Kill it with fire: The Worshipful Company of Cooks, Part One

The smallest of all the Livery Companies had to be the Worshipful Company of Cooks of London. Yet they did exist, so while the clay bread oven I just built is curing (more on that later) we get an excuse to play with food and fire in their name and I get to try my hand at some period recipes.

I've really been looking forward to this one.

If nothing else, this project gives me a chance to post an image from Bartolomeo Scappi instead of my muse/nemesis Jost Amman for a change. Scappi (died 1570) was the personal chef of six popes. His renown, however, is mostly for his magnum opus: Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi, Maestro dell'arte del cucinare, divisa in sei libri (roughly: "The Work of Bartolomeo Scappi, Master of the art of cooking, in six volumes"). Scappi's Opera (as it's known) is at once a gossipy memoir of life as the Vatican chef and a manual of instruction for the state of the culinary art, circa 1550-1570. It contains over a thousand recipes/preparations, and is probably the most thorough accounting of the renaissance kitchen that we have available to us.

It also includes a large number of drawings depicting kitchens both inside and outside and all the implements that one could hope to reproduce. Best of all, you can download it free from the Internet Archive. http://archive.org/details/operavenetiascap00scap



Scappi, unfortunately, was decidedly not English. So we'll be using his 'Opera' as one of many resources as we work from period or near-period English recipes wherever possible. Additionally, we'll be using some of the resources produced by the fine folks who put on the cooking demonstrations for the Historic Royal Palaces. Between Scappi and the fine folks at HRP, I think we're in good hands.

But before I get to all that, I have to learn to cook with fire.

Looking at that engraving up there, it seems simple enough:

1. Light fire. 
2. food over roaring fire. 
3. Eat and repeat.

But nothing is ever as simple as it seems at first blush. If this project teaches me nothing else, it will teach me that.

Can you hear me humming "Smoke gets in your eyes"? 

Yeah...

A word about cookware and safety...

The Elizabethans didn't know a thing about bacteria or food poisoning. Their grasp on metallurgy was

pretty good, though, and getting better all the time. Yet they used some metals and alloys with furious abandon that we now understand to be catastrophic to your health. They practically poured lead on their breakfast cereal.

Lead isn't really a relevant worry here since its use is so constrained in modern manufacturing. The place most Elizabethans encountered it was in the glazes of their ceramics and as a potter I can control for that pretty easily. My main deviation from the period is eschewing bronze entirely. Those cauldrons you see in all the paintings? Most of them were cast in the same manner as church bells and from mostly the same materials.

The biggest problem with bronze (aside from weight and expense) is that it's an alloy mostly consisting of copper. In the period it might be blended with lead or zinc, neither of which are good eats, but even modern bronze has its problems and perils. 

I use copper all the time because I have some copper cookware in my kitchen and it tends to be lined with tin if it's intended for household use. But all my cauldrons are cast iron, which is most assuredly not a period metal. Why the deviation? Because cast iron is easier to clean and care for, less expensive, and even if I screw up completely, it won't poison anyone.

Is that really a danger? Sort of... certainly more of a problem than I'm willing to bear on my conscience. When copper comes in contact with acids it can create a chemical reaction that forms what's known as verdigris.  That's the green patina that forms on copper as it weathers. And it's poisonous.

Scrupulous cleaning can keep you safe and the folks at Hampton Court Palace use bronze cookware that was made for them (I believe) by the folks at Historic Castings.

Thermal mass is the key here. As far as I can tell, the choice of metals for my cookware doesn't change the results and the transfer of heat from fire to food doesn't change all that much.

Speaking of cleanliness, I have pots to clean...

More later.

- Scott

My kingdom for a horse: An Incomplete History of the Shaving Horse

I have a pile of oak staves waiting to be turned into something useful, a razor-sharp draw knife in my hand and a far away look in my eye. Like almost all of my best hand tools, the knife was left to me by my grandpa, who taught me an enormous amount about how to make wood do what I want it to.

I was always a little afraid of the draw knife.  In no small part, this was because the way my dad and grandpa used it seemed weird and unsafe. In fact, I said so once and got in trouble for my cheek.  Grandpa and dad tended to brace the piece of wood they were shaving between their stomachs and a table and scrape away.

They never cut themselves. Never even came close as far as I know. This might've been because they wore heavy jackets, but it was probably a combination of the way you hold a drawknife and the breadth of the blade, they might not even have been in any danger of doing so, but it still seems to me to be an unnecessary risk.

When I inherited grandpa's drawknife, it was put away until I built a proper shaving horse.  Because though dad and grandpa lived charmed lives (at least where draw knives are concerned) I do not. I'm clumsy and need to stack the odds in my favor.

What? You thought this would be a history of the shaving horse rather than a history of why I think I need one?

Fine, be that way.

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The picture above is the stereotypical shaving horse from a 19th century book of trades.

The shaving horse is a key element of the cooper's art and mystery. It is, in effect, a foot-powered vice designed to hold wooden slats as they are shaped. The user straddles what amounts to a modified sawhorse with their feet on the pegs at the bottom of a timber that is hinged where it passes through the top of the horse. 

