The British Housewife by Gilly Lehman

Author:Gilly Lehman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: COOKING / History
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Published: 2002-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

We can only regret that Lady Jane considered this a ‘folly’ and gave no further details beyond identifying it as a landscape rather than a formal garden – a significant difference. When we come to English receipts we shall see this style in practice.

Menon showed the variety of the sweetmeats on offer, and this abundant variety was one of the points he made in the preface. Besides fruit conserves, which are closer to fruit jellies than to the heavier pastes of the seventeenth century,83 we find receipts for ices, both sorbets and iced creams and ‘cheeses’ (‘fromages’),84 and meringues.85 There are also creamy mousses set in decorative moulds and turned out for the table,86 but the jellies and flummeries of English cookery books do not appear. Nor are they found in other French books or their English translations. Clermont, who included some confectionery receipts at the end of his translation of Les Soupers de la Cour, gave conserves of fruit and flowers, with a few biscuits and ices, and an explanation of how to make the different-coloured ‘sands’ in sugar.87 His ices were made with cream and fruit, and he gave several sorbets, moulded to imitate real fruit.88 There were similar receipts, but in very small numbers, in the appendix to volume 3 of La Chapelle.89 However, their presence as early as 1733 shows that the nouvelle confiserie described by Menon was as much a question of presentation as of new receipts. Clermont demonstrates the importance of appearance with his suggestions (found among the cookery receipts) for an elegant arrangement of ices in buckets made of almond paste or in a hollowedout cake (a ‘gâteau de Savoie’).90 This elaboration suggests that ices were no longer a sufficiently impressive novelty in themselves, as they had been at the beginning of the century: something more was required to produce what Michael Smith describes as the ‘gosh factor’.91 In the upper strata of society, ices were taken for granted, whereas lower down the social scale, they were still a rarity before 1760.

What had happened to the dessert in gentry houses in the years between 1730 and 1760? In the study of culinary styles to 1730, we saw a few examples of receipts which look back to the fruit conserves of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as receipts for creams. But the most striking aspect of the dessert then was the presentation in pyramids of the various sweetmeats, echoing the presentation of the grand olios and terrines. The cookery books of the middle of the century offer similar receipts, but with more emphasis on creams and jellies than on the traditional dry and wet fruit preserves. Hannah Glasse borrowed most of her receipts for creams from the 10th edition (1741) of E. Smith;92 here we find creams and syllabubs which are similar to those we have already seen from earlier periods.93 Amongst the receipts which do not come from this source is one for moulded creams:

Jelly of Cream.

Take four Ounces of Hartshorn,

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