RIP Parson Woodforde

I finished reading Parson Woodforde's diary at the weekend, and was strangely moved as I saw the last words were about food, roast beef in fact. I have never read a more engrossing book, the little dramas, passing friendships, his mixture of charity and snobbery, were far more fascinating than television crime dramas or block-buster movies. I can almost (not quite) begin to see the attraction of reality TV. Except the people on those shows generally seem to be arses. Posh arses, common arses, celebrity arses, obnoxious arses. Arses.

From the austerity cook's point of view there is much to learn from the parson's household. Not of course the dinners he gave when entertaining, as he so often did (not in the party sense, but feeding friends, relations,  the squire and his wife, so rather than entertaining hosting may be a better word), which would feature several different meats - maybe roast leg of mutton, roast beef, boiled chickens, boiled roots and a variety of tarts and puddings along with fruit and nuts as what he then termed dessert. No, the things his cook prepared for him when it was just the parson and his niece-companion Nancy at home are of greater interest to the careful cook.

I am intrigued, for example, by how pig's face (a frequent dish at his table) was prepared. Giblet soup I can understand better. The bonier cuts too - breast of veal, neck of mutton and suchlike - were reserved for such ordinary meals. And the humble fish - flounders, mackerel, plaice and so on - that were fetched from market at Norwich - speak volumes about making the best of ordinary ingredients.

More unusual for our times, at least for native Brits if we can use the term, was his enjoyment of freshwater fish like tench, carp, eels, pike and perch. Our coarse fishermen tend to throw back their catch (probably best to do so with eels which are in decline here currently), but then a lot of sea anglers don't actually like to eat fish, which is decidedly odd.

I've eaten perch in France and Switzerland, and love pike quenelles when prepared by a good chef. Perch is actually quite tasty, slightly reminiscent of dab to my palate. Our dream once son has flown the nest is to downsize to a cottage with enough land for a small orchard, and to have a fishing pool - his at one time Woodforde's greatest diversion and almost obsession. Visiting religious houses like Furness Abbey always at some point leads to the spot where the monks kept fish in vast ponds and pools. Yet we now only keep Koi Carp and similarly decorative creatures, whose owners would blanch at the idea of eating them. As our population grows and our grasp on the world's resources loosens we may revert to such medieval models of self-sufficiency (or better, self-reliance), though as Woodforde's facility showed we were still keen on this just a couple of centuries ago.

Do Flavours Become Old?

My bedtime reading currently is Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book. Elizabethan and Jacobean recipes are set out in the original flexible spelling, then explained and commented on by the erudite Hilary Spurling. The seasonality of cooking is one thing that hits you - Mrs Spurling set it out by month - but also the flavours that the cook in those times most leaned on, some of which we use very little today.

Is this a matter of fashion, availability, or does taste evolve in some way perhaps to keep pace with technological change - the fridge and freezer, rapid transport - and the 'new' ingredients that become available?

I like to think I use a wide palette of spices and other flavour enhancers, but some things that were central to old Elinor's culinary world are pretty alien to mine - I wonder who nowadays really uses the cloves they buy, for example? Even in bread sauce I would use nutmeg in place of the overpowering clove. But at least I have a little bottleful in my cupboard whereas rosewater  is absent - I  had a bottle years ago and think it disappeared through a temporal warp vortex, as one day it was gone though I'd hardly used a drop. Rosewater for the Jacobean cook was the stock-cube of today's, which says a great deal about our loss of subtlety.

A myth should be debunked here: spices were probably not then used much if at all to mask meats etc going off, they were far too expensive to waste thus, and those with the money to spend on exotic ingredients would not have been foolish enough to endanger their health with rotting flesh, or desperate enough to have to. Spices were used to produce food that tasted good.

Our contemporary love of nutmeg and mace links us with those times, even moreso perhaps cinnamon. I very occasionally use Orange Flower Water too. Cloves have a flavour that I associate with the cooking of relatives long deceased. But it is not just spices that seem to fade away in cooking. Take raisins: in my Sixties and Seventies childhood they were included in curries, cakes and pies, covered in chocolate as a special treat to be eaten in the cinema, the tough little buggers eaten I'd estimate twice a week. I barely use them now, and have to buy them in specially when needed. Elinor Fettiplace seems to have employed them for every other dish. As my son loathes all dried fruit perhaps they will fade out of the culinary picture entirely when his generation pushes mine away from the hob.

We should not forget such ingredients, so I am going to make an effort to use the occasional clove, hide raisins - one 'receipt' in the book for chicken cooked in mutton broth has raisins (later sieved out) to add depth and sweetness for example - and buy rosewater too. In austerity terms these things should attract the cook for giving loads of taste for very little money - a single clove makes itself known in a big apple pie. More bang for your groat as it were.