The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

Author:Ruth Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2020-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Poor man’s pottage?

Every now and again, we catch glimpses of the thick/wet divide where older styles of cookery hung on in more remote, wood-burning areas of England until they were finally swept away with the arrival of the railways and loads of cheap coal. William Ellis farmed at Little Gaddesden in North Hertfordshire, on the edge of the Chiltern Hills, but he made part of his living as a writer upon agricultural matters. In 1750, he published The Country Housewife’s Family Companion, for which he took a journalistic approach to the subject of food and cookery. Rather than writing out recipes, he recorded the advice and practices of individuals from differing social classes and regions around the country. It is one of the earliest documents presenting ordinary people’s domestic behaviours, if not quite in their own words, at least from a report of them. His section on dairy, for example, included ‘The exact Method of preparing Scalded Cream for making it into Butter the Devonshire Way, by a Correspondent at Stowford, near Ivy-bridge, Feb. 25, 1746–7’. This was followed by ‘A Somersetshire Dairy-Maid’s Account of making Butter with scalded Cream’. And based on his collected accounts (unlike the printed recipe books of the era), frumenty was alive and well.

His chapter upon the use of peas is especially interesting because almost all of his examples were drawn from his local contacts. The one exception came from a farmer’s wife who lived just over the county border in Bedfordshire, near Dunstable, on a continuation of the Chiltern Hills ridge. This ridge, on both sides of the county border, was a heavily wooded area in the mid-eighteenth century. (It still is.) It was also very poorly served by inland waterways. In other words, it was about as far as you could get from either the sea or a coalfield in those days. So, despite being just 50 miles (80 km) from London, this was one of the last places in England to become a coal-burning district. People there had to wait for the coming of the railways for that.

The most popular cookery book of the day was Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727), which in 1750 – the year of William Ellis’s survey – was already in its eighth edition. Smith’s book contained only one recipe for a traditional thick pease pottage but seven recipes for wet-boiled pea soups. Ellis, reporting from his wood-burning neighbourhood, collected one pease pudding recipe that incorporated a wet-boiling method, calling for the dried peas to be soaked, put into a pudding bag and boiled in clean water until three-quarters cooked, then withdrawn from the pot, beaten into a mash, returned to the cloth and the pot, and boiled for a little longer. In contrast, he offered a barrage of thick pease porridge recipes, three from the wives of farmers and one from ‘A Poor Man’s Family’. Their accounts were full of instructions ‘for thickening it, and making it the more hearty’. One told the reader to cook

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.