Restaurants James Pembroke

THE CHARLES II DIET

Jeremiahs everywhere are prophesying the demise of Britain’s restaurant culture. Yet if the Restoration of Charles II after the Civil War is anything to go by, we are in for our greatest-ever boom.

In the 17th century, London became an urban Gargantua, demanding a constant supply of food. It has been suggested that ‘cockney’ is derived from the Latin coquina, meaning cookery, since London was the capital of cook shops. Thus the idea of Cockaigne, a mythical place where eating and sex are on tap.

Novelty and variety returned after the Restoration. Pepys ate lobster at the Cock Tavern in the Strand. Charles II indulged in caviar and ice cream (for the first time in 1671), though not simultaneously. And the Duke of Bedford recorded drinking a sparkling wine in 1665, well before Dom Perignon started rotating his bottles.

Between 1660 and 1721, the area for market gardens around London increased from an estimated 10,000 acres to 120,000. And citrus fruit began to arrive from China, Portugal and Ceylon.

Among the eating places, there were ‘twelvepenny ordinaries’ and ‘threepenny ordinaries’, the price depending on comfort and quality. A London labourer needed just a shilling a week for his lodgings and five shillings a week for food. The daily wage exceeded the daily food bill.

Pepys, the ultimate ‘goodfellow’, earned £350 a year as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. He regularly refers to eating at places like Marsh’s in Whitehall and Wood’s in Pall Mall, where he could have a cut from the available joints, some vegetables, a roll and a pint for eightpence.

Parliament met every spring and autumn. Whereas the grander MPS had built large town houses of their own, the Bufton Tuftons from the shires moved their broods into rented lodgings and had to eat out.

The arrival of these country gents, combined with the get-rich-quick wide boys (yet to experience the South Sea Bubble), provided the perfect conditions

for ostentatious dining. Three exclusive ordinaries are referred to often: the Pontack’s Head in Abchurch Lane, Locket’s in the Strand and Chatelaine’s in Covent Garden.

Pontac was the son of the president of Bordeaux and, as John Evelyn reported in 1683, had ‘the choicest of our Bordeaux wines’, which was unsurprising for a family who owned Château Haut-brion. He started his ordinary in 1670, and the Royal Society held their anniversary dinner there from 1694 to 1746.

The menu was lavish and expensive at between one and two guineas a head: ‘Bird’s-nest soup from China; a ragout of fatted snails; bantam pig but one day old stuffed with hard row and ambergris; French peas stewed in gravy with cheese and garlick; an incomparable tart of frogs and forced meat; cod, with shrimp sauce; chickens en surprise, not two hours from the shell.’

Baby birds were the stuffed dormice of their day. Pope described having peachicks at the Bedford Head tavern.

Even miserly Swift conceded, ‘What wretch would nibble on a hanging shelf,/ When at Pontack’s he may regale himself?’ Locket’s exemplified nouvelle cuisine even better than the 1980s fad. Here, ‘They shall compose you a dish no bigger than a saucer, and it shall come to fifty shillings.’

Needless to say, only the few indulged. The majority stuck with what they knew. When Jos Cooper published a satirical cookery pamphlet entitled The Court and Kitchen of Elizabeth Cromwell, designed to mock the turgid fare of Oliver’s missus, it became so popular that it ran to many editions.

They loved the no-nonsense, homespun recipes; ’twas ever thus.