AUTUMN FOOD AND WINE

Getting one's just desserts

Lisa Chaney

IN THE dining halls of Oxbridge, the dons still abandon their undergraduates and descend from high table to take dessert and wine in the Senior Common Room. Similarly, the pleasures or rigours of your own table concluded, guests can count on an offer of withdrawal to easier chairs and coffee. With luck, there may also be sweet confections and wine.

In other circumstances, as you prise the marzipan out from beneath the ubiquitous concrete icing of festive fruit-cake, savour your favourite breakfast marmalade, col- lect children and wrapped birthday cake from a party or sing a round such as 'Lon- don's Burning', you might consider the illustrious origins of these apparently unre- lated rites of hospitality. They are late reminders of an institution which flour- ished for over three centuries and was responsible for some of the most magnifi- cent contrivances ever to have been pre- sented on English tables: the sweet ban- quet.

Arriving in England from Italy via France in the 1480s, for a time the word 'banquet' (from banchetto, diminutive of banco, a table, via the French banquet) dis- placed the older term 'feast' — signifying a meal of splendour and ostentation. By the 1530s, however, the banquet had tem- porarily acquired a more specific meaning, describing a separate course of sweetmeats ('banqueting stuffe'), usually eaten in another room at the end of the feast. The origins of this development are to be found in the last course of the earlier mediaeval feast, the increasing availability of sweet- meats and the desire of the elite for greater privacy.

A mediaeval feast was a skilfully orches- trated drama of plenty and magnificence. It was an occasion for the noble host to display his wealth and position to retainers and peers. It was as much a demonstration of status as of epicureanism. For those at the high table, the feast was traditionally concluded with hippocras (spiced and sweetened wine) and wafers. A century later, a list of 'the names of all thinges nec- essary for a banquet', includes cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, coriander, aniseed and pep- per. Either as traditional flavourings for hippocras or served alongside, these spices were regarded as warming to the stomach and therefore an aid to digestion — reflecting the contemporary medical theo- ry of 'the four humours'.

During the 15th century, references to sweetmeats such as 'spices and sugared delicates' or 'hot apples with pears and sugar candy' occur more frequently with the hippocras and wafers, until they emerge combined as the enormous reper- toire for 'banqueting stuffe'. Sugar was the catalyst in all this. It arrived on the spice ships and was similarly costly, but demand grew and was met. As well as preserving fruits, flowers and roots, stiff fruit jellies and multicoloured sculpted sugar pastes ('whereof a man may make all manner of fine things with their form, as platters, glasses, cups . wherein you may furnish a table, and when you have done, eat them up'), sugar also went into the jumballs, knots, leaches (cream jellies flavoured with almonds, spices and rosewater), iced, gild- ed and patterned marchpanes, gilded gin- gerbreads, spice comfits and fruit con- serves. Later it sweetened the custards, syl- labubs, tarts and trifles.

Pots of orange or lemon peel, conserved in sugar-syrup called `succade' (anglicised to sucket), were imported from southern Europe. So too was the Portuguese mannelada (manned() is Portuguese for quince), a luxurious, dense jelly scented with rosewater and musk. The first recipe for mannelada (translated into English in 1562 from Alexis de Piedmont) points out that other fruits can be 'dressed in like manner'. These are the forerunners of our present-day jams as well as breakfast mar- malade.

In the 16th century, this 'banqueting stuffe' was preferably served from silver or glass plates and dishes. From the early 16th to the mid-17th century, thy sweet- meats (as well as fruit, cheese and biscuits) were eaten off very thin, highly decorated wooden trenchers, called 'roundels'. Set in the decorated underside was a satirical or pious verse, or 'posie'. Guests ate from the plain side and then turned over their roundel to recite the motto or sing the verse underneath — the origin of a 'roundelay' or round. Roundels were given in sets as wedding or New Year presents. A popular subject of verse was the married

AUTUMN FOOD AND WINE

state, often given a misogynistic flavour: Beshrewe his heart that married mee My wife and I can never agree A Knavish queane by this I svveare The good mans breechs she thinks to weare.

At some banquets, biscuits, marchpanes and dried fruits were decorously laid out in little baskets, one for each guest. On quit- ting the banquet, 'every individual person shuts up and takes away his Basket, to treat his Family and Friends at home' — the derivation of going-away presents at Present-day children's parties. Wrapping dry sweetmeats in one's handkerchief on departing — as with today's birthday or wedding cake — was also customary.

To make wealth conspicuous was undoubtedly a motivating force in the development of the banquet and this need- ed an appropriate setting; which brings us to the French custom of the voidee. Its cachet increasing during the 15th century, the practice of withdrawing from the feast in order to take 'dessert' (a French term derived from desservir) led to taking this final course in a separate room or even building. Host and guests withdrew from servants and the great hall to another room to enjoy in private a final course of wine and spices.

Where an even higher class or royalty were concerned, this led to the develop- ment of the banqueting house. The most Impressive of these was Inigo Jones's Ban- queting House in Whitehall where, in 1685, John Evelyn tells us:

The banquet was 12 vast Chargers pild up so high, as those who sat one against another could hardly see one another, of these Sweet- meats which doubtlesse were some days pil- ing up in that exquisite manner, the Ambas- sadors touched not, but leaving them to the Spectators who came in Curiosity to see .. . were exeedingly pleas'd to see in what a moment of time, all that curious work was demolish'd.

Other banqueting houses were often quite intimate and fanciful. Set on the roof of a house (as at Longleat, Lacock Abbey and Hardwick Hall where the views are breathtaking), or an elevated position away from it (Chipping Camden and the Trian- gular Lodge at Rushton), they allowed the banqueters to survey the beauties of their host's gardens or estate whilst taking their wines and sweetmeats in the summer air.

'Such eating as the French call dessert is unnatural,' complained William Vaughan in 1600. Ironically, although this suggests that the term was still a novel one in Eng- land, the practice of taking dessert (a ban- quet) in a separate banqueting house waned during the 18th century. A more modest dessert, with a lighter, less architec- tural appearance, came to be served in the withdrawing-room. By the mid-19th centu- ry, the final course of a feast, albeit now known as dessert, was once again served at the same table. Only Oxbridge dons still enjoy the dessert of the Renaissance aris- tocracy, while the banquet has reverted to its original meaning and is a complete, sumptuous and non-movable feast.