Historic Food - Ivan Day

Dalemain Marmalade Festival

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The hunt is on for Britain's best marmalade! But will the winning marmalade incite those who eat it to acts of venery, aid conception or be a stunning work of decorative art? Marmalade ain't what it used to be!

White-what?

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

We are all familiar with bread and butter pudding, but did you know that this old favourite had an ancient ancestor called the whitepot that actually tastes better?

Cooking for the long departed

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:00:00 GMT

The other day it dawned on me that I have cooked a lot of meals for celebrities in their homes, often using their fabulous dinner services. Not the kind of celebrities who grace the pages of Hello or OK magazine like Posh and Becks, but the dead sort - the kind of celebrities who have been resting in peace for a century or two, or in some cases even three or four. Puzzled? Well let me explain. I have just set up a table with a Royal repast typical of the 1890s in Queen Victoria's dining room at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Visitors to this marvellous house can now see the kind of stunning table arrangement typical of Royal entertainments of this period. What they might not appreciate when they look at my table, is that the body of the old queen was laid out in state in the same dining room for ten days after she died! http://www.historicfood.com/events.htm

I have also re-created period meals in dining rooms which formerly belonged to Bess of Hardwick, Francis Drake, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Jane Austen and many other English notables. I have also laid out food on spectacular dinner services which once belonged to George IV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Its a bit frustrating that the original hosts are not present at my re-created meals, but perhaps they are in spirit. Not that I really want to see them turn up at any of my museum exhibitions! Did you know that when some English kings could n't attend an important meal, they used to send a portrait of themselves to sit at the dinner table in their absence!

Next year I am going to have the privilige of laying out a 1745 Meissen table service that belonged to Elizabeth, Czarina of all the Russias. The exhibition will be at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhatten. I have had the good fortune to recreate a number of Royal and Ducal meals, but this will be my first gig for an Imperial hostess, albeit a dead one!

Being a food historian gets me some pretty outlandish jobs. I have just been approached by a film company who are making a movie about Sweeney Todd, the demon barber. They want me to train the leading actress to make large Victorian raised pies. If you know the story, you will also know what the fillings were! I should be able to dine out (not literally) on that one for years!

A Food Historian's Diary

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:00:00 GMT

A lot of people often ask me what kind of a job is a food historian? What do you actually do and how do you earn your living from it? Well I reckon I have one of the best jobs of anybody in the country, because I get paid for what I really love doing the most. The work also has tremendous variety. I am very busy and usually have more than one major job on at any one time. For instance, this summer my most important project was acting as historical advisor to a museum near Brussels, where we set up a major exhibition on the history of the dessert course. I made many items of the ornamental confectionery myself from moulds over 200 years old and lent many items from my own collection for the displays. You can see what I did by clicking here.

As well as this, I was involved in a number of TV and Radio programmes, including Radio 4’s Christmas edition of the Food Programme on the subject of Geese, which was recorded here in my home in Cumbria. I also contributed to four episodes of BBC1’s ‘Have You Ever Wondered about Food’ and spent a crazy day making elaborate Victorian jellies in the gardens of Buckingham Palace for Channel 4’s ‘Time Team’.

At the moment, I am preparing for this year’s Christmas gig, which is to set up Queen Victoria’s dining room at Osborne House to show how she dined at Christmas in her twilight years. Last year I created a very similar display at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. My work gets me into some wonderful period houses and I get to use the most spectacular original period tableware. Next year my major project is working in New York on an exhibition on dining in 18th century Imperial Russia.

As well as all these activities, I run about a dozen or more weekend residential courses at my home in Cumbria on a variety of food skills, though of course they are all historical in nature. Many of my students are from overseas, particularly from the USA, Canada, Japan and Ireland. This past year, Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck in Bray, voted in 2005 as the World’s Best Restaurant, has been sending some of his chefs to me for training courses. A few week’s ago, he came for a couple of days himself and he has now appointed me as a consultant to his two restaurants. I will be busy working with him over the next year on the development of new dishes based on old recipes. Earlier this year, the food writer Natacha du Pont de Bie attended one of my courses on Ham Making and kindly described my courses in Food and Travel magazine ‘as the most unique cookery school in Europe’.

I am proud to operate from Shap, a village that is no stranger to good food and hospitality. Nick Bellas the local butcher makes some of the best Cumberland sausage in the region and you can get the most spectacular bacon sandwich in the Universe at the Walker’s Café a few doors down. Chefs Derek and Keith have also established a great reputation for their food at the Greyhound Hotel, which is a favourite haunt of mine. If you are interested in booking on one of my courses have a look by clicking here.

Never mind the pandemayn, let them eat horse bread!

