During the reign of Elizabeth the First it wasn’t unknown to keep the celebrations going from Allhallowtide (November 1) to Candlemas (February 2) when hope in the form of light began to penetrate. Unlike our own noisy preoccupation with Christmas Day, it was Twelfth Night, or Epiphany—the Feast of the Three Kings as they made their journey to Bethlehem to pay homage to the newborn King of Kings—that was the focus; the culmination of an open house policy that began on December 25 welcoming in friends, relatives and neighbours, servants, and strangers, until the final blowout on January 6.

“So I do really enjoy myself, and understand that if I do not do it now, I shall not hereafter,” as Pepys noted in self-exculpatory mode in his diary after Twelfth Night in 1688. He had drunk too much, eaten too much, stayed up too late, and spent more than he could afford. A century earlier, Sir William Petre of Ingatestone Hall had been having an even better Twelfth Night than Pepys. In her book, Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, the culinary writings of  an Elizabethan housewife, Hilary Spurling describes a dinner given by Sir William on January 6 in 1552 at which 100 people consumed between them “16 raised pies, 15 joints of beef, four of veal, three of pork (including a whole suckling pig), three geese, a brace each of partridge, teal, capons and coneys, a woodcock and one dozen larks with a whole sheep . . .”

Despite the astonishing quantities of food, the real focus of these evenings was the Twelfth Night Cake, a spicy fruit concoction into which was baked a bean and a pea symbolising the King and Queen of the Revels. The person who found a token in their slice gained or forfeited  a privilege. Pepys’ cake cost him 20s and was enough for 20 people including gatecrashers but paled into insignificance when compared to the annual Fettiplace cake which was a yeast cake made with “good ale”, 12 1/2 pounds of flour, four pounds of currants, and an ounce and a half of cinnamon and ginger, capable of feeding upwards of 160 guests.

In the late 17th century, the series of tokens secreted in the cake expanded to include cloves for knaves, rags for wanton girls, and so on, and by the 18th century the tokens became a series of characters printed on paper which were cut out, folded and drawn from a hat—vestiges of these customs still survive in the sixpences and threepenny pieces that were sometime put in Christmas puddings.

There are similar traditions found all over Europe: in Spain, the Roscón de Reyes is a ring-shaped cake decorated with candied fruit containing a sorpresa (surprise), a coin or tiny ceramic figure that will bring luck to the finder. It’s a close cousin of Portugal’s Bolo Rei, a cake made with port and candied fruit. The person who finds the bean hidden within must provide next year’s Bolo Rei. Swiss and German Dreikönigskuchen are rich bread wreaths, each concealing an almond which will confer kingship on the finder.  Further afield, in New Orleans, King cakes, brioche loaves iced in purple green and gold, each contain a plastic baby whose finder must give the next Twelfth Night party.

Best known, perhaps, of the Twelfth Night cakes is the French Galette des Rois. This is a round flat cake made with many variations on a theme of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, or with puff pastry filled with frangipane. A bean hidden in the pastry renders the finder into the day’s Lord of the Revels.

The Galette in its puff pastry form has become a welcome antidote to the modern British Twelfth Night which has largely dispensed with revelry in favour of  the gloomy ritual of taking down the Christmas decorations and despatching the tree. In 2021 it might be especially welcome—a delicious distraction from the woes of 2020 and the possibility, pace the appearance of a vaccine, of yet another lockdown currently forecast for January. You can buy a Galette quite easily, or frozen puff pastry makes it simple to construct your own, method  below. The recipe for Elinor Fettiplace’s cake, with modern translation, can be found in Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book by Hilary Spurling (Penguin, 1987).

Galette des Rois

400g ready-made puff pastry
100g softened butter
100g caster sugar
1 lightly beaten egg
100g ground almonds
2 tbsp cognac or dark rum
dash of almond essence (optional)

Heat the oven to 200C/fanC180/gas 6.
Divide the puff pastry in half, roll out each piece and cut each piece into a circle.
Put one round on a baking sheet, set aside the other.
Beat together the softened butter and caster sugar until light and fluffy, then beat in the egg. Stir in the ground almonds and cognac or dark rum and the almond essence if using.
Spoon the mixture over the pastry disc, spreading it evenly. Brush the edges of the pastry with water, then cover with the second piece, pressing the edges to seal. Mark the top of the pastry in a zig-zag pattern, then brush with beaten egg.
Bake for 25-30 mins until crisp and golden. Serve warm or cold.

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I was reminded of this recently when visiting friends in Oxfordshire who have just acquired a hen-house and hens to put in it. The minute I saw them I wanted some of my own. Could hens be rehomed on to a roof in central London? My friend thought they could and, surprisingly, The British Hen Welfare Trust agreed. “Our hens are very versatile,” founder Jane Howorth MBE told me. “They need a bit of space to move around, and the sun on their backs but since they’ve mostly been in a cage, they’re not  expecting grass . . .”

