The Sausage follows the Flag

Draw up a list of iconic British foods: menu items that radiate comfort and Britishness to the native and the outsider alike. The chances are that sausages will be somewhere on that list – not, perhaps, as charged with emotional meaning as the roast beef of old England, the haggis or the nice cup of tea, but somewhere well up in the top ten. When Dennis the Menace or his contemporaries tuck into a slap-up meal, it’s likely to feature a huge pile of mashed potatoes with sausages sticking perkily out of it. When C.S. Lewis brings his characters back to Narnia after dangerous adventures in the frozen north and a sinister underworld in The Silver Chair, it’s a meal of piping-hot sausages bursting with meat that really signify a return to home, safety and comfort.

British Sausage Week, running from Monday 1st to Sunday 7th November, celebrates this key component of the national cuisine. For regular readers of this blog it will come as no surprise that the Wellcome Library has relevant holdings: diet is a major contributor to health or ill-health, and what we eat, accordingly, has always been well represented in the Library.

We can begin, as so often when food is the subject, with our recipe books, and in particular with the mostly seventeenth-century ones now digitised. Searching these for “sausage” yields no hits but all this indicates is a need to take one step back: look for “force meat” and the search is more fruitful. To take an example, MS.7998 – one of a series of recipe books from the Godfrey and Faussett families of Heppington, Nackington, Kent – describes how meat is chopped fine and mixed with suet, breadcrumbs and spices to make a substance that can be rolled into meatballs and cooked that way, or – of course – put into a tubular casing (at this stage, probably the animal’s own intestines) and made into sausages. The presence of breadcrumbs, incidentally, is a demonstration to our coeliac readers of why it can be so hard to find gluten-free sausages; the ratio of bread and other padding to meat, of course, is an indicator of the quality and cost of the sausage.

Coming right up to date, the Library’s Ephemera collection continues to document the British diet, in part by scooping up supermarkets’ flyers and leaflets. From 1994 we hold a leaflet issued by Tesco to promote their Superior Sausage Selection and offering membership in the British Sausage Appreciation Society. The varieties span the globe: Tandoori Pork, French & Garlic, Mexican (featuring chilli and mixed beans as well as meat) and Venison Game, as well as the Traditional Pork Sausage and the Hot Mustard Porker. Fast forward to this year, and another Tesco leaflet gives the recipe for a sweet potato, red onion and sausage frittata (rather appetising, we must say, although one blenches at how Dennis the Menace might react to the word “frittata”). Notably, by now the recipe comes with indications of its precise dietary content, with fat, salt and so forth carefully calibrated.

It’s been said that the slap-up feeds enjoyed by characters in British comics reflect their origins in the years of war and austerity, when abundance of food was a distant memory or a dream of the remote future. The Narnia books mentioned earlier, too, have their roots in these years: the initial adventure, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, takes place when the children in it are evacuated to a country house to avoid the Blitz. When describing the sausages in The Silver Chair, Lewis states explicitly that these were proper sausages, simply full of meat and not mostly bread and sawdust, expecting his readers to recognise that war and austerity had not been good for sausages and had led to a need to make a little meat go a very, very long way by increasing dramatically the amount of padding in the mixture. It’s been pointed out by many historians that government control of supplies, coupled with the scientific input of nutritionists (see, for example, the papers of Robert Alexander McCance and Elsie May Widdowson in the Library’s archives and manuscripts collection) meant that the British public was better fed during the Second World War than before it. There was little spare for luxury or self-indulgence, however. Also in our Ephemera collections is a Ministry of Food leaflet “Suggestions for Breakfast”. The leaflet makes it plain that today’s office workers breakfasting on coffee at the station in the course of their commute would be frowned upon:

A good breakfast every day is the first rule in the book of health.
Get up early enough to enjoy breakfast. A cup of tea and a morsel of toast gulped down with one eye on the clock is no use to anyone. Breakfast is an important meal for all of us, but especially important for growing school children and young factory workers.

The leaflet sets out various ways of getting sufficient protein other nutrients, some rather surprising: the “Summer Breakfast Dish”, for example, is actually a proper Swiss Bircher-Muesli, as devised by Dr Maximilian Bircher-Benner (a world away from the dry commercially produced muesli now available in packets), not something that fits with clichéd ideas about the insular British diet of this time. Meat, however, occurs mostly in the form of bacon, eked out with a lot of potato or flour to make it go further. The sausage packed too concentrated a meaty punch to be easily permissible or possible at this time, except in the disappointing form described by C.S. Lewis: restoration to its rightful role in the full English breakfast would have to wait for the end of austerity.

