Table Talk: Dinner With The Pepys's

Samuel Pepys 1666 portrait
by John Hayls

Mr. Pepys's rather entertaining diary entries are popping up in my email inbox* these days, and as such can furnish these pages with some much-needed Table Talk. Goodness knows how starved you must be, Dear Reader, for any crumbs that might come your way, hem hem, so a couple of his recent delightful dinners (read lunches) hosted with relatives, both of the beloved and unloved varieties, can serve as fine a way as any of announcing Your Correspondent's reappearance about these pages. And apart from partaking of the occasional cake for supper**, his menu seems not too dissimilar to the Pipistrellos! 

Wednesday 26 March, 1662

From Robert Venables
The Experienced Angler, 1662

... At noon come my good guests, Madame Turner, The. [Theophilia Turner, aged ~11], and Cozen Norton, and a gentleman, one Mr. Lewin of the King's LifeGuard; by the same token he told us of one of his fellows killed this morning in a duel. I had a pretty dinner for them, viz., a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tanzy [herb-scented pudding] and two neats' tongues [cows' tongues], and cheese the second; and were very merry all the afternoon, talking and singing and piping upon the flageolette [Ed.: oh, misery, the recorder]. In the evening they went with great pleasure away, and I with great content walked half an hour in the garden, and so home to supper and to bed ...

The Pepys's, Samuel and Elisabeth, are entertaining some beloved Cozens (sic) to a chicken apiece and more on this day in March several hundred years ago, and one Mr. Lewis who is singing for his supper by entertaining the party with a sordid and salacious tale of murder. (No doubt young Theophilia was all agog at the story.) Anyways, the merry Stone Feast was in honour of Mr. Pepys fourth anniversary of the successful operation to remove his bladder stone, performed at Mrs. Turner's house. The miracle of his surviving another 45 years, I read, is that he was the first patient of the day of Mr. Thomas Hollier, whose hands and instruments were relatively clean and not besmeared with the gore of others. 

Nota bene: Avert your eyes now and skip the next excerpt if you don't wish to read Claire Tomalin's*** gruesome biographical account of this pre-anaesthetic operation to remove his "tennis ball"-sized stone (fear not, a tennis ball in 1658 was a much tinier affair at around 1 or 2 inches diameter), which, of course, he kept for posterity. But, for the strong of stomach, what follows is positively fascinating:

The surgeon got to work. First he inserted a thin silver instrument, the itinerarium, through the penis into the bladder to help position the stone. Then he made the incision, about three inches long and a finger's breadth from the line running between scrotum and anus, and into the neck of the bladder, or just below it. The patient's face was sponged as the incision was made. The stone was sought, found and grasped with pincers; the more speedily it could be got out the better. Once out, the wound was not stitched—it was thought best to let it drain and cicatrize itself—but simply washed and covered with a dressing, or even kept open at first with a small roll of soft cloth known as a tent, dipped in egg white. A plaster of egg yolk, rose vinegar and anointing oils was then applied. Pepys, no doubt now fainting with shock and pain, was unbound and moved to his warmed bed.

Anyhoo, back to the dinner table:

Tuesday 8 April, 1662

Hendrick de Fromantiou
Still life with Oysters, 1661

Up very early and to my office, and there continued until noon. So to dinner, and in comes Uncle Fenner and the two Joyces [more Cozens]. I sent for a barrel of oysters and a breast of veal roasted, and were very merry; but I cannot down with their dull company and impertinent. After dinner to the office again ... By the way home and on Ludgate Hill there being a stop, I bought two cakes, and they were our supper at home [!!].

Mr. Pepys, ever the genial host, mostly keeps his critique of those in his orbit to his diary pages but occasionally words are had between relatives or work colleagues. A couple of weeks ago came an entry with the following admission:

... This noon came a letter from T. Pepys, the turner [and yet another cousin], in answer to one of mine the other day to him, wherein I did cheque him for not coming to me, as he had promised, with his and his father's resolucion about the difference between us [over an annuity and threats of a law suit, and many "high words" have passed betwixt them recently]. But he writes to me in the very same slighting terms that I did to him, without the least respect all, but word for word as I did him, which argues a high and noble spirit in him, though it troubles me a little that he should make no more of my anger, yet I cannot blame him for doing so, he being the elder brother's son, and not depending upon me at all.

Between the theatre, the office, church, overseeing his household and his "paynter" working on his and Elisabeth's portraits and his builders working on some home improvements, diligently practicing his "musick", and whatnot, Mr. Pepys is a busy young chronicler of Restoration England. Such a distraction for the reader some several hundred years removed, but dinners with the Pepys's are soothingly familiar.

* Subscribe to www.pepysdiary.com and you, too, can have his diary entries to read each morning, annotated by readers. It doesn't matter when you start reading the diary, it just keeps recycling over the years and there's been a few runs through already, apparently. Consider his writing as part of your morning blog feed, except the commentators chat amongst themselves rather than with the author!

** And the odd reference to overindulgence of food and/or drinke and the need to, ahem, have a little Roman-style purge in his back garden to make a bit more room for the supper he never seems to forego.

*** Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, 2002

Image credits: 1: Wikimedia Commons; 2: via Google; 3: PubHist.com

It's A Slippery Slope

"Prepare the sheep's head in the usual way." 