The British Hen Welfare Trust (find them at www.bhwt.org.uk) has been much in demand during lockdown. They usually rehome 60,000 birds a year, but in the first week of lockdown, they had triple the normal number of enquiries. By the end of April, roughly 5,000 people had booked 27,000 hens. They now have 20,000 hens waiting to be dispersed to good homes. Ironically, Jane noted, the initial reason for the sudden interest in hen-rehoming had been a lack of eggs in the supermarkets. By now, successful rehomers probably have far too many—the average hen lays around five eggs a week, depending on breed, age etc, so if you’ve rehomed three laying hens, you’ve potentially got 60 eggs to get through each month.

These lockdown rehomers are not the only ones grappling with an egg mountain. Back in Oxfordshire, the friends reported a backlog of eggs stretching from July; on average they get over 100 eggs a month. What on earth can you do with them—even giving them away comes fraught with trouble as the recipients of your bounty now discover that you have merely given them an egg mountain of their own.

Obviously you can boil them for breakfast, make cakes out of them and use the oldest ones to shine up your dog’s coat. You can fry, coddle or scramble them, turn them into quiches or custard puddings and, if artistically inclined, mix them to make tempera, but the method that uses up the most eggs in one go is . . . an omelette.

This simple dish is one that has an illustrious history. It can be traced back to ancient Persia where it took the form of chopped herbs stirred into beaten eggs and fried until firm (kuku sabzi). The first recorded omelette in the UK appeared in 1611 when it was defined in Cotgrave’s Dictionary as “haumelotte—a pancake of eggs” but more than likely, thinks Alan Davidson in his Penguin Companion to Food, the omelette had been around from early medieval times since “the concept of frying beaten eggs in butter in a pan is as simple as it is brilliant.” In this context he adds, the French omelette—light, fluffy with a runny interior is a “diversion from the mainstream”. Although, of course, it’s generally the French version one thinks of whenever the occasion for an omelette arises. That’s certainly true in fiction, where omelettes are often shorthand for romantic intentions—all of Jilly Cooper’s characters can knock them up at the drop of a hat in order to lure back a man or net a girl, and in Madam, Will You Talk?, Mary Stewart’s wonderful romantic thriller set in post-war France, the heroine stops in mid-car-chase to consume the perfect omelette at a roadside café, thus allowing the right man to catch up with her.

An exception to this rule is Beatrix Potter who describes one of the most sinister omelettes in British fiction when the wicked gentleman fox, in the guise of making this dish, almost succeeds in persuading the gullible Jemima Puddle-Duck to provide her own stuffing. “Let us have a dinner party all to ourselves!” he suggests in tones that makes shivers run down your spine. “May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm garden to make a savoury omelette? Sage and thyme, mint and two onions, and some parsley . . .”

In real life an omelette is trickier to get right than you think. For one thing, the ingredients must be at their best: fresh eggs, good butter and a decent pan. Herbs are optional, but if you don’t want to leave them out go with Paul Bocuse’s recipe for Omelette aux Fines Herbes—two eggs per person, half an ounce of butter for every two eggs, one teaspoon each of chopped fresh parsley and chopped fresh chives.

But unless you’re cooking for a large family, Bocuse is not going to use up enough eggs to make a dent in the mountain, so you might be better off following Robert May’s 1660 omelette recipe: “Omelette. Break 6, 8, 10 eggs more or less, beat them together in a dish and put salt to them; then put some butter a melting in a frying pan and fry it [the egg mixture] more or less, according to your discretion, only on one side or bottom.”

Robert May, Queen Elizabeth I’s chef, had acquired this recipe during his time in France, where he had learned all kinds of culinary tricks—pies shaped like castles stuffed with live frogs and birds, blown up by gunpowder at the table which “make the ladies skip and shreek” was one—which he enthusiastically practised on his long-suffering monarch.

As odd-sounding as May’s gunpowder suppers, but perhaps more soothing, is Crempog Las, a Welsh variation on the omelette which, for those whose hens turned out to be less prolific layers, uses fewer eggs. This version is based on Jane Grigson’s recipe in Good Things (1971).

Crempog Las

225g plain flour
Fines herbes: 3-4 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped chives (or spring onion stems)
1 tbsp chopped tarragon
1 tbsp chopped watercress
2-3 beaten eggs
enough milk to make a thick batter
salt and pepper
butter

Mix all the ingredients together to make a thick pancake consistency. Heat a little butter in a hot pan and add a good spoonful of batter and cook as for ordinary pancakes. Repeat until you’ve used up all the batter. Eat buttered and hot. They are sometimes served with sausages and bacon. “Very good,” Grigson adds.

