420 pp; 155x220mm; hardback 

ISBN 1903018 005 £30.00

(A superglossary is also available on this web site.)

Don't boil the coffee

JANE JAKEMAN

The eighteenth century was an era of stern domestic moralizing. There was a proliferation of manuals aimed at newly literate social groups, particularly servants and women of all classes. Recipe books began to change character accordingly. The cheerful spectacle of upper-class wastrels having fun which had been implicit in The Accomplish't Cook, the seventeenth-century work by Robert May, for example, where court feasts featured pastry stags with claret running from their arrow wounds, or live frogs in a mock pie, which "makes the ladies to skip and shriek", gave way to prosaic recipes for broths and puddings. Some works were by chefs such as John Farley, head cook at a London tavern, adapting their repertoires for small kitchens; many, such as the famous compilation of Hannah Glasse, were expanded to include recommendations for preserving, dairying and "domestic oeconomy".

Most assumed a metropolitan readership. William Ellis's The Country Housewife's Family Companion is not really a recipe book, but advice for small farmers and rural housewives assembled by an eighteenth-century Hertfordshire agriculturalist with an endearing compulsion to write down every detail of daily life. The book - which in this edition is provided with an efficient introduction and glossary - belongs to some extent with the agricultural manuals that were a feature of the age, but assumes a poorer level of society than the squirearchy, much of it being aimed at villagers. Take the matter of small cakes normally made with butter and eggs. "Our way is to make use of no butter", says Ellis, "neither do we use any eggs . . . we think them a cheap and pleasant food to our workmen."

Sometimes this virtuous rural economizing descends from comedy to horror. "A poor woman that lived a mile from my house, in time of famine having no victuals, made her eldest daughter follow the man that shovel'd away the snow in a sort of path for the sheep to come at turneps; here she pull'd some up and boiled them to a mash . . . and it sustained them much."

Ellis's habit of directly transcribing instructions and anecdotes gives the book something of the bustling journalistic style of Defoe. The animal husbandry is especially lively: "A Sow poison'd by drinking Broth", or the account of a sick cow cured: "By giving her a penny-worth of pepper in half a pint of gin, the cow immediately discharged abundance of wind." There is a section on thefts and robberies and how to prevent them, vigorously peopled by bakers who adulterate their flour with alum, threshers stealing corn and the villainous servant who makes a duplicate key to the wine-cellar.

Particularly dramatic are the medical notes, which include treatment by "doctoresses" as Ellis terms them. "Madam Howard's Diet Drink" for scurvy would certainly have been successful, since it contained Seville oranges. And the Hertfordshire woman whose notion was that "disease cannot so well be drove out, if they take the strength of the blood away" is sadly displaced by "the notions and practice of the famous Dr. Boerhaave and Dr. Dover, who are recorded for bleeding plentifully in all fevers". What Ellis records is a sub-culture of old country remedies clinging stubbornly on, as a more formal and official "educated" medicine killed off those who could afford it. (One should perhaps not romanticize the "doctoresses" too much: curing jaundice by drinking live lice in ale cannot have done much for the jaundice, though at least it presumably reduced the lice-count.)

Ellis himself was not particularly successful. He invented some agricultural machines, but did not use them on his own farm. His four wheel seed-drill worked hopelessly badly. One of his neighbours told a visitor, "Mr. Ellis mostly sits at home in his room and writes books, and goes sometimes a whole week without going into his ploughed lands or meadows to look after the work."

What was William Ellis doing sitting inside all day? Writing this book and drinking coffee, presumably. His classic instructions for making coffee cannot be bettered, and are still the o altitudine of the caffeine devotee: simply pour boiling water over the freshly ground beans, allow the coffee to stand for a few minutes and then decant the liquid off. "If you boil coffee, as the common way is, the spirit goes away, so that it will not be so strong nor quick to the taste; for obtaining the spirit is the main thing to be desired." Exactly so.

William Ellis's "manual of country living," as Malcolm Thick calls this book in his informative introduction, is a guide to domestic economy in an English village in the mid-eighteenth century. Where Hannah Glasse wrote her cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), for gentlewomen and their servants, often living in town, Ellis's directory is for life on the farm at virtually the same time. For the twentieth-century reader, it is a window into a community of gentry, yeomen, farmers, and laborers dependent on each other for their daily bread. Ellis, an unabashed John Bull, cares not for the fricassees of fashion able life, but for putting food on the table and in the belly.

At this period, the English countryside was undergoing profound changes as the progressive enclosure of fields and pastureland, by fences and hedgerows, kept poorer people from reaping its bounty, literally. Ellis begins with a detailed discussion of grain grown in his region - wheat, barley, and oats - and how to grind and store it profitably. He does not disguise his aim of wanting to stretch food as far as possible, telling where one can and cannot cut corners, not so much in preparation but in ingredients. Servants, neighbors, acquaintances, passersby, correspondents, authors, people he happened to meet here or there have given him their methods and recipes for making bread and pastry dishes that he presents to the reader. He conveys his curiosity about them and, unlike Mrs. Glasse, gives them credit in his discursive prose.

Ellis lived in the small village of Little Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, about thirty miles northwest of London, in the Chiltern Hills. He describes the region as "abounding with many hills, dry soils, gravelly rivers, plenty of most sorts of grain, and allow'd by professors of physick to be the healthiest air in England...." The London market was close enough for his poultry and eggs, and he was proud that street criers distinguished them as "Hertfordshire" eggs and fowl. Butter, if kept sweet and fresh, could fetch good prices in London, too, and Ellis gives precise directions to the housewife on how to guide her dairymaid to realize this potential. On the working farm, anything associated with the dairy - milk, butter, cheese, eggs, veal calves - was the domain of the farmer's wife, and so she could keep profits from their sale for sugar, spices, and other staples to enliven a hearty but often stodgy diet.

