Breakfast Links: Week of May 28, 2012

Here's another serving of our favorite links of the week to other blogs, web sites, pictures, and articles, collected for you from around the Twitterverse.
• How George III's Golden Jubilee was celebrated.
• Plenty of room for Beau Brummell, you, AND all your friends: entire Georgian crescent in Bath goes on sale.
• For historical shoe-fans: these 17th c gilded and painted mules are insanely gorgeous/gorgeously insane.
• Georgian cookery: To Make a Cheshire Pork Pie: 18th c recipe, plus 21st c version and instruction video.
• Staggering 19th c images of old London. Step into the time machine.
• Commute like royalty: French rail trains decked out with images from Versailles.
• Remembering the 54th Regiment that inspired Glory.
• Lovely 18th c Pavillon d'amour, Neuville-sur-Oise (but why, why is the chateau in ruins?)
• Richard the Lionheart's death to be investigated 812 years after an infection killed him.
• Top Ten Tourist Attractions in London - in 1780.
• Historical video game: help Queen Victoria escape childhood oppression in Kensington Palace.
• Why no memorial at Epsom for suffragist Emily Wilding Davison - when there are ones for horses?
• Sixty years ago: Her Majesty's coronation gown by Norman Hartnell; for comparison, Queen Victoria in her coronation robes, 1837.
• Who can resist a great pig photo - especially of a great pig like Big Dave?
• From Captain Cook to playboy Prince Bertie: the appeal of the tattoo among high society.
• Grim Dickensian views of 19th c Newgate Prison.
• Joan of Arc was burned this week in 1431.
• Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's 1953 wedding dress.
• What folly is this? Animal welfare in Georgian London.
• Out in the sun: John Singer Sargent paintings, plus Emily Dickinson on Parasols.
• Mirror sold: used by tragic 18th c society beauty who died of make-up poisoning at 27.
• Toilet humor: the case of Thomas Crapper.
• More 18th c trade cards from London.
• Revealed: the true colors of Henry VIII's tapestries at Hampton Court.

Want more? Follow us on Twitter at @2nerdyhistgirls.

Friday video: Yma Sumac

Loretta reports:

I vividly remember a moment in my childhood when, at my grandparents’ house, I happened upon the record album (and it was an actual album in those days), "Voice of the Xtabay."  The picture of Yma Sumac, so utterly exotic-looking, completely enthralled me.  At some point, I got to hear the record, and that was equally astounding.  Many years later, I wondered if she and her music were as strange and wonderful as I remembered, so I bought myself a copy.  It was still strange & wonderful.

You can hear a very clear recording of "Chuncho" & other cuts from the album at a site devoted to her.

Readers who receive our blog via email might see only a rectangle or square where the video ought to be.  To watch the video, please click on the title to this post.

Conceits, Comfits, & Creams: More on 18th Century Desserts

Isabella/Susan reporting:

Yesterday Loretta showed us how the 18th c English table of an affluent household would be set for dessert. Here's a selection of dishes that could have been served.

Georgian diners would not have recognized the massive, death-by-chocolate style of desserts so dear to modern tastes. To them, the dishes offered at the end of a meal should be simple and light (at least light in comparison to the multiple meat dishes and puddings that might have come before), and were intended to refresh and cleanse the palate. "Rich cakes" were reserved for grand celebrations like weddings and balls, and even those were more like modern pound cakes, depending more on their use of butter and eggs instead of sugary frosting.

Here are several favorite desserts, prepared from 18th c recipes by the cooks of the Governor's Palace, Colonial Williamsburg. 

In the fluted glasses are chocolate creams, a close cousin to our chocolate puddings. An 1824 recipe for Chocolate Cream from Mary Randolph's Virginia House-Wife is only two sentences long: "Scrape a quarter of a pound of chocolate very fine, put it in a quart of milk, boil it till the chocolate is dissolved, stirring it continually, & thicken with six eggs. A Vanilla bean boiled with the milk, will improve the flavour greatly." Much more challenging than it sounds, as any cook who has struggled with clumping chocolate and curdling eggs can sadly attest.

The pineapple represents fresh fruit, always a popular offering. It would, obviously, not have been presented at the table like this, but would have been cored, trimmed, and cut into more manageable pieces. Pineapples and oranges were imported, exotic, and expensive, a sign that the host spared no expense for his guests (but not as an apocryphal symbol of hospitality.)