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My children rely more heavily on Deliveroo for food than on the leftover  green sludge lurking in the vegetable rack, and think the idea of boot soup is a joke, but recently I was thrilled to discover an actual recipe for cooked shoes. It’s a mysterious entry in a medieval cookery book first published in 1545. 

A Proper New Booke of Cookerye is by an unknown author, and was one of the first cookbooks written in English and aimed at general readers,  specifically women who were running their own households, so the recipes are more detailed than those usually found in cookery books of this era.

It begins with a comprehensive list of seasonal meats, still useful today, in fact, and from which you can learn such handy rules of thumb as:

A fat pigge is ever in season. A goose is wurste in Midsommer mone and best in stubble time . . . Hennes bee good at all tymes but best from November to lent. Pecockes be ever good but when thei bee young and of a good stature  thei be as good as fesantes. A Mallarde is good after a frost till candlemas so is a Tele and other wylde foule that Swymmeth. A Hare is ever good but best from October to lent.

Apart from the list of meats, the author also includes 49 recipes, mostly for meat and pies and a couple of puddings. The recipe for boiled shoes comes near the end, and begins promisingly:

To Make Shoes

Take a rumpe of beife and let it boyle an hower or two and put therto a gret quantitie of cole wurts and let theim boyle together thre (e) howers then put to them a couple of stockdoves or teales, fesand, partrige or such other wylde foules and let them boyle altogether then ceason them with salte and serue them forth.

Similar to the recipe by Roman cook Apicius which spends pages instructing the novice chef on how to make a complicated sauce, only mentioning at the end that the sauce should be poured over the roast pig. I like the way the several types of bird needed for the Shoes recipe are only mentioned in passing, long after the time you should have been plucking and gutting. Cole wurts, translated as cabbage, kale or other leafy vegetables and herbs, are much easier to get hold of at the last minute than a couple of stock doves and a teal.

The shoes themselves only appear in the title, so perhaps  they’re nothing but a medieval spelling mistake, or possibly a sole-shaped piece of tough beef that needs a good stew, rather like the legendary black herring, so desiccated they were stored in the joists and joints of sailing ships on long-ago sea voyages, eventually becoming part of the vessel’s internal structure.

Boiled shoes don’t make many further appearances in cookbooks until the 20th century, when they take a leap into film. The 1925 silent comedy The Gold Rush contains a scene in which Charlie Chaplin boils a shoe and eats it, twirling up the laces on his fork like spaghetti. And in 1980, Werner Herzog ate his own shoe as a result of a lost bet. He cooked it with the help of Alice Waters at her restaurant Chez Panisse. She braised
Herzog’s boots in a pot of rendered duck fat with “thyme, rosemary, salt and pepper, bay leaves, the whole nine yards”. The leather never softened but Herzog ate some of one boot by chopping it up with a pair of poultry shears. He later turned the event into a short film entitled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, dedicated to people who want to make films but are afraid to start.

Since you’re unlikely to find cooked boots on Deliveroo, and modern day trainers, if you were thinking of doing a bit of DIY boiling, would only make a very thin gruel, it’s probably best to save your shoes for purposes other than soup. But, just in case you’re in the last-dregs saloon food-wise, and unable for some reason to get out to the shops, here’s a recipe for Scrapings Soup, made not with footwear but with things that grow naturally in the back of anyone’s fridge or cupboards . . .

Scrapings Soup

Feeds as many as necessary.

olive oil

bay leaf

1 large onion, peeled and chopped, or substitute a leek

a knob of butter (optional)

Any vegetables you happen to have lying around (e.g. potatoes, parsnips, carrots, sweet potatoes, celery, old tomatoes), peeled and chopped

A few frozen peas (optional)

water or stock or stock cube

a handful of fresh herbs, spinach, parsley or other greenery (old kale is good for this), chopped

single cream (optional)

Heat the oil in a deep pan or medium-sized saucepan. Add the chopped onion and the bay leaf and fry for a few minutes over a low heat. Add the butter and cover and continue to cook for 10-15 minutes, stirring from time to time,  until the onion is soft and translucent.

Add the chopped vegetables and peas if using and cook for a few minutes, stirring so that all the vegetables are covered in the oil.  Crumble in half a stock cube (if using), raise the heat, stir and add the water to cover the vegetables (or substitute stock for the water and omit the stock cube). Lower the heat and simmer for 20-30 minutes, until all the vegetables are cooked through. Add more water if necessary. Add the herbs and continue to cook. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in a spoonful of cream (if using). Blend to make a smooth soup, or serve unblended in bowls or mugs. You’ll be surprised how good it is.

