Lady Fanshawe's Receipt Book by Lucy Moore

Author:Lucy Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Ann’s general instructions for distilling and preparing herbs. The note on the right-hand page is in Ann’s handwriting.

She would have planted other plants and herbs, too, for use in her new still-room, perhaps in a preventative drink like this Water of Life: melissa, rosemary, fennel, roses, mint. Tormetil is a wild herb with astringent qualities, used to increase resistance to disease. This receipt, with its large variety of ingredients, required expert preparation over an extended period of time, so perhaps it was one Ann could have made especially well in a still-room of her own, undisturbed by a hostess (however well-meaning) or a landlady. After Richard’s illness she would have been eager to store up the health of her family and a richly nutritious, herbal concoction like this, given to her by the wife of a relative of Richard’s, was ideal. Richard, coming to terms with having abandoned his master and comrades-in-exile, would have had particular need of its anti-melancholic, spirit-raising qualities.

Even though, by her standards, Ann was living in vastly reduced circumstances, the ingredients she used in both medical and culinary receipts placed her as part of the elite, able to afford expensive sugar and spices from across the known world. At the apothecary’s shop, a handful of herbs could be had for a halfpenny, powdered exotic spices like cinnamon and ingredients like ground bezoar stone cost about sixpence for quarter of an ounce, although ground pearls were eighteen pence and the various essential vessels cost several shillings: receipt making was an occupation only for those who could afford it.

As well as rosemary and roses and various other herbs, wild and domestic, that Ann would have gathered at Tankersley, this receipt for Water of Life calls for Muscat wine from France, sugar from Portuguese Brazil and cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger from Indonesia, sourced by Portuguese, Dutch and British traders. Other remedies included precious ambergris, the scented secretion from sperm whales; frankincense, an aromatic resin from the Boswellia tree traded through Arabia (the best quality frankincense came from Somalia); and sassafras, the leaves and bark from a North American tree introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century and used to combat a multitude of ailments from arthritis and gout to impotence and indigestion.

A global network was coming into place to make receipts like Ann’s possible. The academic Kim Hall has suggested that not only did the habits of the English housewife shape social order but also her demand for ingredients stimulated colonial expansion: profit-seeking English traders spanned the globe to bring home rare ingredients to adorn English tables and be used in still-rooms.9 Diplomatic crises reverberated through the kitchens of the seventeenth century: when England was at war with Spain there was no marmalade, for instance, because Spain was its sole source of Seville oranges (China, or sweet, oranges, had not yet been introduced to England).

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