Below the pineapple is a dish of chocolate almond conceits. The conceit is that there are no almonds in the recipe, but simply chocolate (and sugar and butter, much like fudge) shaped like almonds, and dusted with sugar.

Next is a small dish of caraway comfits, especially popular with a decanter of port. Caraway seeds are dipped repeatedly in a sugar syrup to build up crisp layers, and then rolled in sugar.

The last of the desserts is a plate of ratafia cakes. Ratafia cakes (or biscuits) took their name from the fruit-flavored brandies with which they were often eaten, though by the early 19th c they're being consumed with coffee and tea by both Jane Austen's friend Martha Lloyd and Captain Jack Aubrey. Ground almonds, egg whites, and sugar are the essential ingredients, similar to macaroons. If you'd like to try them yourself, here's the 1726 recipe used by the Governor's Palace cooks - plus an adaptation for modern cooks and kitchens.

Many thanks to Frank Clark, Rob Brantley, and Susan Holler of Colonial Williamsburg for sharing their kitchen wisdom.

A table setting for dessert, 18th century style

Loretta reports:

These photos are from my visit last year to the Victoria & Albert Museum .

According to the note accompanying this display of a fashionable family’s table setting for dessert, “The word ‘dessert’ comes from the French desservir meaning to ‘unserve’ or clear the table, as it was originally served after the main dishes had been removed.  It consisted of fresh fruits or a sumptuous display of ices, whipped creams and sugared fruits.”

Doing a little compare and contrast with table settings & pieces illustrated in Susan Watkins’s Jane Austen’s Town and Country Style, I came upon this interesting note about the knives:

“The knife-blades have broad, rounded ends, so that one could eat directly from the knife as well as from the fork. Fingers were used for eating more than is customary today, making finger bowls essential between courses.”

If you're in New England in the fall, you can sample an 18th C dinner, and receive a lesson in 18th C table manners, at Maxwell House, in Warren Rhode Island.

You'll find more about The School for Manners (one of the titles from which the rules listed on the Maxwell House site & Wikisource are excerpted) in one of my earlier posts.

What the Maidservant Wore, c 1770

Isabella/Susan reporting:

We've seen what a stylish British mantua-maker's apprentice might wear in the shop in the 1770s, what a female blacksmith or other laboring woman might wear at her work, and, what, too, a housewife might wear as she went about her day. Now Abby Cox, one of our knowledgable friends from Colonial Williamsburg, shows us what a woman in domestic service might wear. (Her clothes are modern replicas, not 18th c originals, but cut and sewn entirely by hand in true 18th c fashion.)

Uniforms for female servants were a 19th c. innovation. While Georgian-era male servants were often provided with livery, their female counterparts - whether at the top of the servant-ladder as ladies' maids or lowly maids-of-all-work - were expected to provide their own clothing from their meager wages. They were also expected to dress in a manner that was modest, fit for their station, tidy, and clean. Samuel Johnson noted that "women servants. though obliged to be at the expense of the purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than men servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male."

Here Abby is wearing an untrimmed English-style gown of a woven striped cotton. The gown has inverted back pleats to shape the waist, and is worn over a plain dark linen petticoat (the under-skirt) and a white linen apron. She has looped her skirts up both to help keep them clean, and to mimic the elaborate skirts of more fashionable gowns - though the effect in the soft cotton fabric lacks the exuberance of poufs of crisp, costly silk.

She also wears white thread stockings, low-heeled buckled shoes, and a linen kerchief tucked around her shoulders. Beneath her gown, her figure is shaped by her stays (corset), which every respectable young woman would wear - see here for more about her stays. Her only indulgence is her cap, ruffled white cotton trimmed with a silk ribbon. While Abby's dress is suitable for a servant, it could be equally worn by a young woman working in a tavern or shop, or simply at home.

Like nearly all 18th c women's clothing, regardless of cost, Abby's gown is pinned closed in front (see detail, left). While men's clothing fastened with buttons and ties, women pinned their clothes together with straight pins; the points of the pins were safely buried in the multiple layers of gown and stays. Pinning was not only a neat finish, but also offered an endless, practical range of adjustments to a woman's changing body.

Photographs by Susan Holloway Scott. Many thanks to Abby Cox for being our maid servant!