On This Day: “Heart and stomach…”

August 19th, 1588: On this day in 1588, Queen Elizabeth I of England delivered her famous speech to her assembled land forces at Tilbury in Essex as they prepared to repel an expected invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Before the speech was even given, the Armada had been driven from the Strait of Dover in the Battle of Gravelines eleven days earlier and had by then rounded Scotland on its way home. Elizabeth’s troops, however, were still held in readiness in case the Spanish army of Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, might yet attempt to invade from Dunkirk. On the day of the speech, the Queen left her bodyguard before Tilbury Fort and went among her subjects with an escort of six men. Lord Ormonde walked ahead with the Sword of State; he was followed by a page leading the Queen's charger and another bearing her silver helmet on a cushion; then came the Queen herself, in white with a silver cuirass and mounted on a grey gelding. She was flanked on horseback by her lieutenant general the Earl of Leicester on the right, and on the left by the Earl of Essex, her Master of the Horse. Sir John Norreys brought up the rear.

After she had made her rounds through the troops, Elizabeth delivered her speech to them. The version of it most widely considered to be authentic was discovered within a letter addressed to the Duke of Buckingham. The letter had been penned by Leonel Sharp who had been attached to the Earl of Leicester at Tilbury during the threatened invasion of the Armada and would later become chaplain to Buckingham. According to Sharp, the Queen’s speech was as follows:

“My loving people.

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and we do assure you on a word of a prince, they shall be duly paid. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.”

For those who have noted the part of the speech in bold, then you might be wondering why that is so. The simple truth is that here at Tastes Of History we thought it would be fun to create some light-hearted historically themed T-shirts as much for our amusement as anyone else’s. The version pictured took its inspiration from Good Queen Bess’ speech at Tilbury but, having suggested that recipes would be found on our website, it seemed only fair that we deliver on the promise. So, for those who took the time to visit www.tastesofhistory.co.uk, here are a couple of Tudor-period dishes that might fit the bill (please note that no monarchs were harmed in the making of these recipes).

Heart  The first is for braised beef or ox heart. For those unaware, ox heart is today a much under-rated, and underused, cut of meat but this makes it very affordable. As Tom Hunt wrote in his article “An offal waste: why you should be eating ox heart” for The Guardian newspaper in 2020: “Ox heart is an overlooked ingredient, as is most offal, which tends to be treated like waste at the abattoir, where it’s recycled or just disposed of. That’s crazy, because it’s both delicious and affordable: lean and with a clean flavour.” Rather usefully the article also included a recipe for ox heart kebabs which we have yet to try, but our braised beef heart recipe below as proved a popular dish at Mediæval events:

Stomach  If braised heart is not to your taste, then to fulfil the second criteria of our little “joke”, perhaps you might prefer a recipe involving a stomach. The most obvious choice would be for haggis, a savoury pudding containing minced sheep's heart, liver, and lungs, combined with chopped onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, salt, and stock. Traditionally the ingredients are encased in the animal's stomach and cooked (artificial casings more often used today).

It could be argued that the idea of quickly cooking offal inside an animal's stomach has ancient origins [1] since for early hunters all the ingredients would have been conveniently available after a successful hunt. Thus, cooking the perishable offal near the site of the kill makes sense as it would ensure little of the valuable food was wasted. It would be relatively simple to grill the liver and kidneys directly over a fire, but this method would be unsuitable for the stomach, intestines, or lungs. Perhaps not wishing to remain in proximity of a fresh kill in case other predators are attracted to it, then an expedient solution might be to dice the offal and stuff it into the cleaned stomach giving the hunters a means to safely transport the meat back to a campsite. It follows that the hunters might add whatever herbs and fillers to the offal filled stomach before boiling the ingredients. In this way, rather than wasting the stomach it becomes a convenient cooking vessel, and a tasty dish something like haggis was born.

Many people might assume haggis to have a Scottish origin, yet the first known written recipes naming a dish made with offal and herbs as “hagese” (pictured) are in a cookbook from Lancashire in northwest England titled Liber Cure Cocorum [2]. This dates from around AD 1430, as does the recipe for “hagws of a schepe” in another English cookbook dated to the same year. These two early references are certainly not proof of an English origin, however, as they only really offer when and where the name was first documented. Indeed, other countries are known to have recipes for something similar, albeit with different names, which were undoubtedly created to solve the problem of perishable ingredients. We can confidently say, however, that haggis is today the national dish of Scotland thanks to Scots poet Robert Burns’ 1786 poem “Address to a Haggis”. From then on, the most popular recipes remain distinctly Scottish. 

Haggis is so popular that it can be purchased from numerous makers and retailers, both on the high-street and online. A search of the latter will return so many versions of haggis, including vegetarian options, that we considered the dish to be thoroughly covered by others as to leave well alone. All of which meant an alternative to satisfy the “stomach” criterion was needed. Time to consider eating Humble Pye as described in Thomas Dawson’s The Good Huswife’s Jewell of 1596:

“To make a Pye of Humbles. Take your humbles being parboiled, and chop them very small with a good quantity of mutton suet, and half a handful of the herbs following - thyme, marjoram, borage, parsley and a little rosemary. Season the same being chopped, with pepper, cloves and mace, and so close your pie and bake it.”

Before proceeding, what exactly are “humbles”? Circa AD 1300 the word numbles (or noumbles) in Old English meant the edible viscera of animals, especially that of deer. The word comes via nombles in Old French for “loin of veal, fillet of beef, or haunch of venison”. This itself is derived from Latin lumulus, a diminutive of lumbus “loin”. Through rebracketing, which commonly occurred as the English language evolved, “a numble pie” would become “an umble pie” in Middle English. Umbles are therefore numbles without the n- but the word still meant what we would refer to today as “offal”. So, while Mediæval nobility or the wealthy would consume the higher quality venison meat, the offal and lesser quality parts of the animal would be baked into a pie for their servants. Thus, as a food fit for low-class servants or the poor, to “eat humble pie” became associated, by the 1800s, with being humiliated and forced to admit error or wrongdoing.

With all that said, we needed a recipe involving if not the stomach, then at least the umbles, so the following recipe for Umble Pye is adapted from one dating to the 1600s:

Bon appétit!

Endnotes:

1. Around 800 BC the earliest appearance in literature of a sheep’s stomach being used to encase what is thought to be a type of black pudding appears in Book 18 of Homer's classic saga “The Odyssey”: “Here at the fire are goats' paunches lying, which we set there for supper, when we had filled them with fat and blood.” The first recognisable recipe, using lengths of intestine as the container rather than a stomach can be found in Book 2 of Apicius’ De Re Coquinaria (“On Cookery”). The recipe botellum sic facies instructs the cook to: “Take the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, chopped pine nuts, onion, and sliced leeks, and mix with blood [and forcemeats]. Add ground pepper and fill the intestine with the stuffing. Cook in stock and wine.”

2. þe nere means ‘the kidneys’.