Every few months I turn to Pinterest for design inspiration as to how to make the dining room table look beautiful for events. Pinterest brings up pictures of complex floral centerpieces, show stopping gingerbread houses, and every manner of iced cake. That got me thinking about how people dressed their tables hundreds of years ago.
Food, like fashion, indicates wealth and status. Historically, the divide between the haves and the have-nots was incredibly pronounced on the dining table though ingredients and presentation. As dining and dining customs became more formalized, the upper classes looked to dress their tables with unusual, rare and elaborate centerpieces to further display their wealth.
The pineapple was one such item. Pineapples, which are now readily available at the grocery store, were once incredibly rare and expensive items. They had to be shipped over great distances to buyers. Growing them in non-native climates was labour intensive and costly. Once a pineapple was purchased, it became a display as a centerpiece, being used over and over until it eventually rotted.
Another item found on dining tables was an epergne (pronounced AY-pairn), a centerpiece made of small dishes connected by scrolled branches which held fruits, nuts and other sweetmeats and confections. In the 18th century, they were a costly item made from silver or other metals. Even as the style of dining changed in the 19th century, epergnes remained on the table as decorative pieces. Manufactures began to produce epergnes from glass and porcelain, which eventually made them available to a wider audience and brought them into middle class homes.
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| This epergne from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, displays intricate silver metalwork as well as the characteristic bowls for fruit. Source. |
Elaborate game pies were also used as showstopping edible centerpieces. While lower classes did eat meat, it was still seen as a luxury food reserved for the upper classes. People ate a wide variety of meat and poultry, including ham, beef, pork, venison, mutton, hare, ducks, pigeons, geese and partridge. A common way to eat meat was to cook it in a pie. One of the earliest English-language cookbooks, The Forme of Cury (cury from the Middle French cuire, meaning to cook), gives recipes for the making of pastries called coffins and chastelets. Coffin, or “coffyn” (meaning box) as it was in the late 14th century, were pastries made with straight sides, sealed at the top and bottom. Chastlets were much more dramatic, made in the shape of a castle, usually with each tower holding a different filling.
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| The page from The Forme of Cury giving the recipe for chastlets. The first lines read: "take and make a foyle (leaf) of good paste with a roller of a foot broad and longer by compass. Make four coffins of the self-paste upon the roller..." Source. |
The 17th century saw more development in the art of pastry crusts. These are not be the same puff pastries we have today, but a type of hot water crust pastry made with a durable rye flour. This strong flour helped the pastry hold its form. Cooks developed pies with elaborate designs, mimicking patterns from textiles, heraldry and architecture. The pastry patterns were created by hand, either by rolling or tracing paper designs directly onto the pastry. Some were created by pressing the pastry into carved wooden boards. Later in the 18th century, earthenware and metal springform tins developed and became a common item by the 19th century.
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| A page from Edward Kidder's Receipts of Pastry and Cookery (c.1720) showing the intricate designs for two pies. Source. |
The fascination with novelty shapes extended beyond pies. Manufactures developed a whole range of novelty molds to be used for cakes, jellies and ice creams! Molds were made from copper and covered with tin; some had a special vent at the top to help release the food within.
While jellies are not as popular today, historically they were seen as food for the rich. Jellies begin to appear in the 14th century, but it was not until the end of the medieval period that cooks were able to perfect jelly making. Jellies were not just sweet dishes (like how we think of Jell-O today) but also for savory dishes, such as blancmange or aspic. Cooks originally obtained gelatin from boiling collagen-rich bones, such as calf’s feet. This was a time consuming process, and restricted the use of gelatin to the wealthy. In the 16th century, isinglass, a form of pure gelatin found in fish, was imported from Russia. Again, the cost of importing the ingredient was prohibitive. But by the 18th and 19th centuries, gelatin was mass produced, which fueled the Georgian and Victorian craze for molded jellies.
Aspic was an incredibly popular dish, appearing on tables in the late 18th century. These were clear, savory jellies which encased whole or sliced ingredients. Their elaborate molded shapes made them show-stopping centerpieces; some were intentionally designed to be inedible! Molds were made out of wood, pewter, ceramic or ceramic coated in copper or tin. The more elaborate molds – those with many details or pointed tops – were the most difficult to form correctly. Aspics were so popular that the famed French chef, Antonin Carême, developed a category of food he called “chaud froid”, which were hot dishes served cold.
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| Examples of the types of molds available for savory jellies. Source. |
Sweet jellies were also popular desserts and had their own range of flavour and molds. Blancmange, a dish made with almond milk, originated as a savory dish in medieval times and included shredded chicken or fish. By the 18th century, it was a sweet dish, with sugar, cream and rice and served in tall, decorative forms. Flummery, a softer pudding made with starch from flour, oats or almonds, and milk, was molded into elaborate and novelty shapes. In Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 cookbook, The Experienced English Housekeeper, she provides a number of recipes for molding flummery, including: a nest of eggs, floating islands, stars, moons, and eggs and bacon. She declares these unique dishes: “pretty decoration for a grand table.” Raffald gives instructions on how to form shapes by using dishes and other pots, but by the 19th century, specialized molds made it easy to create interesting novelty flummeries for the table.
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| Elizabeth Raffald's recipe for Eggs and Bacon made from flummery. Source. |
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| A modern-day recreation of the eggs and bacon in flummery recipe. Source. |
One manufacturer was Agnes Marshall, known as the “Queen of Ices.” Marshall developed her own ice cream empire, publishing cookbooks, running a cookery school, and manufacturing ice cream churners and novelty molds. Ice cream molds continued the trend of novelty ice cream shapes, which likely developed in Italy in the late 17th century before becoming popular throughout the rest of Europe. By the 19th century, novelty ice cream forms had taken the shape of fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs.
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Ice cream molds offered by Agnes Marshall in her cookbook The Book of Ices (1893)| Source |
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| A surviving example of a three-part pewter asparagus mold. Source. |
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| A modern-day recreation of ice cream in the asparagus mold. Source. |
The great diversity of edible and dramatic centerpieces would end by World War I, as modernist ideas began to change dining trends to be more minimal. Some trends, like jelly foods, had a revival in the 1950s; with refrigerators seen as a status symbol in the post-war economy, gelatin-based dishes once again were seen as an indicator of wealth.
It’s easy for us to be shocked when looking at historical, either in cookbooks or in modern-day recreations because the food, flavours and presentations seem so different from what we have today. Shocking food combinations live on in modern cookery, like bacon ice cream or the novelty foods served at the Canadian National Exhibition each summer. What is lost is the incredible skill and artist that went into producing these elaborate dishes and the molds that formed them. While cookbook authors live on in their publications, home cooks and kitchens staff are unnamed and unrecognized as the talent behind these unusual dishes.
It’s easy for us to be shocked when looking at historical, either in cookbooks or in modern-day recreations because the food, flavours and presentations seem so different from what we have today. Shocking food combinations live on in modern cookery, like bacon ice cream or the novelty foods served at the Canadian National Exhibition each summer. What is lost is the incredible skill and artist that went into producing these elaborate dishes and the molds that formed them. While cookbook authors live on in their publications, home cooks and kitchens staff are unnamed and unrecognized as the talent behind these unusual dishes.
