7 - How to Make a Bisk: The Restoration Cookbook as National Restorative

Summary

Abstract

Scholars credit Robert May and William Rabisha with a central role in the development of seventeenth-century English courtly cuisine. Focusing on a recipe common to both of them—the ‘bisque’ or ‘bisk’—I argue that in the hands of these authors, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Working within the framework of Restoration hospitality, Rabisha and May attempt to transform society by harmonizing foreign influences in order to expand the culinary, religious, and political boundaries of Englishness. The bisk symbolizes a table at which all England shares in a national commensality, even as aspects of that commensality remain fiercely debated.

Keywords: tolerance, hospitality, Restoration, assimilation, courtly cookery, commensality

‘How to Make a Bisk’ opens the seventh chapter, ‘Which teacheth to make all manner of hot boyled meats of flesh’, of William Rabisha's The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (1661). The bisk forms the meat of my argument here in two senses: first, because in the hands of Rabisha and his contemporary, Robert May, this ‘grand boyled meat’ ushered in a new approach to English cuisine. Second, the bisk encapsulates the grand project of incorporation for which these authors strive. Working in the first years of the Restoration, Rabisha and May attempted to transform English society by means of two principles, both abstracted from the experiential practice of cookery, especially recipes such as the bisk: hospitality and assimilation. These principles overlap and often work in tandem, but sometimes also operate in productive tension with each other, contrasting two subtly different views—contained paradoxically, as I will show, within the same recipes and cookbooks—of how to address foreign influences upon English society. I trace the development of this project along culinary, religious, and political lines, showing that both Rabisha and May employ this approach to cookery and cookery writing in the interest of inculcating a culinary tolerance that transcends, in limited but nevertheless important ways, religious, national, and social divisions inherited from the Interregnum, and which builds upon the analogy of how the physical body itself encounters, plays host to, and absorbs the foreign organisms that form its food.