With occasional interruptions like this caused by force majeure, however, the sausage has had pride of place in the full English wherever British stomachs have followed the Union Jack. In the years between the First and Second World Wars Sir Robert McCarrison served in the Indian Medical Service in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. A photograph album in his papers at the Wellcome Library illustrates his lifestyle – the bungalow in wooded hills, the gravel drive, the garden combining British floral borders with tropical foliage and palm trees. It’s a window into the last days of the Raj, a scene familiar to anyone who has read Paul Scott’s novels or seen the television adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown. Amongst his correspondence, we find a letter further demonstrating how a little bit of Britain was maintained in the subcontinent. The letterhead proudly spells out that this correspondence comes from “H. Cooter, Ham and Bacon Curer, Sausage Manufacturer, Direct Importer of Danish Bacon, Hunters’ English Hams and Half Hams, Maypole Dairy Company’s Margarine, Jams and Marmalade.” Also based in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Cooter could provide most of the components of the full English breakfast from one source. He proclaims his firm to be under the no-doubt-grateful patronage of the Governor of Madras – and, one presumes, many other colonials keen for a taste of home.

We mentioned at the start the iconic role of the sausage in British cuisine. There is, of course, another culinary tradition in which the sausage is perhaps even more important, that of Germany. German cooking includes a huge variety of types of Wurst - xenophobic stereotyping in Britain reduces the German diet to beer, sausages and sauerkraut. Another item in the Ephemera collection, from another British colony, perhaps acknowledges this primacy. Irvine and Stevenson of Dunedin, New Zealand, proudly proclaim in a late 19th-century flyer that they manufacture “Real German Sausages… prepared by an approved German Expert”. As well as being “A Perfect Food – A Real Delicacy”, these are also “Guaranteed perfectly pure of the finest materials and free from all sinews and indigestable [sic] matter.” You can’t ask for more than that. However, the nervous Briton might well cast his or her mind back to an article in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1856 in which W.H. Michael set out a “Case of fatal poisoning by German sausage.” There is, no doubt, a new Richard Hannay adventure to be written around this tragedy, featuring dastardly plots for the control of Europe, sinister Continental masterminds foiled by a sock to the jaw, and a rousing affirmation of the superiority of British pork products.

Images, from top:
1/ 19th century image of a butcher's shop, from Wellcome Images.
2/ MS.7998, page showing force meat recipe.
3/ Tesco recipe leaflet, 2010 (detail), from the Library's Ephemera collection.
4/ Ministry of Food leaflet “Suggestions for Breakfast”, from the Library's Ephemera collection.
5/ Sir Robert McCarrison (right), Lady McCarrison and a friend, in Southern India: from a photograph album in the McCarrison papers in the Library's Archives and Manuscripts collection.
6/ Irvine and Stevenson advertising leaflet, late 19th century, from the Library's Ephemera collection.

Say cheese!

One of those quotations that comes up again and again is General de Gaulle’s complaint about the impossibility of uniting France: “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” For the serious gourmet, of course, the riposte is, “How could you not want to govern a nation with that much cheese?” France’s cheeses are justly celebrated. Less well-known is Britain’s wealth of cheeses: sweet or strong, creamy or crumbly, pale or orange red, with or without the blue that comes from mould and yes, made from various milks (contrary to common belief, one does not have to cross the Channel to meet cheese made from sheep or goat’s milk). The heritage is a long one: Cheshire, Britain’s oldest cheese, dates from at least the eleventh century and is mentioned in the Doomsday Book - it was old enough and famous enough for London to have pubs named the Cheshire Cheese before Camembert was even thought of. This is British Cheese Week, a week of events to celebrate this wealth (for more information, visit the appropriately named British Cheese Board or simply Google to find recipe sites such as this one). With apologies to any lactose-intolerant readers, today’s posting exploring the Wellcome Library holdings takes as guiding principle the words of the nation’s favourite eccentric plasticine inventor: “Cheese, Gromit! That’s it! We’ll go somewhere where there’s cheese!”

