Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (32 page)

George Grenville or Granville (the family, descendants of the famous Sir Richard Grenville of the
Revenge
, appears never to have made up its collective mind how to spell the name), son of Bernard Grenville and grandson of that Sir Bevil Grenville who in 1642 was killed fighting for the royalist cause at Lansdowne, was in his youth a quite successful dramatist and poet. For a time also a successful politician and courtier, in 1711 Queen Anne created him Baron Lansdowne of Bideford. After the Queen’s death in 1714, Lansdowne and his wife were involved in the same 1715 Jacobite plot which cost the Duke of Ormond his estates. Both the Lansdownes spent eighteen months in close imprisonment in the Tower, and on regaining their liberty retired to Longleat, recently inherited by the 2nd Viscount Weymouth, Lady Lansdowne’s seven-year-old son by her first husband, Thomas Thynne.
¹¹
There the Lansdownes stayed until 1722, when financial difficulties made it expedient for his lordship to remove himself to Paris, where he stayed for ten years.
¹²
He had been a lavish spender and by all accounts was an amiable and civilised man. John Nott must have found him a good employer. We may suppose him to have been less happy at Hackwood with his Grace of Bolton. Described in
The Dictionary of National Biography
as proud, vain, dissatisfied, ‘troublesome at court, hated in the country and scandalous in his regiment’ (he was a notorious buck and gallant), this nobleman can hardly have been the ideal master of Hackwood or indeed of anywhere else. As we have seen, by 1724 John Nott had left the Duke’s employ.

Surmise though much of John Nott’s career must remain, we do at least know the kind of houses he worked in. Given the way such establishments were then run, he would have had under-cooks, turnspits, scullions, kitchen apprentices to assist him. There would have been a steward in charge of the entire household, and a butler to look after the wines and beverages, the plate and linen. (The folding and pleating of starched napkins into
elaborate and fantastical shapes was an important part of the butler’s duties.) Employers who were sufficiently desirous of keeping in the fashion and rich enough to do so also employed a professional pastrycook and confectioner, or at any rate hired one for special occasions. This may explain why Nott, in spite of including Massialot’s directions for freezing in his anthology, gives only the scantest of receipts for actually preparing the sherbet-type beverages, and sweetened creams which were turned into ices. We get cherry, redcurrant (under currant), and raspberry waters, but no creams at all.

It would be strange if among the men he worked for none could boast of an ice well in his grounds. The storage of ice or compacted snow and its use as an aid to food preservation and for the cooling of wines and beverages had after all been one of the important innovations in England in the second part of the seventeenth century. Charles II had had such wells or pits constructed in the grounds of St James’s, Whitehall and Greenwich palaces very shortly after his return to the throne.
¹³
Before long, the King’s example was widely copied. It was a milestone of great significance in the history of English domestic refrigeration, and even if John Nott had little first-hand experience of the confection of ices he must surely have been familiar with the use of ice for the cooling of wine and fresh fruit.

By the early years of the eighteenth century, the existence of ice wells was being taken for granted. In about 1702 Celia Fiennes refers to them as a matter of course. At the Epsom residence of a Mrs Rooth, formerly Lady Donegal, she records that in the grounds were ‘two mounts, cut smoothe, between is a canall, these mounts are severall steps up under which are ice houses, they are a square flatt on the top fenced with banks round and seates beyond which is a summer house in a tree’.
¹⁴
Ice wells were usually surmounted by a roof of thatch, and the ice or compacted snow was closely packed in between layers of straw. Lady Donegal’s ice houses sound like a more recent development.

