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