The Free Thinking Festival Essay - Inside a Pirate’s Cookbook: A Culinary Journey through the 17th Century

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2015

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The 1667 recipe book by Sir Kenelm Digby featured tea with eggs brought from China, sugared mallow-leaves that cured gonorrhea and ‘pan cotto' cooked by Roman Cardinals. Digby had journeyed far and wide to collect his dishes, feasting with pirate chieftains in Algiers and munching melons in the eastern Mediterranean.

Joe Moshenska of the University of Cambridge explores Kenelm Digby’s culinary travels, revealing startling contacts between Britain and the East, between alchemy and cookery, and between the past and the present.

The New Generation Thinkers are the winners of an annual scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to find academics at the start of their careers who can turn their research into fascinating broadcasts.

The Essay was recorded in front of an audience at the Free Thinking Festival at Sage Gateshead. If you want to hear Joe Moshenka discuss his research you can download The Essay and conversation as an Arts and Ideas podcast.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's
0:27.5	out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.
0:34.7	Thank you.
0:36.5	Sir Kenel Digby died in his rooms on the north side of Covent Garden Square on the 11th of June 1665.
0:44.1	He had lived a remarkable and a varied life. Born in 1603, when Digby was two years old, his father
0:51.5	Everard was gruesomely executed for his part in the gunpowder plot.
0:56.7	The rest of Kenelm's life was spent trying to escape from the shadow of his father's treason,
1:01.8	moving restlessly between England and the continent, and interacting with many of the great
1:06.7	minds of the age, from Ben Johnson to Thomas Hobbes to the French mathematician Pierre
1:11.7	de Fermat, while producing original works of theology and philosophy covering a dazzling
1:17.2	array of topics. When I first sat in the reading room of the British Library to read through
1:23.0	Digby's surviving manuscripts, I was astounded by the range of his mind and delighted in particular by his gorgeous looping handwriting. So, I was astounded by the range of his mind and delighted in particular by his
1:29.1	gorgeous looping handwriting so refreshingly legible by the standards of the 17th century.
1:35.8	But amidst the dense and witty letters on philosophy, theology and literature, alongside pages
1:41.5	recording his business dealings, was one document that leapt out to me
1:45.5	because it revealed another side to Digby and one of his more unusual passions.
1:51.5	This was the inventory taken of his rooms in Covent Garden after his death,
1:55.2	and it showed me that Digby also had a remarkably well-stocked kitchen.
2:00.6	The meticulous list, covering several narrow,
2:03.9	slightly yellowed sheets, reveal that he owned four brass skillets and five brass stewing dishes,
	...

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