The Source of Triumphs or Why Your Food is Important

Continuing with historical food, I want to take a few lines today to explain the significance and source of this blog’s title.  While do so, I would hope to show why I think food is worthy of scholastic studies as well as practical delicious ones.  This is the balanced approach that I hope to bring to my posts here.

“Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery” is a phrase used in a 1660 work by one Robert May - entitled The Accomplisht Cook.  A number of food historian and English scholars have identified this book, what we would call a cookbook (the relativeness newness and geographic specificity of that term is a topic for another day) as one of the first to document an individually English cooking style.  The cooking instructions that we have written evidence of to this point in history were very much upper class and were actually quite similar across northern Europe.   

May wrote his important book in a very turbulent time known as the Interregnum, after the King of England had been defeated and deposed in the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century.  May was a professional cook who worked for noble clients tied very closely to the royal power structure and so found himself very short of work.  The book celebrates and yearns for the era, almost twenty years past, of royal celebrations and the kind of food that came with them.

The context of this blog’s title reads:   

Such noble Houses were then kept, [to] the glory of that, and shame of this present age; then were those golden days wherein were practised the Triumphs and Trophies of Cookery, then was Hospitality esteemed, Neighbourhood preserved, the Poor cherished, and God honoured; then was Religion less talk't on and more practised, then was Atheism and Schism less in fashion; and then did men strive to be good rather than to seem so.

A certain type of good noble food is tied to being a good person; not that I agree but it is important to consider how what we eat represents us.

To take us out, I provide one of May’s recipes, which keeps with the pie theme of yesterday, as well as an illustration of various pie shells from his book.

Minced Pies in the Italian Fashion.

Parboil a leg of veal, and being cold mince it with beef-suet, and season it with pepper, salt, and gooseberries; mix with it a little verjuyce [very acidic grape juice,] currants, sugar, and a little saffron in powder.

(He has provided the crust recipe earlier)

Note:  When I said I was writing every day, I actually meant to say six days a week, so I will be back with something thoroughly modern on Monday.