Wednesday 21 September 2016

Ratafia


I have just bought an Elizabethan cook book written by Lady Elenor Fettiplace, and the first thing it made me wonder was where all those interesting names went to. I suppose they died out with the last male heirs.

As expected, it features Quince products quite heavilly. Quince were the Elizabethan fruit before the fashion for Spanish oranges took their place in Marmalade. If I were more gullible, I could convince myself that the aroma of Quince takes me back to a previous life in the 1600s.

The first question it has answered for me is 'what is Ratafia?' I know that they made special glasses (see above) in the 18th century to drink Ratafia from, but I never quite knew what it was until Lady Elenor showed me a recipe (or receipt, as she calls them). It is, quite simply, apricot brandy. End of mystery, but I suppose I could have looked up the biscuits of the same name.

It is indeed a small world. The Fettiplaces were good friends of the Danvers family of Dauntsy, where H.I. and I had a big hand in the restitution of the Doom Board, in the family church.

The reason I say that I would have like to have been born in the second half of the 17th century is that the first was a little troubled by the plague, poor medicine to fight it, family fueds which involved the royal court - and regicide.

One of the Danvers was executed for his part in the plot of the Earl of Essex, and his estates were foreited to the Crown.

His brother married into the Fettiplace family through a relative who was murdered at Dauntsey, and the Fettiplace family got him his estates back. He sold some of the estate including the whole of Cirencester - for £2600. That wouldn't buy you a kennel these days, but there again, a rural priest could live on £30 a year.

All this has been gleaned from a quick scan of the book (compiled and annotated by Hilary Spurling), and I am looking forward to trying out a few receipts from it. I hope I do not have to make the cure for the plague which is in it, though.

23 comments:

  1. I have to google some words and to read it again so i can follow your thoughts here, but i just want to say that H.I. is not only a very beautiful woman but also avery good painter, (or artist? you know what i mean..)

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  2. Modern Ratafia is quite regional. Our local one is made with Walnut leaves in Eau de Vie, and I imagine some sugar.

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    1. Oh, I didn't know it was still brewed using the same name.

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  3. Tom, your post has reminded me that my grandmother used the word receipt. I hadn't thought of that a a while, and thank you for summoning up that memory.

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    1. I think it was quite common up until the 1940s.

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  4. What a beautiful piece of glassware and I am green with envy over the old cookbook. Did you know that Nostradamus was culinarily inclined?

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    1. Know I didn't, Donna. I thought he specialised in the end of the world, like Jehovah's Witnesses.

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    2. You'll have to type his name into the left top place on my blog.

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  5. And did she mention (which I omitted in my recent comment to Cro) that the quince was called "Aphrodite's apple"? Ain't that evocative?

    As to her use of "receipt" - that's very close to the Germanic "Rezept". Whilst "receipt" in German is "Quittung" and has nothing to do with "quitting". It's a minDfield out there.

    Forgive me for being curious and somewhat indiscreet: How much did you pay for the book? And, more importantly, where did you find it?

    U

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    1. £3 in a charity shop. It was printed in the 1980s.

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  6. Please send a few of those quince receipts to Cro who is desperate to find some way of using up his crop of quinces and is pleading for help/

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    1. I have offered, and he has not asked for them. I think he needs the compost.

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  7. I had to google the thing as I was very curious about the 'receipts' of 16hundredandsomething. Wikipedia (and we know that they know what they are talking about) says that there is a recipe for a celebration cake for 100 people in the book. Hop to it, Stephenson, we are all hungry!! Let us eat cake!

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    1. Reading it at 3.00 am this morning, I discovered that those vast feasts of 20 courses were more for decoration than actually eating. Simliarly, 'four and twenty blackbirds' in the pie was in fact a little trick which involved making a pie-crust by keeping the lid up with bran when baking, then stuffing it with live blackbirds which flew about the room in panic when the pie was opened. They would also put live frogs under lids to scare the women, which is another reason that I would be born into the second half of the 17th centruy when this fashion died out.

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  8. Interesting aside about the names. I wonder if uncommon names took a swift nosedive when our Saxe-Coburg-Gotha's switched to Windsor and the others followed suit. My father had a friend whose first name was Tudor. There was nothing terrible about him - albeit he may have been from Anglesey ;=)

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    1. I see from the book's family tree of lineage that the last male Fettiplace turned into the Reverend Francis Merewether in 1796, which doesn't explain a lot.

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  9. I LOVE that glass(and this post) A friend of mine who collects antiques, curios etc and has never to my knowledge sold anything, just fills his huge house with stuff, gives me old books of receipts occasionally. We always say we will host a dinner party one day with some chosen receipts. Your story telling is similar to his too.. grand!

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    1. I have one recipt book called, '700 Years of English Cooking'. I saw it as a decoration on the shelf of a pub, but when I went to take it down, I found that it had been glued to it for safety reasons. I had to buy it so I found a copy elsewhere and did. It turned out to be a little disappointing. itwould have been better from the French perspective.

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