The Great Stop of the Exchequer, when his government had grandly announced that it would be paying neither interest nor capital on its debts for a period of a year, now looked like a terrible miscalculation. For what banker would lend rhore to a king who did not keep up his payments? What debt was safe, if a king could subsequently alter its terms as it pleased him?
His only income now was his pension from Louis, and what he could raise from Parhament. Parhament made it clear that it would vote no more without results. The king was on the verge of bankruptcy.
That was the month he gave Louise a sedan chair upholstered in silver silk, and two negro footmen to carry it; 'a necklace worth three thousand pounds, a rope of pearls worth twice that, and
rebuilt her apartments to include a hall of mirrors. That was the month he gave Nell a carriage with six white horses, to show that she was the lover of royalty, and a silver table to match her silver plates. That was the month he ordered the building of a new state apartment at Windsor, and flooded St James’s Park for a mock battle on the water.
It was a summer of ice creams - of course it was. The king was much taken with his new glasshouses; his gardeners had succeeded in growing a fine crop of pineapples, apricots and musk melons, and he gave orders that I was to have whatever I desired. I made an ice cream that looked exactly like a pineapple, sweetened with a littie sugar and grape must. I surrounded it with real pineapples and sliced it open with a flourish in front of the king himself, declaring that he would find it the sweetest, ripest fruit in his kingdom. This event occasioned more amazement at court, I believe, than the capitulation of Utrecht.
I found myself running out of ideas. Once I had served the king and his guests every fruit that England grew, every cordial of Europe, every seed water of the world, what then?
Sometimes I found myself wishing I was like Hannah, who served no more than five or six pies in any one month, depending on what had taken her fancy at the market.
‘What is this?’ I called to her across the inn’s dining room one day, as I lifted a steaming crust on something rich and deep-red and unfamiliar.
‘Umble pie.’
‘I am still none the wiser.’
‘Venison offal. A deer’s heart, tongue, brains, and stomach, with onion gravy and thyme. All the parts that wealthy people don’t want to eat.’
Yet even wealthy people, I noticed, now sent their servants to the Red Lion to buy a few pies for their supper. Hannah’s renown was spreading.
‘And tomorrow?’
‘Cock-a-leekie. On Thursday, ale-and-kidney. And on Friday, cheese-and-onion. Why?’
I grunted. ‘I need some new flavours for the king.’
‘Send him a pie,’ she said facetiously.
I could not, of course, but the next time I was in the pantry I pulled out her cookbooks and thumbed through them, looking for ideas.
‘What are you doing?’ Hannah asked, coming in.
‘I mean to make some herb sorbets. This sounds interesting, for example. Culpeper speaks of the culinary uses of nettles—’
‘You should be more careful. I have told you that book should not be left out,’ she said quietly.
I looked at her, perplexed. ‘I thought you meant, to keep the pages clean.’
She shook her head. ‘Culpeper’s books have been banned by the Stationer’s Office. If they find them, they burn the book and arrest the owner. And that’s if you’re lucky. Sometimes they burn both. Herbals make good witches’ pyres, they say.’
‘But why?’
She took the book from me and slid it back into the shelf. ‘Culpeper was a Fifth-monarchy-man - that is to say, one of those who believed that the time of kings was coming to an end, and the time of freeborn men beginning. That was partly why he published his knowledge, and in plain English - so that ordinary people could have the information that physicians and apothecaries were trying to keep to themselves, with their Latin and their guilds. Much good it did him. Or those who followed him.’
I remembered those herbs in her pies - sage, sorrel, a delicious whisper of tarragon, onion gravy and thyme . . . ‘You were one of them? A herbalist?’
She nodded. ‘Among other things.’
‘Then will you help me devise some ices?’
She shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Why not?’
‘Good. I will pay you something extra—’
I do not want paying,’ she said quietly. ‘Culpeper gave his own knowledge away for nothing, in the hope that people would make use of it. It is not for me to make a profit from it.’
And so began another stage of my culinary education. For while we began by making simple herb sorbets - nettle, sage, fig leaf, pelargonium and lemon balm — it soon became apparent that herbs were even better in combination, either with each other or with other tastes, and that by employing them in this way an almost infinite variety of flavours could be created.
This, truly, was no longer engineering. This was cookery, pure and simple. For certain flavours married, and others did not, and it required both imagination and skill to envisage what such a marriage might be like - whether it would be a fruitful union or a barren one. Who would have thought, for example, that pippin and rose petal ice cream would be so good, the deep, sweet richness of the apples and the voluptuous scent of the flowers making the ice cream almost ridiculously sensual and heady in the mouth Who would have thought that celery - the mildest and most watery of vegetables - would, when its seeds were toasted and combined with hibiscus flowers, have the clean, piercing, dry flavour it did? Who would have paired blackcurrant and mint, or oranges and basil, or made a cordial of maidenhair fern and black pepper?
Fig and bay leaves, peach and hyssop, clotted cream and lavender, apricot and cardamom - these were among the ice creams we made that day. They were majestic, fascinating, even remarkable yet the ingredients were as simple as an English summer’s garden.
I could not ask Hannah not to taste them, of course; I needed her expertise and her palate. And when she in turn wanted to get the opinion of a third person, someone who did not know what to expect, she quite naturally turned to Elias and gave him a spoonful, and he told us what he thought.
‘It’s-wonderful!’ he cried of an ice cream straight out of Culpeper, made with cucumbers and celery.
‘It is, isn’t it!’ his mother replied. And the two of them danced a litde jig around the pantry.
‘I thought you would be against such things,’ I said, surprised.
‘Why.^ We h-e not opposed to pleasure, only to privilege.’
‘Yet these are for the king alone,’ I reminded her. ‘The king and a few of his favourites.’
‘Yes,’ she said, a little deflated. ‘Of course.’
‘Perhaps if you met him you would not be so against him. He is a charming man.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said flady, and danced no more.
Later that month, as the king ate an ice cream of barberries and lemon balm, he said to me thoughtfully, ‘You are a man who knows about ice, Demirco.’
‘Indeed, sir.’
‘Louis’s plan is to wait for winter. After all, if we can ride coaches across the Thames, why should he not drive his cannon across the frozen polders?’
I hesitated, and he said, ‘You think it will not work?’
‘The issue is how much salt there is,’ I explained. ‘Just as the Thames does not freeze below The Great Bridge,^ so allowing in seawater would immediately cause the polders to unfreeze again. It all depends how determined the Dutch are to resist the invasion.’
‘William of Orange has stated that every Dutchman will drown before they see their country Catholic.’
‘Then I certainly would not trust to ice alone to win this war.’
A few weeks later Arlington and Buckingham were sent to Holland to try to conclude a separate peace. The French, furious, accused the English of betrayal. In the event, no peace was forthcoming, and we were back at war, with the added complication that now Charles’s own allies did not trust him either.