A few years later, in 1709, Joseph Addison, writing in
The Tatler
under the pen name of Isaac Bickerstaff, gives a sardonic and somewhat ungracious description of a dinner given the previous summer by a friend who admires French cookery. Addison cares for none of the fancy dishes and is indignant that the noble sirloin of plain roast beef, of which he has more than one helping, is relegated to the sideboard. When at last the dessert comes on,
Addison is actually impressed. ‘It was as extraordinary as any Thing that had come before it.’ It looked, he says, ‘like a very beautiful Winter-Place’. There were several ‘Pyramids of Candy’d sweetmeats, that hung like Iceicles, with Fruits scattered up and down, and hid in an artificial kind of Frost. At the same time there were great quantities of Cream beaten up into a Snow,
¹⁵
and near them little Plates of Sugar-Plumbs, disposed like so many Heaps of Hail-Stones.’ There was also a ‘Multitude of Congelations’, i.e. frozen things, and ‘Jellies of various Colours’. Addison declines to spoil the effect of this pretty spectacle by eating anything, and is annoyed with his fellow guests who do. ‘I could not but smile’, he comments maliciously, ‘to see several of them cooling their Mouths with Lumps of Ice which they just before been burning with Salts and Peppers.’
¹⁶
Not one’s ideal guest. His ‘Lumps of Ice’, by the way, is no doubt a comment on the unsatisfactory nature of the ices of the time. As can be seen from the directions in Nott’s book, the method of freezing them was very hit and miss. It must have resulted in either a rock-hard and glassy mass or in an imperfectly frozen slush. ‘Send it quick to your table or it will melt againe’ runs the final line of a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century receipt for Ice Creame in a MS. cookery book which belonged to Grace, Countess Granville
¹⁷
who was Lord Lansdowne of Bideford’s first cousin and his exact contemporary in age. Interestingly, some of the receipts in her book are the very ones used by John Nott.

Here we must leave our cook and his book and turn to his publisher, Charles Rivington. When in 1723 he brought out Nott’s
Dictionary
, he had already been a successful publisher since 1711, when he had acquired the very flourishing fifty-year-old business of Richard Chiswell, publisher of Dryden’s poems and one of the associates who in 1685 issued the fourth folio of Shakespeare’s works.

The books published by Rivington were of an educational and serious nature. Volumes of sermons, histories, legal and medical manuals – among the latter was Dr Ratcliffe’s
Pharmacopoeia
published in 1716, and two books by Daniel Defoe,
The Complete English Tradesman in Familiar Letters
and
A Plan of the English Commerce
which both appeared in the 1720s – were the kind of works for which the Rivingtons, father and son, were known. Following John Nott’s book came
A New Treatise on Liquors
by
James Sedgwick in 1725, and in the 1730s Philip Miller’s important
Gardener’s Dictionary
.

Later, the Rivingtons achieved an extraordinary commercial success with the publication in 1741–2 of Samuel Richardson’s four-volume
Pamela
, famous as the first English novel, and throughout the eighteenth century the Rivington imprint was to be associated with some of the greatest names in the literature of the period, names such as Addison, Pope, Dr Johnson and Tobias Smollett.

Charles Rivington, it becomes clear, was not the man to publish flighty books. John Nott’s
Dictionary
must have been considered by him to be a substantial and instructive work of reference and its author a respected personage. Publishers of cookery books do not of course necessarily know anything about cookery or its literature. Charles Rivington may simply have considered a cookery manual in dictionary form a sound financial proposition, and been impressed with John Nott’s credentials, and the book did in fact achieve a respectable success. Oxford, in his
English Cookery Books to the Year 1850
(1913) notes that following the original edition there were two printings in 1724, three in 1726, four in 1733, after which demand for it appears to have ceased. Oxford, incidentally, seems to have been struck by Nott’s opening description of practical jokes played at banquets in former times. This, in fact, was derived by Nott from Robert May’s book of 1660, and was then already far from new. Something very similar had been laid on at a reception at Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome in 1593 to amuse the three sons of William, Duke of Bavaria. The young men were paying a formal visit to Pope Clement VIII and the whole affair was described in the 1593 edition of
Il Trinciante
, the famous treatise on carving by Vincenzo Cervio. I think John Nott regarded Robert May’s description as of historical interest. So it was. And so indeed today is the whole book. In republishing it, Lawrence Rivington, Charles’ direct descendant, is continuing in the family tradition – according to
The Guinness Book of Records
, the Rivingtons are the oldest publishing family in Great Britain. As his father, Septimus Rivington, wrote in 1919 in
The Publishing Family of Rivington
,
¹⁸
theirs was ‘the oldest name connected with the bookselling and publishing business… a considerable achievement for one family’. That over sixty years on it should still be in the same business is even more of an achievement.