So sayeth the rather unhelpful opening instructions to a recipe for Sheep's Head Stew, according to a popular Edwardian-era recipe book consulted by the doughty domestic historian Ruth Goodman on the olde BBC programme Edwardian Farm.* 

Time-travelling farmers,
Alex, Ruth, Peter & Chums

Even Your Correspondent, a two-year long Carnivore, doesn't have an autopilot procedure for tackling such a beast's bit**. When, I hear you cry, did such traditional knowledge fall out of the domestic sphere? Ditto, as another for inst., olde dressmaking patterns, with their spare and breezy instructions to go ahead and sew up some complicated garment as you "ordinarily would". The Edwardian era was only just over a century ago, merely twice the temporal distance from my earliest memories, and without the aid of Mr. Google, I have no notion how to prepare a head o' mutton for the pot nor sew a leg o' mutton sleeve. For shame!

Leg o' Mutton sleeves, if you please

Back to Dear Ruth on the telly, she was preparing this frugal yet filling aforementioned staple while her fellow time-travelling adventurers had gone off to cook some limestone in a kiln for several days, as you do when the rather acidic soil on the farm you are to work needs some tonnes of quicklime and there is no local agricultural store to pop into, it being, you know, not invented yet. For the Gentleman Viewer this was an instructive lesson for when the agro-chemical industrial complex goes up in smoke, and some back-to-basics is required to keep starvation from the door, for forgotten manly commonplaces necessary to life lie thick on the ground these days.

Indeed, the observant reader will have already gleaned many valuable tidbits from around these pages, (granted, all unsolicited advice, but provisioning against the end-of-days has become rather a niche herein and I am confident you will thank me later), viz. the tongue of a hoopoe will restore the memory of a forgetful person, amongst the many choice nuggets. 

A hoopoe for those who forgot what it even was

And, of course, will have noted that the Pipistrellos have at their fingertips a most excellent book of instruction on keeping calm and carrying on when the electricity is switched off forever, and thusly a perpetual source of practicality and delight, and from which I share from time to time over at my Commonplace Book:

Chockfilled with canny know-how

But today's cautioning about the slippery slope to a new dark age, Dear Reader, is less to do with such diverse canny know-how falling by the wayside, like how to clear a blocked chimney (Edwardian Farm tip: feed down a bundle of scouring holly!), and more to do with the sort of permanent cultural amnesia which besets us when we stop thinking about once-quotidian abstract ideas. Or, to put it plainly, how if you don't use it you lose it. Like the forgotten habit of Biphasic Sleep.

Apparently, up until the Industrial Revolution, we humans slept in two stages between sundown and sunrise, our so-called First and Second Sleeps, separated by The Watch, when we were up and about for an hour or so and getting on with things prosaic, practical or personal. Who knew? 

Since self-help books in the olden days were confined to the Properly Improving, such as The Art of Dying Well ***or Galateo: The Rules Of Polite Behaviour**** (and good paper would never be frittered away on the Blindingly Obvious, like perhaps a little pamphlet entitled Muttonheads Guide To Sleep), when sleeping (or attempting to) straight through the night came into vogue for various reasons, since nothing was written down reminding us otherwise, we basically, and incredibly, forgot how we used to sleep.

Daresay Flaming June never forgot how sleep worked

Which is a comfort to know, really, for those beset with middle-of-the-night insomnia, and for which is recoursed judicious applications of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral and the like. Embrace The Watch! could become a catchcry, if not just for reminding ourselves how our forebears lived their lives. 

We really need to take notice of stuff and write things down. And the more pedestrian the better. This is the rôle of the diarist, of course, and the contemporary writer, to capture the zeitgeist, not I. The occasional scribblings around here tend to hearken back more to nostalgic doings, coloured with purple prose since English is fun, and anyways is really only useful while the electricity works and the cloud can keep it all going. But at least I've figured out that if we stop doing and thinking about the stuff we take for granted, it's possible to wake up one day and hey presto! it's the Dark Ages again. No fun.

ps: And don't get me started on the pruning of Nature Notes words, like acorn and kingfisher, from the Oxford Junior Dictionary to make space for so-called technology words like blog and voice-mail! Call me old fashioned but blog, as fond as I am of this little playground, is hardly going to be a forever word worthy of muscling out beauteous words like bluebell. Remember, kids, if you don't use it you lose it!

* Thank you, Dear Cro, sidebar resident over at Magnon's Meanderings for the televisual heads-up this week!

** Although, I do know how to prepare lamb's fry! As I tiny tot I would volunteer to do so as I found holding the liver under the running cold tap and skinning the membrane to be a strangely sensual experience.

*** A tip from Saint Robert Bellamine: Fasting is meritorious and very powerful in obtaining divine favours.

**** Bonus two tips from Giovanni della Casa: 1) Don't fall asleep or pull out a letter to read when in the pleasant company of others, thus demonstrating little appreciation of others and their conversation, and 2) Avoid proclaiming how greatly you are enjoying food and wine, for this habit is fit only for tavern keepers.

Image credits: 1: Rijksmuseum; 2: via Google: 3: via Pinterest; 4: Royal Collection Trust; 5-6: Flying With Hands; and 7: forgotten as I didn't write it down!

Merry Christmas!

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Dear Reader!

I wish for you Bright Things for the year ahead, as well as Peace and Prosperity.

This passing year has been notable for the slim pickings and prolonged absences of Your Correspondent, for which a mumbled apology of "Busy Busy" really cuts no mustard, but here we are. I hope to turn a blogging corner when the calendar flips to 2025 and resume to a normal-ish transmission.

Love from Pipistrello

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