Note: Sadly, the hovering shaving horse didn't pan out, so I put legs on mine.

By pushing away with your feet you apply pressure to the top of a slanted portion of the horse, pinching your workpiece in place.

Here's a picture and you should go back and watch the video of the cooper at Colonial Williamsburg that I posted last week to see it in action. 

So much safer than holding the stave against your tummy.  Don't worry, mom, I'll be wearing a leather apron anyway. 

Just in case.

Is it period-appropriate for a 16th century cooper?

I was a bit surprised to discover that this is a controversial question in certain circles.

A rudimentary shaving horse is depicted in use in the 1556 book De Re Metallica. For the record, it's shown being utilized by a miner to make bertte, a wood billet with shavings left attached to be used as fire-starters. In the case of the miners in the etching, to light fires in a mine to fracture rock.

Bertie makes the best bertte in all of Bavaria!

The bertte maker is the image of a shaving horse most bandied about in these discussions online. And I thought it might be the only one in existance until I paged through the Mendel Hausbuch and noticed that half the coopers in the book are using a shaving horse of some sort.

                                                                                                                         Photo Source: Stadtbibliothek Nuernberg 

So there's a cooper at work, his tools in the background, including a shaving horse. Case closed as far as I'm concerned. More pictures of the same foot vice here and here. Since the monk in the second image is using his as a sort of ersatz workbench, you can see the whole thing in profile, including the arrangement of the foot pedal and vice dog.

This is mine...

It's worth nothing that none of the shaving horses I've found have the angled surface that mine (and every other shaving horse I've ever seen) has. That slanted piece makes shaving with knife or spokeshave easier, but would preclude using the horse as a work surface as that second monk was doing.

It might be a later addition to the design; I'm not sure and don't have any data one way or the other on that topic. Mine has the slanted second level and I'm not planning to remove it so we'll make a note of it and move on.

~Scott

----

I was flipping through NetFlix videos and found an episode of Dirty Jobs where he learned to make a wine barrel. Hilarity ensues...
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/27751-dirty-jobs-building-a-barrel-video.htm

Clothes Make the Man

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
                                                              - Mark Twain

Going into this, I honestly did not give much thought to clothes. I am mostly known as a costumer, of course I was going to be doing most if not all of this garbed in the period manner. As much as possible and a bit more, please.

I live near Seattle, so a lot of this will be undertaken in the Pacific Northwest. But it might well be necessary (or just more fun) to take this show on the road. Which might make costuming a bit dicey.  I'll be traveling in places and talking to people where I am not known. Places where wandering about in trunkhose and doublet might not be taken as well as you might hope.

For all that I love making a scene, I can't imagine my life would be made easier or the project made better if I wore costumes to the library on a research trip.

While I won't be wearing a costume the whole time ( I do have to go to work once in awhile, you know) there will be times when the outcome of that day's project will be altered subtly by my manner of dress. Even if only in tone. There are also times when wearing or not wearing a full costume might be safer.  I'm more than happy to take my lumps for your amusement, but dying is right out.

This woodcut is the inspiration for the workingman's outfit I am about to make.

An English chap of the mid 1560's stands against a tree, a working stiff of some sort, tools arrayed in a pile at his feet. I've heard him called a surveyor because of the dividers in the foreground, but  I'm not so sure. There's also a pick axe, handsaw, and claw hammer. Not to mention the apron the man's wearing, which makes more sense for a carpenter or something than for a surveyor.

I like the elegant simplicity of it. I read this as galligaskins ('Gascon hose', probably of wool), plus a doublet and jerkin. Worn with a vestigial ruff at the collar, probably attached to the shirt collar. Made in appropriate fabrics and with the correct accouterments, it should pass unnoticed in any tavern, field, or guildhall of the 16th century.

It's simple and looks made to stay out of the way while working. Perfect for my needs.

The first version I plan to make will be grey wool bottoms and white fustian or wool top. A simple color scheme that works well and adheres well to what we know from the research being done into English wills of the period by UK historians and seamstresses Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies. According to their research into the wills of the county Essex, 40% of doublets mentioned were leather,  24% linen canvas, and 21% fustian.

You will note that linen was the watchword of the time -- 100% cotton cloth (calico) was virtually unknown in Northern Europe at the time due to the technical difficulties posed by the short fibers of the plant.  Fustian was as close as we got, a fabric woven of linen and cotton. The longer warp threads are linen because the English didn't have the technology to make strong enough threads of short-fiber cotton, so it was used for the shorter width-wise strands on the loom.

Clockwise from the upper left, in our fabric stash I found a nice grey wool, a heavy unbleached fustian canvas, a lighter white fustian, and a pale green linen tablecloth to use as a lining.

Yes, a table cloth. Why not?  It will make a nice lining for the Gascon hose.

The wool is a safety measure as well as being chosen for its warmth. Wool is apparently slightly more fire-retardant than most untreated cloth, which will be nice when we get to the cooking, baking, and blacksmithing portions of our curriculum. Also the Pac Northwest is typically damp and cold, so woolens are ideal.

This is the outfit you will be seeing me wear in most of the photos and videos to come.  All that needs to happen now is for me to sit down and make the things...