References

1
.
Mrs Mary Eales’s Receipts
. Confectioner to her late Majesty Queen Anne. 1718. Reprinted twice in 1733, one of the reprints, according to Oxford (
see
2 below), being entitled
The Compleat Confectioner
. Other editions appeared in 1747 and 1753.

2
.
See
A. W. Oxford’s
English Cookery Books to the Year 1850
, published 1913, and in facsimile by the Holland Press, London, 1977, for authors and titles given in date order.

3
.
The Diary of John Evelyn
. Edited by E. S. de Beer. OUP, 1959.
See
index for many references to Thomas Butler, Earl of Ossory, and James Butler, Earl of Ossory, later 2nd Duke of Ormond. Also
The Dictionary of National Biography
and Cokayne’s
Complete Peerage
.

4
.
The Diary of John Evelyn
. pp. 829–31. The gardens of Swallowfield Park are now open to the public during the summer months.

5
. Gladys Scott Thompson.
Life in a Noble Household 1641–1700
. The Bedford Historical Series, London, Jonathan Cape, 1937.

6
.
The Recipe Book of Diana Astry c 1700
. Bedfordshire Historical Records Society No 37. 1957.

7
.
The Journeys of Celia Fiennes
. Ed. and with an Introduction by Christopher Morris. Cresset Press, London, 1947.

8
. ibid. For much detail of the social and domestic life of the time,
see also
Mark Girouard’s
Life in the English Country House
. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1978.

9
.
Cokayne’s Complete Peerage
. Ed. Vicary Gibbs.

10
.
Memoirs of the Kit Kat Club
, 1821.

11
. Roger Granville.
History of the Granvilles
. Exeter, 1895.

12
.
The Dictionary of National Biography
.

13
. H. M. Colvin,
History of the King’s Works
. Vol V. 1976. Edmund Waller’s
A Poem on St James’s Park As Lately Improved by His Majesty
. 1661.
The Times
19.9.56.
The Harvest of Cold Months
, article by Elizabeth David published in
Petits Propos Culinaires
No. 3, 1979, Prospect Books.

14
.
See
(7) above.

15
. This referred to the charming dish of whipped cream and egg whites which had come to us long before via Italy. There can scarcely be a printed or family receipt book of the seventeenth century which does not contain at least one recipe for snow
cream or snow cheese. Nott has a version called ‘Ice and Snow’.

16
.
The Tatler
. Paper 148, March 18th to 21st, 1709.

17
. I have written about Grace, Countess Granville and her receipt book in
Petits Propos Culinaires
No. 2. 1979. See note 13 above. Also in
The Herbal Review
, Spring 1980. Published by The Herb Society, 34 Boscobel Place, London, SW1.

18
. Published by Rivingtons, 1919.

Introduction to the 1980 facsimile edition of John Nott’s
Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary
, 1726

What to do with the Bird?

A nice thought, although perhaps an unworthy one, that when Christmas morning dawns, for four whole days there won’t be any shopping to do. Or anyway no serious food buying. That means that for once the house won’t be crammed with a lot of unnecessary food. And the surprising thing is that it is unlikely we’ll be in any great danger of starving.

I suppose the question of what to cook with the bits of leftover turkey (good as it is cold, there does come a moment when it can’t be faced again) or goose, ham and the rest will have to be pretty well planned beforehand, but this isn’t really such a burden as everybody makes out. I don’t believe, myself, in opening a whole lot of jars and bottles and tins to help out with the remains. I don’t want a whole stack more oddments becoming problems in their turn. And on the whole, dishes made from already cooked birds and meat are very much more attractive if you treat them as if they were dishes in their own right. They only become squalid little horrors when you doll them up with a lot of ingredients without point or purpose.