First, make your cheese. As has been mentioned before, the Wellcome Library’s manuscript books of recipes often contain not merely medical advice, but information on anything that might help to run a household. One such mixed bag is the book compiled in the late seventeenth century by the Boyle family (one of the writers is apparently Katherine Boyle, afterwards Lady Ranelagh (1614-1691), who was the sister of the physicist Robert Boyle). (MS.1340, complete digitised facsimile here.) Most of the recipes are medical but we also find many culinary ones, including several for cheese. We will pass over the recipe for “slipcoat cheese” as a little complicated for beginners and instead give the one for “a winter cheese”, to give our readers something consoling to read as the British weather begins to bite:

Take the Mornings Milk Strained, and the Cream of the morning and night before strained into it, if it be too cold warm some of the Milk: Put a little quick Rennet into it the less the milder it will be, Cover it and let it come [= curdle] leisurely[;] when it is come turn it gently with a thin disk, pressing it down with warm hands, Whey it [= drain off the whey] and heave it into a Cheese vate [= vat], laying a plank on it press it by degrees, Cloth it and turn it as you See cause, about 4 hours after when it is well wrung turn it out of the vate into a clean tubb and with a long knife Slash it in thin pieces and wipe them dry with a cloth and put them in fair water in another tubb, then dry them in a cloth and put them in the former tubb, Mash it all to crumbles, and having saved 3 pints or less of the Nights Cream not put into the Cheese before pour that Cream into the Crumbled Cheese now, Mix it very well and then heave it gently into the Cheese-vate; having a wett Cloth in it, Lay the plank very warily and weight very little at first, turn it that Night in Moist Cloths and next day you may put on more weight but with care Salt it. Some like Butter in stead of Cream in the Mashing. It may be made from the beginning of May till the latter end of August. (The recipe is split between two pages, beginning on MS.1340/67 and continuing on MS.1340/68.)

Just the thing to bring out in the dark days of winter, though the recipe has its frustrating aspects. These are recipes written as an aide memoire, or a note to future generations of the family: they are not a complete step-by-step guide for a stranger to follow, and so assume a great deal that is not made explicit, dodge back to expand on things mentioned before, and generally have a more conversational tone than today’s instruction manuals. How much swearing there would be from anyone who tried to follow this recipe from scratch without reading it through first: that casual mention two-thirds of the way through of “having saved 3 pints or less of the Nights Cream not put into the Cheese before” would derail almost everyone.

Having made your cheese, some would say that this is all you need – well, that plus some crackers or wine to accompany it. The many recipes that you can make using cheese, however, also occur in our holdings. A quick search of the archive catalogue reveals several recipes for cheesecake. A modern recipe for this tends to involve one buying commercially-produced curd cheese but of course these recipes date from a time when that basic ingredient was also something that you would have to make yourself, so the process begins right back at the milk stage. This version of the recipe comes from a book compiled by the Gibson family (MS.311, complete digitised facsimile here) in the seventeenth century:

Take 5 quarts of new milk and one of creame, sett it to sam [ = curdle], then whey it [ = drain off the whey] and rub it well that there be no lumps in it, then take almost half a pound of butter melted[,] ten yolks of eggs, mix these all together with a little rose water, then sweeten it to your tast[e], and to fill them, you may put in currents or what spices you please. (MS.311/53)

As mentioned above, these recipes take a lot for granted: only by looking at the next recipe in the book, also for cheesecake, would you know that the final stage is to put this mixture in a dish lined with pastry and then to bake the cake! The seventeeth-century oven, of course, was not predictable: the heat came from a fire and individual ovens would differ radically, even from day to day. We must not, therefore, look to recipes from this period for precise instructions on oven temperature and cooking time – and readers trying these at home should be prepared for many instances of trial and error…

Turning from sweet to savoury, MS.1325 (complete digitised facsimile here), a largely anonymous compilation again from the late seventeenth century, includes a recipe for “an Amlett of Cheese”:

Take Eight Eggs & break – grate a Nutmeg in a little Salt. Beat them well. Take a pound of Parmasan Cheese & grated put to the Eggs. Then take a [penie = penny?] of Butter & put into a ffrying pan & Melt it Then take half the butter & put it to the Eggs & Stirr them well about. Then put in the Eggs into the ffrying pan and ffry it on One Side[;] w[i]th a hott frie Shovell warme your Amlett on th’other Side. Then ffould it up ffoure Square and put it on a Plate. Squeese an Orring over it and Garnish with Orring. (MS.1325/87)

