Feb 20
By Carys Brown (@HistoryCarys)
Boris Johnson’s declaration last week that Brexit ‘can be good for carrots too’ caused a mixture of despair, mild amusement, and utter confusion. For those trying to get their heads around Britain’s Brexit-based future, this was hardly the ‘clarity’ they demanded. What few registered, however, was that Johnson had unwittingly tapped into a long history of the manipulation of this versatile vegetable for political ends. Read more
By Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett
On the Monday before Lent, wrote comedic poet John Taylor in 1639, a farmer returned home to his wife ‘busily making Pancakes for him and his family’. After he criticised the quality of the fare – ‘the coursenesse of the flower, the taste of the Suite [suet- fat], the thicknesse of the Batter’ – the farmer’s wife decided to teach her husband a lesson, ‘knowing he was better experienced in the Plough, than the Panne, and to eate Pancakes better than to make them’! Telling him to wait outside with his back to the door and the plate outstretched in front of him, she promised to toss the pancake through the chimney from which it would land merrily onto his dish. Instead, in retribution for his snide comments, the wife ‘came suddenly behinde him, & with the pan and all clapt the Pancake upon his head’. With his hair ‘well basted with the fat of the Panne’, the ridiculed husband scorned his wife as ‘an arrant Shrew’ and named the day ‘Shrewes Munday’ and the next ‘Shrews Tuesday’ in her honour.[1] Read more
by Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett
By Christmas 1940 almost all of Britain’s major cities had been hit by extensive bombing raids, amongst them the devastating London Blitz of September and the destruction of Coventry in November. 24,000 British civilians had died, and families were displaced as children were evacuated from cities and parents went to serve in the war.[1] Read more
By Eleanor Russell
This article forms part of Doing History in Public’s Christmas series, which this year looks into patterns of consumption at Christmastide.
Like today, the most spectacular and anticipated part of the medieval Christmas was not the Mass, then mandatory, but Christmas feast, an event which offered not only an opportunity to celebrate the birth of Christ, reconnect with family and friends, and eat to bursting, but also the chance to express social hierarchies and identity. Read more
by Elly Barnett – @eleanorrbarnett
When I explain that I am researching the links between food and the European Reformations, I am usually met with premature praise for my (in reality non-existent) cooking skills. The obvious location in which to research food, they assume, is the kitchen. The cooking of historical recipes, moreover, has gained much public exposure recently, especially after last week’s Tudor theme on the nationally-coveted show, The Great British Bake Off. Meanwhile, food is increasingly becoming a legitimate and flourishing subject of enquiry in academia, as it moves away from traditional historical narratives. How then, should historians react to this popular interest in historical cooking, and is there any academic value in moving research from the archives to the kitchen? With these questions in mind I attempted to recreate an early-modern blancmange… Read more
The brandy is the first thing that hits me, followed by the creeping spiced sweetness of currants and raisins. Then, bafflingly, there emerges the equally spicy taste and texture of meat. All of this is encased in a crisp, short-crust-type pastry and topped with some fairly inept attempts at pastry decorations (see picture, top right).
I wasn’t sure how I felt about the ‘Minc’d pie’ I had just created, but the affront it presented to my taste-buds and the early modern recipe I used to make it did make me curious.1 Given that the combination of sweet fruits and spices with actual minced meat is quite challenging to a modern palette, what was its function at a late-seventeenth-century dinner? Modern mince pies have a very specific Christmassy association and the taste of one can evoke strong memories of occasions of Christmas past. Did early modern consumers of minced pies hold them in such esteem as we do?