The seasonal rhythms tell us much about farming life. In the month-long autumn wheat harvest (the Lenten harvest was shorter), Ellis's laborers worked from four in the morning to eight at night, for thirty or thirty-six shillings. They stayed in his house, where they were less apt to waste time. To get the best workers during this intense period, he hired them well ahead. Ellis gives details of the five separate meals, served punctually, and the quart of beer ration that he gave them over the course of their workday. Their victuals consisted of "beef, bacon or pickled pork, beans, pease, pudding, pyes, pasties, cheese, milk, with other culinary preparations," and plenty of vegetables, he writes. The farmer's wife known for providing such food got the best hands. "Our housewife's art lies in furnishing variety of eatables, and yet to do it in the most frugal manner. And that it may be so done not only in harvest-time, but also at all other times throughout the year, is the main design of my writing this treatise of the Country Housewife."

Besides the harvestman's piece of bacon or salt-pork, "which proves a good friend to his pocket," cheese was especially important during harvest as quick, portable, and nourishing. The second half of the book, on similar topics but with new content, gives methods of making traditional hard English cheeses such as Leicestershire, Cheshire, and Gloucestershire, told to Ellis by dairymaids from those counties. Among fresh cream cheeses, he mentions a Welsh cheese from the Vale of Glamorgan, made from the rich ,, milk of Brecknockshire sheeps' milk mixed with cows' milk that sounds tantalizing - yet another cheese of that great tradition now lost to us.

Farmyard animals take up a large part of the book - not so much the roast beef of Old England, as porkers, bacon hogs, and swine used in every way imaginable. He tells how to butcher, salt, and process the meat to preserve it for bacon, pickled pork, and ham. Directions for sausages, brawn, haslet, chitterlins, meat pies, and countless puddings are given. Many, especially in northern England, he says, eat pork as almost the sole meat, along with a regular complement of boiled puddings and baked pies. He also discusses fruits and vegetables, including the recently established potato, which he values for being cheap, nourishing, filling, and versatile. Mrs. Glasse includes a single potato recipe.

To a modern reader, Ellis's practical, no-nonsense style can clarify mysteries of the farmyard and shake some of our modern assumptions. On bacon, for instance, that "we can not have too fat nor too large a flitch," he reminds us of a world where neighbors often went hungry, thus fat was desirable. Apart from his medicinal recipes for animals and people, Ellis shrewdly observes that smoked meat can be unwholesome, that whole-wheat bread is healthier, that potatoes are better with skins removed after boiling, and that apples ward off scurvy. In one small aside, he remarks that swine fattened on butchers' offal is bad practice -  advice that British farmers today wish they had heeded.

In this microcosm of Little Gaddesden, Ellis cannot resist including neighborhood gossip, cautionary tales, warnings about adulterated food, advertisements for his seeds or tools, testimonials from various individuals, or experience from a lifetime of his own farming. He writes with exuberance yet not a trace of wishful thinking. In this handsome volume with its helpful glossary, Prospect Books gives us the sights and smells, tastes and textures of everyday life in the eighteenth-century English countryside.

This facsimile of a book published in 1750 has an informative introduction by historian Malcolm Thick (the introduction is available on-line on the publisher's web site at www.prospectbooks.co.uk, a site which also has other interesting material.) It is one of several facsimile editions of texts likely to be of interest to historians of agriculture, social life and food. As the introduction to the book points out, Ellis wrote in a rather breathless style, but as it is based on the personal experience of the author as a farmer and trader over fifty years, it has a certain authority in spite of (or even because of) the style. Read this book, or at least browse in it, for explicit detail about eighteenth-century trade, agriculture and social life. However, there are valuable insights here into social position, food, work and consumption, and the book is as valuable for these as for the explicit detail.

There is a great deal about social position; sometimes this is explicit because Ellis carefully specifies whether he is addressing gentlemen, yeomen, farmers, labourers or servants. Sometimes it is implicit, such as in the commentary on many of the recipes. Writing about staple foods (bread, pies, fruit, meat, cheese and so on) is aimed at the whole of the population from gentlemen to labourers' wives. The different social groups are presented as eating the same kinds of dishes but a food hierarchy emerges from his comments. The better-off will be able to add to the basics (like puddings, pottage and so on) such extras as cream, eggs, dried fruit, spices, herbs and pepper. Apple puddings are regarded as an excellent staple food for farmers and labourers, but puddings with other fruit and spices (like gooseberries or plums) are appropriate for the better-off. He approves of oatmeal, which is port rayed as preserving 'the lives of millions of people in sound health'. And he approves of milk porridge which 'is much in use from the lord to the peasant'. On the other hand, he does not approve of the poorer sort substituting a 'tea breakfast' for porridge because this is both too expensive and 'unwholesome'. He does, however, expect the &mikes of gentlemen and yeomen to have a 'tea breakfast' and recommends some breads and other food for this. Yet this is not just a conventional view of social distinction, with one sort of food appropriate for the rich and another for the poor. It is firmly rooted in a humane concern forthe well-being of all levels of society, and especially those who have to do heavy manual work. There is the implication that, although there was a potential for everyone to have enough to eat, the house hold had to be properly managed and that farmers and labourers needed to be careful to get as much out of their food as possible, making small amounts of meat go a long way with vegetables and especially potatoes for example.

There are valuable descriptions of the use of various utensils in the kitchen and dairy but attitudes to consumption in general are implied. Ellis warns against buying staple foods in shops because he thinks these items over-priced. So it is better to keep pigs than buy bacon from a butcher; better to bake your own bread than buy from a baker. He also warns that you should not give your children or servants the opportunity of being corrupted by buying in a shop where there might be gossip.