Sudi Pigott: London Cook Recooks Old Recipes
It all started as a schoolboy prank to escape the vagaries of the British weather," recalls Ivan Day. "Caught in a dramatic downpour one exeat afternoon (when boarding- school children are allowed off the premises), a school chum and I took refuge in an antiquarian bookshop and happened on a battered volume of archaically phrased 18th-century recipes. The idea of roasting a sucking pig, which sounded really rude, and making a 54-egg pudding had us tittering in pure Monty Python mirth. I was hooked."
Now the culinary historian and museums adviser is courted by top chefs and is a big draw on the international lecture circuit. His historical cookery courses in roasting, baking and ices, held at his Cumbrian farmhouse using his collection of period kitchen appliances, are booked up a year ahead.
I first encountered Day at the Leeds Food Symposium session on food history and baking traditions in northern England. After regaling us with the intricacies of 18th-century pastry-making, which often had elaborate decorative finishes echoing the fashionable knot gardens and parterres of the day, he treated us to a feast - a Mrs Agnes Marshall raised game pie of statuesque proportions, and sweet mince pies, fragrant with almonds and preserved orange and dusted in ambergris.
This status-defining luxury ingredient of the 1600s, which has a perfumed, almost truffle-like taste, is a wax-like secretion found in the intestinal tract of one in 1,000 sperm whales. However, as this secretion is basically whale phlegm, which is repellent to modern sensibilities, ambergris is no longer produced.
Day takes a purist, decidedly scholarly approach to his subject - a chasm apart from the kitsch-inclinedre-enactment movement (widely known in the US as the Society for Creative Anachronism - think medieval fairs in Alabama), which prepares "history food" as part of living tableaux.
Day is enjoying such serious success now partly because there is a general swell of interest in historical food. It is being led bysome of the chefs who are regarded as the most modern and experimental, such as Heston Blumenthal of the Michelin three-star Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire.
"We can use the pastas a way forward. It'stremendously exciting to breathe new life into historical dishes," Blumenthal explains over a traditional lunch of potted shrimps,sublime oxtail-and-kidney pudding, and trifle in his oak-panelled Tudor pub, The Hinds Head. Just across the way from his restaurant, it serves historical tavern dishes in keeping withthe surroundings.
...
Ivan Day's website is at: www.historicalfood.com
Now the culinary historian and museums adviser is courted by top chefs and is a big draw on the international lecture circuit. His historical cookery courses in roasting, baking and ices, held at his Cumbrian farmhouse using his collection of period kitchen appliances, are booked up a year ahead.
I first encountered Day at the Leeds Food Symposium session on food history and baking traditions in northern England. After regaling us with the intricacies of 18th-century pastry-making, which often had elaborate decorative finishes echoing the fashionable knot gardens and parterres of the day, he treated us to a feast - a Mrs Agnes Marshall raised game pie of statuesque proportions, and sweet mince pies, fragrant with almonds and preserved orange and dusted in ambergris.
This status-defining luxury ingredient of the 1600s, which has a perfumed, almost truffle-like taste, is a wax-like secretion found in the intestinal tract of one in 1,000 sperm whales. However, as this secretion is basically whale phlegm, which is repellent to modern sensibilities, ambergris is no longer produced.
Day takes a purist, decidedly scholarly approach to his subject - a chasm apart from the kitsch-inclinedre-enactment movement (widely known in the US as the Society for Creative Anachronism - think medieval fairs in Alabama), which prepares "history food" as part of living tableaux.
Day is enjoying such serious success now partly because there is a general swell of interest in historical food. It is being led bysome of the chefs who are regarded as the most modern and experimental, such as Heston Blumenthal of the Michelin three-star Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire.
"We can use the pastas a way forward. It'stremendously exciting to breathe new life into historical dishes," Blumenthal explains over a traditional lunch of potted shrimps,sublime oxtail-and-kidney pudding, and trifle in his oak-panelled Tudor pub, The Hinds Head. Just across the way from his restaurant, it serves historical tavern dishes in keeping withthe surroundings.
...
Ivan Day's website is at: www.historicalfood.com