Cheese, of course, is not to everyone’s taste. We would be unfair if we did not mention this, sad though the present writer finds that concept. A piece of medical ephemera in the collection sums up this dichotomy. The early nineteenth-century humorous broadside “The Physician’s Receipt” describes a how a patient with fever may be treated with soup made from leeks and toasted cheese. If the patient is Welsh, this will cure him – Welshmen, in jokes from at least the sixteenth century onwards, being depicted as loving cheese almost as much as they do leeks. If he is English, it will kill him. Well, de gustibus non est disputandem [there’s no accounting for tastes]: you don’t have to be Welsh to love cheese (although British Cheese Week does include quite a few events in Wales) and you don’t have to come from east of Offa’s Dyke to dislike it. For those of us who find it irresistable, the Wellcome Library’s holdings provide plenty of ways to think about it and while away the time until one gets home and can raid the cheese-board.

Wallace and Gromit footnote fact: according to this interview, the word “Cheese” even shaped Wallace’s face: the way that his mouth projects beyond his cheeks was suggested by the way that actor Peter Sallis said “cheeeese” when he voiced the character.

Images, from top:
1/ Cheese and crackers: from Wellcome Images (image N0028321)
2/ Presses, including a cheese press top left: from the Library's Iconographic Collections and also visible on Wellcome Images as image V0023780.
3/ Another recipe for cheesecake, this time from the eighteenth century: MS.7747 by Mrs Frances Ranson. Also visible on Wellcome Images (image L0031621).
4/ The Physician's Receipt: reproduced from Wellcome Images (image L0003617)

Frugal Food

'At a time when money worries are front-page news,' say the publishers of Delia Smith's Frugal Food, 'Britain's most trusted cook is once again on hand with a wide range of tasty recipes that are cheap and easy to prepare.' There is, however, a serious side to all this economy gastronomy. The link between the economy, unemployment, poverty and the nation's health has been, and remains, one of the most ideologically contested areas of public health policy. As many of us are forced to tighten our belts financially we are simultaneously made to feel guilty for filling up on cheap, high-sugar, high-fat convenience foods and not pre-soaking our pulses or being creative with leftovers. The heightened language of moral panic over Britain's current 'obesity epidemic' sells newspapers, books and TV programmes. Who is to blame? Individuals? The government? The food industry?

G.C.M. M'Gonigle (1888-1939) was Medical Officer of Health (MOH) for Stockton on Tees at the height of the inter-war economic depression.^[1] His personal papers are held in the Wellcome Library and have just been catalogued (Ref. PP/GMG). M'Gonigle would have had little truck with the victim-blaming attitude that characterises much current media coverage of Britain's poor diet. Although it was the official view of the Ministry of Health during the 1930s that it was ignorance of food values and cooking, not poverty, that resulted in poor nutrition, M'Gonigle argued that this was not only 'untrue' but that it also 'cast an undeserved slur upon the capacity of the working-class housewife.'^[2] For M'Gonigle, it was poverty, not ignorance, that led to malnutrition. White flour, sugar and margarine then, as now, were cheap and filling. M'Gonigle became well-known for his views, and was much in demand as a writer, commentator and broadcaster.

He has also been name-checked by historians who have debated whether the 1930s were 'healthy' or 'hungry' and whether the medical profession responded adequately to the economic crisis. Charles Webster cited M'Gonigle's relationship with the Ministry of Health as an example of the harassment meted out to individual MOHs who were at variance with the Ministry line. ^[3] For Jane Lewis, M'Gonigle was one of the very few MOHs who proved immediately receptive to the ideas of social medicine and his attitudes were 'far in advance' of the vast majority of his colleagues.^[4]

The 18 boxes of M'Gonigle's papers that are now available will, for the first time, allow researchers to examine the man and his views in more depth. They contain a series of correspondence and subject files, including several that cast light on his relationship with the Ministry of Health; published and unpublished writings and press-cuttings. In addition to M'Gonigle's views on nutrition, the papers contain useful material on a number of other inter-war public health issues, including maternity and child welfare, school health, housing and birth control. They include, for example, M'Gonigle's personal set of papers of the Inter-departmental Committee on Abortion (the Birkett Committee).