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I was thinking about Dorothy Hartley and her Vicarage roast, because I had lately acquired my own version—a leg of gigantic lamb, last in the shop, a birthday treat capable of feeding at least eight hungry revellers, destined for a sad lockdown twosome. It was astonishingly expensive too, but by dint of employing the cost-per-wear theory/excuse of the fashion world (i.e. you buy a fancy thread for Priti Patel amounts of money and then carefully whittle the cost down by wearing it at every opportunity), my leg produced a further eighteen meals (including one for the dog) at roughly £1.50 per person per meal.

It turned out to be one of the most cost-effective lumps of meat I’ve bought in ages, giving rise to numerous old-fashioned suppers and also made me think of mutton in general—a meat once revered by people like Dr Johnson and Mrs Beeton but which fell out of fashion towards the end of the 20th century. Its recent small revival has been helped by Prince Charles’s strenuous campaign for a Mutton Renaissance which he launched in 2004 at the Ritz.

Food in England, a celebration of old-fashioned English food, came out in 1954, coincidentally the same year that the American francophile and partner of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, published her own bestselling cookbook. The two could hardly be more dissimilar.

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is famous for its hash brownies, but is more of an eccentric disquisition on life, love and the elaborate art of French food and cooking—a kind of autobiography recounted through recipes. It describes a very different attitude to food and eating from that which was to be found in post-war England—especially when it came to mutton.

Amongst references to octopus, fennel sauce and other “little known French dishes suitable for American Kitchens”, Toklas recounts the eccentric instructions for the preparation of a leg of mutton given during the war to her friend Madame Pierlot by “a surgeon living in the French Provinces”.

The surgeon’s directions begin: Eight days in advance “cover the leg of mutton with a marinade of old Burgundy, Beaune or Chambertin and virgin olive oil. Into this balm to which you have already added salt, pepper, bay leaf, thyme, an atom of ginger root, put a pinch of cayenne, a nutmeg cut into small pieces, a handful of crushed juniper berries and a dessertspoon of powdered sugar. Twice a day you will turn the gigot.”

But before you get on to the turning, the instructions continue, “arm yourself with a surgical syringe of a size to hold half a pint which you will fill with half a cup of cognac and half a cup of fresh orange juice. Inject the contents of the syringe into the gigot in three different spots. Each day you will refill the syringe with the marinade and inject the contents into the gigot. At the end of the week, the leg of mutton is ready to be roasted.”

Toklas assumed that the daily injections with a syringe full of cognac had been a kind of Gallic joke, but years later and much to her surprise, she found the exact recipe in Bertrand Guégan’s Le cuisinier français.

Gigot de la Clinique couldn’t be further removed from the vicarage leg whose virtue resides in simplicity. This British staple shares a much greater affinity with another French recipe for mutton originating from the Auvergne. This is a stew described by Marthe Pampille Daudet in her book Pampille’s Table (1919), an attempt to group together some of the best traditional recipes of French cooking.

When not collecting recipes, Mme Daudet had a much racier life as wife to the poet Alphonse Daudet’s son Léon. Proust makes several references to her in À la recherche du temps perdu, usually through the persona of a nostalgic Mme de Guermantes but once with a side swipe at the snobbish salonnier, M Verdurin who “died at the right moment, àpoint, as the lobsters, grilled according to Pampille’s incomparable recipe, are going to be”.

The stew in Pampille’s Table was from the Auvergne and considered by Pampille to err on the plain side. The Auvergnat is “stingy without much ambition beyond a bowl of soupe aux choux” she notes. “But for more festive occasions, he will cook up a leg of mutton with potatoes . . .” though he is “quite likely to do this without the leg of mutton”.

Life being what it is, one is more likely to encounter an Auvergnian or clerical leg of mutton than the tipsy Toklas leg which seems more like a magnificent one-off, never to be recreated. And anyway, would its leftovers feed another eighteen people? Alice B. does not let on, but Dorothy Hartley had one more trick up her sleeve for the Vicarage roast to perform.

“If you use mutton fat for cake making,” she writes, “(and it makes farmhouse gingerbread, apple cake and the homelier kinds of cake very well), beat it to a cream with the lemon juice, or a spoonful of cider, till it whips like snow.”

Thursday mutton curry

A variation on a dish first published by the London Oriental Club in their cookbook Indian Cookery by Richard Terry (1861).

Feeds 2—4.

1 large onion, finely chopped

olive oil

butter

2 tbsp curry powder

1 tbsp curry paste

leftovers from a leg of mutton, cubed

2 medium tomatoes, chopped

1 tsp salt

Heat the oil in a deep frying pan, add the onions and fry for a couple of minutes. Add a knob of butter, cover the pan and cook for 10–15 minutes until the onions are soft and translucent. Add the curry powder and paste to the pan and stir. Add the mutton, and the tomatoes, stir together and pour in enough water to cover, season with salt, and simmer on a low heat until all is cooked through and you have a thick aromatic gravy. Serve with rice.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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