Christmas Pyes : Jacky Horner, Namby Pamby and Plums

The festive season seems like a great time to bring back a long dormant blog on food and specifically food history from in and around the English seventeenth century.  Hopefully, nearly ever day during the season, I will provide an entry of information and some period (adjusted) recipes to at least intrigue in a holiday way. 

The subject of the first couple or more entries will be Christmas pie and some of what that meant.  You can look forward in the coming days to a turducken-like recipe from probably the English celebrity cook/writer of the eighteen century.  But today let us go back to your nursery rhymes, specifically one little Jack Horner and his Christmas Pie. 

For all our memories, it reads something sort of close to this: 

Little Jack Horner  

Sat in the corner,  

Eating of Christmas pie;  

He put in his thumb, 

And pull'd out a plum  

And what a good boy was I. 

We shall ignore the moral implication of sitting in a lonesome corner with a pie and being proud of that, as well as the politics that may well have prompted the original writing.  Many writers since have spilled a lot of ink in those areas.  Instead let us look at some history of the poem and what that can tell us about Christmas pies and plums.   

The text above is what was printed in the last half of the eighteenth century.  It is in a book called Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle.  The earliest surviving edition of that text is from 1791 but it may have been published first in 1765.  However, the rhyme seems much older: in a 1726 printing of an attack satire on another writer, one Henry Carey shows he is clearly aware of it.  

Carey wrote Namby Pamby: OR, A PANEGYRIC on the New VERESIFICATION Address'd to A— P— Esq.  Ambrose Pierce, the A.P. of the title, was also mocked by Pope and apparently would write childish verse for the offspring of his patrons.  In Namby Pamby, Carey travels through a number of seemingly common nursery-like rhymes in mock praise of their use by the titular character, his name for Pierce.  In one such instance he writes:  

“Namby Pamby is no Clown, 

London-Bridge is broken down: 

… 

Now he sings of Jacky Horner 

Sitting in the Chimney-corner, 

Eating of a Christmas-Pie, 

Putting in his Thumb, Oh, fie! 

Putting in, Oh, fie! his Thumb, 

Pulling out, Oh, strange! a Plum.”   

Part of Carey’s derision of Pierce seems to be the latter’s use of familiar juvenile rhymes.  The mention of “London-Bridge” is part of a predecessor to the current rhyme about the falling bridge, which is said to have been heard sung in the reign of Charles II (1660–1685).   This would mean that little Jack Horner would probably have been familiar to children in a similar time period. 

But what does this tell us about what Jack was eating and why there was a plum in there.  The commentary on the rhyme included in Mother Goose's Melody gives some clues: 

“Jack was a boy of excellent taste, as should appear by his pulling out a plum; it is therefore supposed that his father apprenticed him to a mince pye-maker, that he might improve his taste from year to year; no one standing in so much need of good taste as a pastry cook”

So, if we are to take the boy's solo training in taste at face value, Christmas pie was, like today, a mince pie in the late 1700s.  Now, what actually a mince pie was then and in the century before is the subject of tomorrow’s thoughts.  Moving back in time from Carey’s Jacky Horner we will see what another satirical piece - THE EXALTATION OF CHRISTMAS PIE As it was Delivered IN A PREACHMENT At ELY House By P. C. Dr. of Divinity and Midwifery – has to say on the weighty matter.