Old Spice: William King, Culinary Antiquarianism, and National Boundaries

In 1708 William King (1663–1712), lawyer, vicar-general of Armargh, and keeper of the records at Dublin Castle, published a Menippean satire, The Art of Cookery in Imitation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry” (1709). ¹ Though King had been an able Tory satirist, his success with The Art of Cookery drew upon popular reappro-priation of the Roman chef Apicius. His work, relying heavily on spices and identified in King’s subtitle as concerning “the Soups and Sauces of the Antients,” combined Greek agriculture, Greek dietetic cookery, and domestic science derived from Apuleius and others. ² Inspired by Martin Lister’s 1705 edition of Apicius, King’s Art was inscribed to the Beef Steak Club with mocking praise for the “Apician Art” of John Evelyn’s essay on salads, Acetaria (1699).

Although King’s introductory letter expresses nostalgia for feudal days when the “Beef and Brown Bread were carried every Day to the Poor,” King is primarily expressing Tory noblesse oblige, a political charity possible only in an aristocratic culture of luxury. King’s attitude is again reflected by alluding to The Forme of Cury (1390?), the medieval cookbook mentioned in William Rabisha’s royalist text, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661): persons of rank do not say, “Pray cut up that Goose” but “Break that Goose...mince that Plover”—an expression of the rights of the nobly-born over the natural world. ³

King’s implied privileging of the privileged is fused with sophisticated cosmopolitanism, and he is not ironic in hoping that his tract “will...remove the Barbarity of our present Education: For what hopes can there be of any Progress in Learning, whilst our Gentlemen suffer their Sons at Westminster, Eaton, and Winchester to eat nothing but Salt with their Mutton?” He observes unfacetiously that every family now needs a “French Tutor” (p. 3) and revises the first lines of an imaginary classical epic: “Muse, sing the Man that did to Paris go, / That he might taste their Soups, and Mushrooms know” (p. 79). Later, he comments that “The French our Relish help, and well supply / The want of things too gross by Decency,” suggesting that the older taste for sugared meat was giving way to garlic (p. 97). For King, French standards have become the map for the navigation of what he calls “the various Maze of Taste” (p. 105); and he uses Apicius not only to lend an antique panache to his cosmopolitanism, but to help chart a new sensibility in cuisine appropriate to it. In a fine pun—“what was Earth before became a rich Terrene” (p. 93)—an Old English word mutates into a romance word, echoing a culinary metamorphosis.

Dietary topography was being hotly contested at the time; but although their political conclusions about French cuisine disagree with King’s, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele state the same facts about its nature. They seized on the spice trade as a symbol of foreign threats to the English nation; and the Tatler and Spectator criticized the superficialities of the fashionable world, including transnational fashions in flavorings. In the early eighteenth century, journals were turning their attention to the threats suspected in exotic and luxurious tastes: reacting against the continental tastes enjoyed by wealthy town dwellers, Steele and Robert Campbell promoted simplicity, and Addison and William Cullen fulminated against gluttony. ⁴

The Tatler for 21 March 1710 is indicative of the trend: Steele recites the lineage of beef as a symbol of stout aristocratic Englishness: “The Renown’d King Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted Ox.” Urban taste for “Fricacies and Ragousts [sic],” however, have led to the emasculation of “many great Families”; and models of health are now found among “the meaner Sort of People, or in the wild Gentry, who have been educated among the Woods or Mountains.” Peter the Wild Boy, a media phenomenon of 1726, was one such example—a vegetarian brought from the forests of Hanover to the court and lionized as a noble savage. Steele takes issue with the highly...