Category: History

Ah, Bastille Day – I’d say something about it in French but my French is lousy. So rather than subject us all to that, let’s celebrate it by looking at a few French moments and highlights in culinary history.

Rich in dukes and cardinals – but also rich in culinary trivia.

Imagine it. It is 1637. Cardinal Richelieu, for reasons known only to himself – maybe his own safety (he wasn’t universally popular) or maybe he was put off his dinner watching people pick their teeth with pointy ends – suddenly orders the blades of his dinnerware to be ground down and rounded off.

Behold, the modern dinner knife was born. Continue reading “Crafty Cardinal Creates Cutlery” →

Vanilla. We all know vanilla. Naturally warm and sweet, it’s the base note of dessert in the Western World, from the scoop of vanilla ice cream served with apple pie in the US to the warm custard poured over crumbles in the UK or baked into tarts by the Portuguese.

It’s that essential ingredient in cookies and cakes and puddings. It takes the edge off chocolate and coffee, and lifts a mug of hot milk to dreamy bedtime heights. One might even say that vanilla is the umami of the sweet palate.

Vanilla’s Bad Rep?

But vanilla gets a very bad rap these days. There’s a perception in this day and age that vanilla is somehow boring. In our quest for ever more exotic flavours of ice cream we’ve derided the humble but pure pleasures of a well-made vanilla ice cream. Other spices like star anise and  cardamom, lovely though they both are,  have become so achingly hip that good old vanilla seems like a dull, almost matronly staple in comparison. Vanilla has to be dressed up as “French Vanilla” or ” Genuine Madagascar Vanilla” or “Vanilla Bean”. We’ve even-horror of horrors- begun to use the term “vanilla” to mean boring, unimaginative sex. It’s as if vanilla has become the Doris Day of spices.

And that’s not fair. Continue reading “The Spicy Truth About Vanilla” →

Banbury is, as you may know, forever entwined with Banbury cakes – flat-ish oval pastry filled with spiced currants. They’re not unlike Eccles cakes and they’re still available in Banbury though not in the two shops most associated with them in days or yore. I present to you – the days of yore.

E. W. Brown’s Original Cake Shop, 12 Parsons street.

There was some dreadful idea being tossed around about turning that A. Betts High Street space (very much present and in use lately as a pop-up shop) into an arcade.

Betts’s Cake Shop on Banbury High Street in 1878

Yes, a gaming arcade. I am very much hoping the request for the change of use required will be denied. But never mind that now. I will complain about that elsewhere.

Banbury has another eponymous foodstuff lurking in its past and today seems a good time to mention it. Why today? Because today is April 23rd — anniversary of both Shakespeare’s birth and his death.

Banbury Cheese!

“Banbury cheeses, for which the town was noted until the 18th century, were first mentioned in 1430” (*). It was a cow’s milk cheese, yellow in colour and quite strongly flavoured, made in thin (about 1 inch) rounds.

“But wait!” I hear you cry. “What does this have to do with Shakespeare?”

In “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Bardolf addresses Slender as “You Banbury Cheese!” – and this would have been commonly understood by the playgoers as an insult implying there wasn’t much to him (Banbury cheese being only about an inch thick.) That’s not to say Banbury cheese wasn’t popular – it was; in fact, it was better known than Banbury cakes at the time. It was just  … well, thin.

It was made in various places around the area but mostly in Grimsbury and Nethercote – what was then the Northamptonshire end of things (**)

And that’s not the only bardish thing about Banbury. No, there was a Shakespeare Inn on Parsons’ Street and we can still see the bust (sitting over the door at 46 Parsons St) that used to greet visitors to the Shakespeare Inn (1871-1891, I believe). *waves* Hi, Will!

And that is my culinary history trivia for the day. Happy birthday, Will.
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* A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 10, Banbury Hundred

** Boundaries tended to move around a lot and originally Banbury straddled two counties.

It is April 23 – National Cherry Cheesecake Day. Do we really need to expound on the glories of cheesecake? Don’t we all know it already. Instead, let us turn our culinary attention to Shakespeare. Yes, you heard me right. Shakespeare.

Today is the day of Shakespeare birth in 1564 (at best estimate) and his death in 1616. And on both those occasions, I bet food was prepared, served, eaten and shared. But which foods? Continue reading “Shakespearean Noshes, A Literary Nibble” →