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21

For to bake quinces

1500

AUTHOR: Unknown, FROM: This Boke of Cokery

To bake quinces take iii or iiii quinces and payre them pyke out their cores and fill them full of good syrup made of clarry or of wast pouders and sugre then lette them in coffins and hyle them and back them and serve them.

Now you might well think that one Boke of Kokery must be much like another Boke of Cokery. But there are fundamental differences and not just that a period of sixty years saw the progression of the letter ‘K’ being replaced by a ‘C’. While the former was a handwritten manuscript, This Boke of Cokery was printed. In fact, it is the earliest-known cookbook printed in English. There could well have been others and that they were lost suggests that not a great deal of value was placed on them at the time. These would have been regarded as fairly insignificant works – mere records of banquets, seasonal eating and recipes. More value would have been placed on the printer Richard Pynson’s other books – law statutes and suchlike.

As if conscious of this, the title page of the book is humble and modest. ‘This is the boke of cokery’ it states. A longer introduction follows on the next page. This is rather fuller of itself: ‘Here begynneth a noble boke of festes ryalle and cokery a boke for a princes household or any other estates and the makynge therof according as ye shall find more playnely with this boke.’

I turned the ancient pages of this volume, my hands clad in white gloves, as it rested on a pillow in the chilled map room of the Longleat archives in Wiltshire. The book had resided for a couple of hundred years in the Green Library of the house, one of seven libraries, having come into the family collection by marriage. It had rested on a shelf next to titles like Don Quixote, Wars of England, The Arabian Nights and works by Sir Thomas More. Today it is carefully preserved in a secure air-conditioned unit in the house’s converted stable blocks.

This is not a book for the kitchen and it never was. The pages are as clean as a bible’s. It was written as a record and also as an aide-memoire for the cook. As ever, there are no cooking times and quantities are scarce – save for the quince recipe given above, which at least tells you how many to use.

The author, most likely a senior cook in the royal household, records some memorable banquets from the past – a feast for ‘King Harry the fourth’, who reigned from 1399 to 1413, and a list of the dishes that were served at the coronation of Henry V in 1413. Guess what: the guests were served pottage, boiled pike, gurnard, trout and so on. After the list of banquets there’s a dense, dull, list of seasonal cooking: capon stewed, trout boiled, bream in sauce … ad infinitum. It’s with some relief that the author then announces: ‘Here endeth the calendar of the boke of cokery and here beginneth the making.’

And a little light detective work – a re-read of the Boke of Kokery – suggests that these are not original ideas. Like the worst type of plagiarist, the author lifts a number of recipes and then just rewrites them slightly. His recipe for mussels being almost identical to the one that appears in the 1440 book. Except the new version is not quite as good as the old one and lacks the vital detail of the importance of serving the dish on a warmed plate.

But we can forgive this. This work after all was the first printed English cookbook and – as established in the case of Platina, with his pilfering and passing off as his own the work of Martino de Rossi – the wider dissemination of good cooking is what helps food and society develop. The techniques are enlightening too, revealing much about people’s tastes at the time. Vinegar is tossed onto food as we today would drizzle over olive oil. So either contemporary palates favoured tangy flavours, or the vinegar was sweetened. The likelihood is that palates acclimatise to what is available. If olive and butter are scarce but vinegar is not and that’s what everyone’s tossing on their freshly boiled crab, then that’s what you use.

Speaking of crab, there is a recipe ‘For to dight [prepare] crabe or lobster’. The author instructs one to ‘to stop the crabe or lobster at the vent with one of his litel claues and boyle them’. Since the vent is the Middle English culinary term for a creature’s bottom, this is an interesting proposition. Is the suggestion that shoving a crab’s little claw up its arse will arrest it for a short time, enabling you to grab it and fling it into a boiling pot? Meanwhile, after cooking the crabs/lobsters in either boiling water or baked in an oven, one should again ‘serve them with vinegar’.

When it comes to fish there is equally little mercy, it seems: ‘Take your tench and scald hym and splat hym and cast him into the pan.’ Does that suggest the tench is pan-fried alive (after the scalding and splatting) and with its guts? The recipe adds that the fish should be served with ‘blanched almonds’, which adds a rather more luxurious note.

There are then numerous recipes for roasting every bird imaginable. Partridge, quail, crane, heron, egret and goose are among many. As Dr Kate Harris, archivist at Longleat, comments: ‘People at the time had a strange interest in cooking and consuming vast quantities of wild fowl. It makes books like this read more like ornithological texts than recipe books.’

In fact not long after the publication of This Boke of Cokery the first law to conserve birds was enacted. although it was more to protect birds so they could be served at the table rather than to actually save species. But aside from the lists of birds to be netted by princes and noble folk to sate their appetites, there are some recipes more palatable and practical to our modern tastes. Not to mention less offensive.

The recipe for baked quince with sugar is as sensible and worthy as it is delicious. No species of birds were harmed in its preparation and the quince is a mighty and timeless fruit. The recipe calls for ‘clarry’ (sweet and spiced wine) to be poured over the quinces or some sugar and ‘wast pouders’. These were crushed spices – spicy powder – to add a medieval hue to your baked and sugary fruit.

British Museum: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Quince with sugar and sweet spiced wine baked in a ‘coffin’ is one of the recipes in This Boke of Cokery.

They are cooked in ‘coffins’ – pastry containers – in the absence of a good ovenproof pot. If made of sweetened edible pastry, the recipe could make a good quince pie. And since This Boke of Cokery is not exactly precise with its instructions, who’s to say you can’t improvise?