By Lindariel
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"There is no record of the Shire-folk commemorating either March 25 or September 22; but in the Westfarthing, especially in the country round Hobbiton Hill, there grew up a custom of making holiday and dancing in the Party Field, when weather permitted, on April 6. Some said that it was old Sam Gardner’s birthday, some said that it was the day on which the Golden Tree first flowered in 1420, and some that it was the Elves’ New Year."
-- The Return of the King, Appendix D, "The Calendars"
It is easy to imagine that the miraculous mallorn the illustrious Samwise Gamgee planted in the Party Field first flowered in 1420 on his birthday. Sam's early Fourth Age descendants maintaining the Red Book of Westmarch would have been well placed to know whether or not the date really was Sam's birthday and also would have delighted in recording not one but three reasons to celebrate. Two of the reasons to celebrate 6 April were specific and Shire-centric, but the date for Yestarë, the Elves' New Year, is a little more obscure.
One could trudge through the weeds of the calendar discussion in Appendix D to figure out the date of the Elves' New Year, but happily Appendix B is more direct. Appendix B records that "on the day of the New Year of the Elves, Celeborn and Thranduil met in the midst of the forest."1 Shortly thereafter it records the "meeting of Celeborn and Thranduil" on April 6 of the Shire Reckoning.2 April 6 therefore corresponds to Yestarë by the commutative property of dating.
The Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings took fairly well to life outdoors, and Bilbo once threw a truly enormous outdoor birthday party with "songs, dances, music, games, and, of course, food and drink" as well as fireworks.3 The triply propitious date of 6 April seems like a perfect occasion for all the Westfarthing hobbitses to take to the outdoors as well, for an official beginning of picnic season in the Shire.
Since it's early in the spring, campfires or some other outdoor cooking arrangement might be pleasant as well as providing the means to prepare one of Sam's signature dishes, rabbit stew, outdoors. Bringing food cooked indoors to a picnic outdoors, on the other hand, means you can pick up an order of fish and chips in celebration of one of Sam's other signature dishes. Either way, no Hobbit picnic would be complete without beer, some kind of mushroom dish, and bread. Mushroom ketchup would be a good condiment for the day as well.
For all the ways in which this day's celebration invokes Samwise and a mallorn tree, perhaps it is a good time to consider baking some lembas, or at least something like it. Lembas will be the subject of Part II of this article.
The chapter "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit" gives us the clearest and most sustained glimpse of Hobbit cookery in the entire legendarium. Unlike Bilbo's distracted bustling about Bag End in "An Unexpected Party," in the wilds of Ithilien we see a cook assess his options, prepare his tools and equipment, acquire ingredients, prepare, serve, and make excuses for a meal. And it is Sam we see. We know that he "was a good cook, even by hobbit reckoning."4 An attentive reading of the passage reveals which ingredients Sam thought were necessary to a proper rabbit stew: coneys, broth, onions, carrots, turnips, potatoes, bay-leaves, thyme, and sage, plus bread to eat with it.5 Surely in after years Sam would have told the story, over steaming bowls of properly made rabbit stew, of how he once had to conjure up a rabbit stew au maigre from two coneys and a handful of herbs. No doubt every Hobbit-child in attendance would roll their eyes and remember to be properly grateful for the existence of taters.
Dorothy Hartley's Food in England, the celebrated handbook of English cooking from the medieval period into the first half of the twentieth century, does not offer any thoughts on stewed rabbit specifically. For the most part Hartley discusses roasted rabbit dishes; the closest recipe she gives to stewed rabbit is the traditional jugged hare, made with blood and wine in a bain-marie.6 Yet Sam's process doesn't evince any preparations or expectations of jugged hare, not with his expressed wish for half a dozen potatoes! Tolkien is also on record as saying he disliked French food,7 so perhaps the fussiness of a jugged hare was not at all to his liking. Hartley's "An Old Tough 'Rabbit Pot'" would likely have been too elaborate for Tolkien's taste also, since it involved cooking all the ingredients of her rabbit pie recipe (including an elderly rabbit) plus some additional ingredients in a pot with a crust on top.8 Instead, Tolkien may have been influenced by exposure to some homely cook's version of a stew of young fresh rabbit with many root vegetables, particularly potatoes. Sam's idea of rabbit stew clearly represented a rustic dish Tolkien enjoyed, given how lovingly he depicts the way Sam reimagines, makes do, prepares, and serves it.
Turning back a little further to Mrs. Beeton, the dominant late nineteenth-century English cookbook author, we find much more on the topic of rabbits cooked in liquid. According to Mrs. Beeton, rabbits do happen to be in season in April.9 She offers several recipes for Rabbit Soup, Boiled Rabbit, and Stewed Rabbit. The Rabbit Soup dish includes some of the root vegetables that Sam desires for his own stewed rabbit dish, although the complete preparation is a panade (a smooth soup thickened with breadcrumbs) which is many steps more complicated than any dish we might regard as a stew.
Rabbit Soup.
181. Ingredients.—2 large rabbits, or 3 small ones; a faggot of savoury herbs, 1/2 head of celery, 2 carrots, 1 onion, 1 blade of mace, salt and white pepper to taste, a little pounded mace, 1/2 pint of cream, the yolks of 2 eggs boiled hard, the crumb of a French roll, nearly 3 quarts of water.