Those bored with Delia's 'poor man's cassoulet' (which she recommends making with a well-known brand of rather pricey organic sausages, by the way) may also find inspiration in Family Meals and Catering, a controvesial leaflet of recipes produced in 1935 by the BMA's Nutrition Committee, of which M'Gonigle was an active member. ‘Minced meat roly’ followed by ‘rusks and jam’, anyone? <sup>[5]

[1]</sup> For more biographical information see Susan McLaurin, ‘M'Gonigle, George Cuthbert Mura (1889–1939),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [available by subscription at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/60875].
^[2] G.C.M. M’Gonigle, Nutrition: the position in England to-day (London: Industrial Christian Fellowship, 1936), p.10. (Wellcome Library: PP/GMG/E/14).
^[3] Charles Webster, 'Healthy or hungry thirties?', History Workshop Journal (1982, vol. 13, no. 1) p.112.
^[4] Jane Lewis, What Price Community Medicine?: the philosophy, practice, and politics of public health since 1919 (Brighton : Wheatsheaf, 1986), p.33.
^[5] File on the 'BMA Nutrition Committee' (Wellcome Library: PP/GMG/B/17); see also related records of the BMA (Wellcome Library: SA/BMA/G.44-53; SA/BMA/G.54-55).

Author: Jennifer Haynes

A Friday night curry

We are what we eat. This is most obviously true in the physical sense, but also culturally: our diet expresses our society and encodes a wide variety of cultural influences. Not only does our food say who we are now as a society; it also tells us of where we have been, of the history of our society and its encounters with other cultures, other gastronomic spheres, over time.

This is National Curry Week in the United Kingdom, and it would be hard to find a better example of food as a route into social history. The dominance of curry in the British diet – the Roast Beef of Old England is now eclipsed by Chicken Korma as a favourite dish – is of course the result of Britain’s encounters, by trade and then imperialism, with the Indian Subcontinent. As curry was assimilated into the British diet, it was transformed and becomes a cultural hybrid, located somewhere between the two culinary cultures. The delicate flavours that come from using fresh spices are eclipsed when the nearest fresh cumin is several thousand miles away and the cook is working with dried powders or paste: instead, we end up with a thicker, hotter sauce which becomes, at its most extreme, the brick-red paintstripper favoured as a rite of passage by the weekend beer monster.

It can be a surprise to see how early curry recipes begin to appear in domestic recipe books: long before Britain had a formal empire in India and long, long before mass immigration from the Subcontinent. One of the most influential early cookery books, Hannah Glasse’s The art of cookery, made plain and easy (1748), contains recipes for curries and pilaus:

"To make a Currey the India Way"
TAKE two Fowls or Rabbits, cut them into small Pieces, and three or four small Onions, peeled and cut very small, thirty Pepper Corns, and a large Spoonfull of Rice, brown some Coriander Seeds over the Fire in a clean Shovel, and beat them to Powder, take a Tea Spoonful of Salt, and mix all well together with the Meat, put all together in a Sauce-pan or Stew-pan, with a Pint of Water, let it stew softly till the Meat is enough, then put in a Piece of Fresh Butter, about as big as a large Walnut, shake it well together, and when it is smooth and of a fine Thickness dish it up, and send it to Table. If the Sauce be too thick, add a little more Water before it is done, and more Salt if it wants it. You are to observe the Sauce must be pretty thick.

This is no isolated exotic recipe: below it are two recipes for Pellow (pilau). Each ends with a note of hard-won, presumably bitter experience: the first one reads

"You must be sure to take great Care the Rice don't burn to the Pot."


By the nineteenth century, the British love affair with curry is well established. Recipe books in the collection such as MS.7111 contain instructions on how to mix spices to make curry powder. The powder might be applied to a wider variety of meats than we now expect, as we learn from the Johnson family recipe book (MS.3082) compiled during the 18th and early 19th century: on page 148 of this, we read

"A curry may be made of Meat, a Rabbit, Fowl or Lobster, cut in limbs or cucumbers. First [fry?] them a light brown, then put it in the Gravy to stew with the Juice of a Large Lemon, a little Salt and one Onion chopt small when almost finished stir in it nearly a large Spoonful of curry powder … Either dish your Rice up by itself or put it on a Dish & put your Curry in the middle – You may Thicken the Gravy with a few Blanchd Almonds."