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 05:00:00 GMT

An Englishman’s status in society was once expressed by the kind of bread he consumed. While his serfs ate coarse loaves made with whole grains, the bread of choice for a medieval nobleman was a fine white roll called pandemayn. This premium luxury loaf was made with flour from which the bran and wheat germ had been sifted. So the average medieval baron was actually eating far less nutritious bread than the peasant who ploughed his fields. In fact the lord’s white pandemayn, (known also as manchet and gentleman’s rolls), was not even as wholesome as the bread that was consumed by his horse. Yes, a special type of bread really was baked especially for horses! It was made chiefly from chisel, the name given to the bran sifted from the whole meal to make flour for pandemayn.

One sixteenth century writer says of wholemeal bread (also known as cheat or cockle bread), ‘it is fit and meet for hindes and other worke folkes, as delvers, porters and such other persons as are in continuall travel, because they they have need of such like food, as consisteth of a grosse, thicke, and clammie juice’. Of the upper class white loaf he says, ‘it is good for idle and unlaboured persons, such as are students, monks, canons and other fine and daintie persons, which stand in neede to be fed with food of light and easie digestion’.

Upwardly mobile folk have always tended to imitate their social superiors, so many who had made new money, abandoned their honest yeoman’s cockle loaf and went for the high status manchet. Thus was born the English workman’s love affair with the white loaf. By the eighteenth century, everybody wanted white bread, despite the warnings of some medical men, who realised that wholemeal bread was better for our health. A doctor called William Buchan, writing in the 1780s, said ‘The artificially whitened, drying, stuffing bread, though made of the heart of the wheat, is in reality the worst of any; yet this is the bread which most people prefer, and the poorer sort will eat no other’. So the white loaf, once a luxury for the rich, became the preferred choice for all. Buchan thought the poor should eat maslin, a type of bread baked from a blend of whole rye and wheat flours, which he correctly assumed was better for us.

Compared to an eighteenth century white loaf, which at least was made from stone-ground organic flour, a modern factory-made white sliced loaf is very poor stuff indeed, crammed full of flour improvers and other unnecessary additives. Modern strains of wheat also do not have the character of some of the old varieties, such as rivet wheat, once commonly grown throughout the land, but now sadly almost extinct.

What Britain needs are far more artisan bakers with the kind of vision expressed by Andrew Whitley in Bread Matters, an important new book that should be on every kitchen bookshelf in the country. And if you cannot find a decent baker near you, take Andrew’s advice and bake your own.

Olde Smokey

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Meat slowly smoked in the hooded chimneys of Lakeland farmhouses was an important element of the local diet for centuries.

Oyster Sausages make a comeback in Cumbria

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Ivan Day revives an ancient British recipe with Andrew Sharp's Herdwick mutton and the finest Colchester oysters.

Why cook from historical recipes?

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 05:00:00 GMT

People often ask me, "why on earth are you interested in cooking food that is so passè? Surely many of the ancient dishes that have not survived into modern times have been lost because they were pretty awful and don't deserve to be eaten today?" Of course many old recipes are not to twenty-first century taste and your dinner party would hardly go with a zing if you offered your guests porpoise with furmety, a roasted bittern or a broiled udder. The animal rights people would quite rightly throw a brick through your window. Nevertheless, there are literally tens of thousands of British recipes that have been entirely forgotten and are well worth reviving. Many are absolutely incredible.

More than any other European nation, we have lost touch with our true culinary heritage, and tend to look to other cultures for ideas. We seriously need to reverse this process. For many complex historical reasons, food that was once highly prized in this country has become unfashionable and in some cases unobtainable. Take mutton for instance. We are surrounded in Cumbria by millions of sheep. But how many butchers do you know who sell mutton in this region? I am not talking about lamb - I mean mutton - you know - "ould yaw". The truth is that mutton was once the most commonly eaten meat in Britain - more popular even than the so-called "roast beef of old England". And there were good reasons for this. When well finished, properly hung and cooked properly, mutton is a delicious, tender meat with a much better flavour than much of the mass-produced lamb we eat nowadays. In fact there is an entire lost gastronomy that belongs to this wonderful meat. Did you know for instance that Yorkshire Pudding was eaten with mutton, long before it became a popular foil to roast beef.

In a recent survey I made of English recipes published between 1550 and 1914, I identified 324 recipes for cooking mutton that are all completely different. And my survey was not entirely comprehensive. What has happened for instance to mutton roasted with oysters, smoked mutton gammon, soused breast of mutton, braised rumps of mutton and carbonaded mutton with cream? How many of you know what China Chilo is - or Stump Pie - or Oxford John? When did you last feast on Mutton Sausages? (Click here to see a mutton recipe)

A few inspired individuals like Andrew Sharp of Lindal in Furness, are trying to encourage us to eat more of this excellent meat. Surely the great eating public of Cumbria, where we raise some of the best sheep in Europe should be leading this Mutton Renaissance. Help the cause by asking your local butcher for mutton and ask in your favourite local restauraunts why it is not on the menu! (Click here to visit Farmer Sharps site)