of visual wit. Take for example the cockentryce. A capon, or castrated cockerel, was boiled, cut in half and sewn to the rump of a piglet. This was then stuffed and spit-roasted before being ‘gilded’ using egg yolk, saffron and (edible) gold leaf! In those days if you were offered custarde, you wouldn’t have poured it over your apple pie. Custarde was a type of 15th century quiche made with eggs, veal and prunes. Medieval foodies loved to combine fruit with their meat in dishes like fish sausage, made from a mixture of fish, currants, cloves, mace and salt. Puddings were equally creative with wonderfully poetic names such as ‘a dish of snow’ - a concoction of whipped egg whites and apple purée, and ‘eggs in moonlight’ eggs poached in rose water and sugar to resemble moons. Some dishes would probably not be 6
considered palatable today. For example, in the 1700s, cows’ udder would be eaten either roasted or boiled with spices and served cold, and Richard Bradley’s The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director in the Management of a House and the Delights and Profits of a Farm (1736) contains a recipe for boiled vipers. In rural areas, both badger and hedgehog were considered a delicacy. Bradley’s cookery book has instructions on how to prepare badger by cutting off its ‘gammons’ (hind legs), stripping them and then soaking them in brine for a week to ten days, after which they should be boiled for four or five hours and finally roasted. The hedgehog was a Romany favourite and would have been widely eaten in mid-Bedfordshire where there was once a thriving Romany gypsy population. The hedgehog would be caught, packed in clay and baked on the open fire. Once the clay had hardened it was broken away, which took the skin and spines with it, to uncover a meat said to look and taste like roast pork (hence the ‘hog’ perhaps). Beestings (or beastings) pudding was another rural dish. A milk pudding, it was made at home from the rich colostrum of a cow that had recently given birth. The Victorians were adept at using every part of a slaughtered animal for food, from the brains to the hooves. Calves’ ears would be shaved, boiled and fried; offal used to make various patés; and calves’ feet boiled to extract the natural gelatine. We could probably learn a lot from the Victorians in managing our food wastage today. Perhaps future generations will look back on our love of Super Noodles and tinned baked beans with both horror and amusement.