It is doubtful whether this would be recognised as curry by anyone east of Suez, but such recipes added variety to the native diet and hinted at the great networks of trade and empire that fanned out from Britain at this time. Within this country, recipes would be exchanged and disseminated. One of the Library's quietly evocative items is a collection of loose recipes collected by a Mrs Turnbull in the mid-19th century (MS.5853): internal evidence suggests that in the 1820s she had been in India, but was now resident back in Surrey. The recipes, for things such as Dhall Bhât (MS.5853/86) or "Colonel R's curry" (MS.5853/91), speak of old India hands swapping recipes and of memories of the Subcontinent kept alive by cookery. It can surely only have been nostalgia that led her to preserve the recipe for a lethal compound to be spread on furniture as a preservative against termites, which has as one of its ingredients "1 quart of the worst Bazar Mustard" (MS.5853/85); unless Surrey has changed beyond all measure in the last 150 years.

The top illustration shows the frontespiece to Hannah Glasse's The art of cookery, made plain and easy, in an edition dating from c.1770. The lower illustration shows a curry powder recipe from MS.7111.

Item of the Month - September 2009

Laudanum, Sago and Glue for the Father of his Country

Two hundred and fifty years ago, on September 20th 1759, a young member of the landed gentry in Virginia sent an order for supplies to London.

The document, now held in the Wellcome Library as WMS/Amer.91, is an interesting indication of the degree to which the colony, although now well over a century old, still relied heavily on imports from the (then) mother country. Medical supplies rub up against hardware, veterinary supplies and cookery ingredients. Adding particular interest to the shopping list is the identity of its author: the young gentleman farmer is George Washington, and twenty years later he will be embarking on his first term as President of the newly-independent United States.

Of this, of course, Washington could have no inkling at the time: he could have been forgiven for believing that the dramatic chapters of his life were over and he was now settling down. Born into the Virginia gentry in 1732, in the early 1750s he was beginning a career as a planter in an economy driven by large slave-worked tobacco plantations. He was also an officer in the Virginia militia. During the 1750s, tensions between the French and British settlements in North America, over who would control the Ohio valley beyond the Appalachians, erupted into war, and the young Lieutenant-Colonel Washington had distinguished himself: in 1755 General Braddock’s Monongahela offensive ended in disaster and Braddock’s death, but his aide Washington rallied the remaining forces to minimise damage and effect an orderly retreat. In 1758 British forces returned to the Ohio valley, with Washington - now a General – taking part in the expedition that expelled the French forces and turned their Fort Duquesne into the new British base of Pittsburgh.

After these wars in the Ohio valley Washington, now 26, resigned his commission and settled down. In January 1759 he married Martha Custis, a wealthy widow, whose dowry, combined with lands he had been granted beyond the Appalachians, made him a wealthy man: the newly-married couple settled at Mount Vernon, overlooking the Potomac downstream of the recently-founded town of Alexandria (and downstream of the site of the capital city that was to bear his name, years later). The order for supplies held at the Wellcome Library dates from the early months of their life at Mount Vernon and demonstrates the pattern of trade from the Virginia plantations: luxuries and infrastructural supplies imported from Britain, paid for from the proceeds of a cash crop (tobacco at this stage, although in the mid 1760s Washington moved over to cultivating wheat).


The order Washington sent out nine months after his marriage is a long and detailed one, and the sheet held at the Wellcome Library may not even be the whole of it. There is a long list of tools at the start, for surveying, joinery and so forth. Items plucked from the list include "2 long plains [planes]", "1 handsaw, 1 Pannel ditto, 1 Tenant ditto…", "6 dozen steel compasses", "1 dozen augers sorted from 2 Inches to ½ ditto", "25 lb Glew [glue]" and "12 inch chizzels". It is an indication of the equipment needed on the plantation and of the way that the colony was not yet able to match the workshops of Sheffield and Birmingham in supplying it.

Below this Washington moves to medical and culinary ingredients. Interestingly, these are mingled together in a style similar to that of the 17th and 18th-century recipe books held in the Library, without clear distinction between food and medicine. Some ingredients, of course, clearly belong in one category or the other: "6 Bottles Turlington's Balsam", "5 oz. liquid laudanum" and "5 oz. spirits sal ammoniac" are obviously medical, whilst four pounds each of pearl barley and sago and five pounds of white sugar candy leads us to the kitchen. But there are other items that could be for either purpose – "4 oz. best rhubarb" is almost certainly there as a medicine rather than a foodstuff, and one might surmise the same about "12 oz. Venus treacle", but there is no clear distinction.

At the end of the order comes a distinct section of veterinary supplies, in which Washington allows his supplier to use their discretion: "40/- worth of Medicine proper for Horses – among which let there be - 4 lb. flower of Brimstone; 4 lb. Anniseeds… & such others as are most proper." It is to be hoped, however, that the list of medical/culinary supplies prior to this also includes things ordered for veterinary purposes: in it we find "4 oz. Spanish flies", which are chiefly used when encouraging farm animals to mate (when crushed the beetles irritate the lining of the urethra) but also have a long and often disreputable history as a purported aphrodisiac for humans.

One sheet of paper, signed one afternoon 250 years ago by a soldier who thought his fighting days were over: but it opens vividly the world of the Virginia plantations and the colonial society whose last days were ticking away.

Cooking in the City

The Wellcome Library has recently acquired the "Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c." (MS.8687) started by Sarah Tully, who married Richard Hoare of the London banking family in 1732, and continued by other hands, presumably following her early death in 1736. The early pages of this volume are written out in a very fair hand and it seems quite likely that this was done either by Sarah Tully herself or a relative as a preparation for her wifely duties in running her husband’s household. Richard Hoare later became Lord Mayor of London and was knighted in 1745.

The volume contains the usual mixture of medical, household, veterinary and culinary recipes, and includes, pasted inside the front cover advertising broadside, printed in English in Venice, for the famous theriaca fina or Venice treacle, a honey- or molasses-based composition thought efficacious against poisoning, sold at the "Aquila Nera" [At the Sign of the Blak Eagle] in the Merceria San Salvatore.

The culinary recipes indicate a cosmopolitan and sophisticated household. Some connection with India, or at least the East India Company, is suggested by recipes for "A Loyn of Mutton Kebob’d" "pilau after the East Indian Manner", "currie powder" and “Indian pickle”. There is some evidence for European travel or contacts, with instructions on how "To make mackrony' [macaroni] - including "Parmason cheese", specified, and to prepare "Fromage Fondu". There are also details of how "To make Chocolate as prepared for the King". Whether these somewhat exotic items were actually prepared within the Hoare household may possibly be revealed by consulting the archives of C. Hoare and Co., private bankers, which include ten boxes of bills and receipts relating to Richard Hoare’s household expenditure, 1727-1754.

The medical recipes include "An Excellent rect. [receipt] for ye heartburn brot from Italy by the Duke of Shrewsbury", "Dr Radcliffe's Specifick for the Cholick"; "A Tincture for the Gout or Cholick in the Stomach" also ascribed to Dr Radcliffe, and "Mrs Masham's universal Purge" - which may or may not reflect the after-effects of the rich and exotic dishes described.

Heston Blumenthal - do try this at home

Britain's most scientific chef Heston Blumenthal is back on tv this week, with his new Channel 4 series inspired by historic recipes. This week he recreated an amazing array of dishes, including mock turtle soup, Alice's 'Drink Me' potion from her Adventures in Wonderland and an eye-popping absinthe jelly recipe.

Heston used some very intersting source material for his creations. As well as Lewis Carroll, he has found inspiration from a number of Victorian recipe books. The Wellcome Library holds a number of historic cookbooks, including the one he uses for his crispy edible insects, Vincent M. Holt's Why Not Eat Insects? If you are inspired to find out what the Victorians did for us, then feel free to visit the Library and check the recipes out for yourself.

Next week's episode will cover Medieval cookery, with a pie containing four and twenty blackbirds - well, pigeons actually - a fruit dish made from bull's testicles, and some nicely fried nerves. Later weeks will cover Tudor England and Ancient Rome. Fabulous.

17th century recipe books online - call for testing

Please take a moment to test out our exciting new digitisation project. The Library’s first venture into full-text digitisation is underway with the photography of 17th century manuscripts from our collection of recipe ("receipt") books. These manuscripts contain household medicinal and culinary recipes, often written by women. The project will not only produce cover to cover digital surrogates, but create a rich index to the level of individual recipes.

Four examples of entire manuscripts have been made available for viewing online and we would welcome your feedback. You can use the comments section of this blog, or email us direct at SystemsStrategy@wellcome.ac.uk.

MS 1
MS 108
MS 144
MS 1791