Mode.—Make the soup with the legs and shoulders of the rabbit, and keep the nice pieces for a dish or entrée. Put them into warm water, and draw the blood; when quite clean, put them in a stewpan, with a faggot of herbs, and a teacupful, or rather more, of veal stock or water. Simmer slowly till done through, and add the 3 quarts of water, and boil for an hour. Take out the rabbet, pick the meat from the bones, covering it up to keep it white; put the bones back in the liquor, add the vegetables, and simmer for 2 hours; skim and strain, and let it cool. Now pound the meat in a mortar, with the yolks of the eggs, and the crumb of the roll previously soaked; rub it through a tammy, and gradually add it to the strained liquor, and simmer for 15 minutes. Mix arrowroot or rice-flour with the cream (say 2 dessert-spoonfuls), and stir in the soup; bring it to a boil, and serve. This soup must be very white, and instead of thickening it with arrowroot or rice-flour, vermicelli or pearl barley can be boiled in a little stock, and put in 5 minutes before serving.
Time.—Nearly 4 hours. Average cost, 1s. per quart.
Seasonable from September to March.
Sufficient for 10 persons.10
I found a recipe for a simple rabbit stew similar to Sam's ideal version, including root vegetables but no fiddly ingredients. It's made in a slow cooker.11 With a little attention, that method can easily be adapted to stovetop, oven, or firepit cooking; the main concern is to keep the heat very low and constant under a well-covered cooking vessel.
While Sam's rabbit stew may not represent a squarely traditional English dish, it sounds remarkably like an early twentieth-century American beef stew save for the change of meat. And if you're like me and don't eat rabbit, you can always substitute for rabbit stew with any favorite recipe for meat stew. Don't forget the taters (unless you're allergic, of course)!
The first fish and chips concessions arose in England during the early 1860s. Its popularity immediately skyrocketed, and over the course of decades the dish became firmly synonymous with British culinary identity. Even during World War II, when most British foods were subject to rationing, "the Minister For Food, Lord Woolton, exempted fish and chips from rationing."12 During the war is precisely when Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, so perhaps it is no surprise to find that ubiquitous British in the work. He even gives it pride of place: fish and chips is the only dish Sam speculates about preparing at some point in the future. By attributing skill in preparing it to Sam, Tolkien reinforces Sam's identity as a particularly British cook. Tolkien also uses the dish to create a rare moment of humor during the dangerous quest: Sam is so sure of his proficiency with it that he suggests he can convert Sméagol to eating cooked fish.
But how would Tolkien expect his fish and chips to be made? Let us set aside the rare inclusion of a New World anachronism, "po-ta-toes,"13 for linguists to argue over and focus instead on the fish. Food historians seem to regard the origin of the fried fish element of fish and chips as a Sephardic Jewish introduction into Baroque England. Frying fish on Friday had more than a simple alliterative purpose in the days before refrigerators: it was a way to prepare cooked food ahead for the Jewish Sabbath, a day on which regulating flames, and therefore cooking, was forbidden. Frying the fish with a coating stabilized it into a semi-preserved food that could be kept overnight and eaten on Saturday.
The first Jewish cookbook ever published in English, The Jewish Manual (1846), includes two variations on a fried fish recipe. According to The Daily Mail, it is the earliest fried fish recipe in English.14 Be that as it may, by 1846 Jewish cooks in England were being instructed to coat their fish for frying with egg and flour if it was to be served cold, and with egg and breadcrumbs if it was to be served hot.15 This approach holds true for most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British recipes for fried fish. While most fried fish recipes in British cookbooks of the period are bone-in, occasionally the same treatment is extended to boned fillets of fish,16 as most fish for fish and chips is served these days.
Later in the nineteenth century, Mrs. Beeton offers more than a dozen recipes for fried fish of various species (e.g., perch, plaice, sole, whiting), generally with the bones left in. Almost all of them are prepared with egg and breadcrumbs and served hot. Oysters and sprats are prepared with batters containing eggs, flour, and breadcrumbs. Whitebait, a very small fish, is the only fish she recommends be prepared for frying with only flour. She does not, however, ever suggest a fried fish be paired with fried potatoes.
Miss Tattersall's Jewish Cookery Book, a teaching cookbook published in 1895 for the School Board for London, offered a series of lessons for teaching young Jewish women to create various dishes and meals. Lesson X is (bone-in) fish fillets and chips, the earliest English recipe I have found for the pairing so far. Since one of the intentions of the book is to teach kosher practices, it may be that the recipe for fish and chips is there to provide religiously observant Jewish families with a way to eat the popular street food without having to patronize a non-kosher establishment. It calls for coating the fish first with two tablespoons of flour and then with beaten egg. "If liked the fish could be dipped in batter and then fried; this method is cheaper," the author notes.17 Like a great many early English recipes for fried fish, Lesson X calls for a garnish of fresh parsley fried until crispy in oil.
Nowadays most British fish for fish and chips is cooked in a batter coating made with flour, beer, and leavening rather than bound breadcrumbs. Bound breadcrumbs was apparently the preferred method in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps Tolkien would acknowledge and accept the modern battered version of fish and chips, but I like to think he would prefer the old-fashioned breadcrumb coating of the home-cooked version.
Even if you don't try Stewed Rabbit or pick up some fish and chips, you can consider trying mushroom ketchup for Sam's Birthday. What could possibly be more Hobbit-y than a sauce made of mushrooms that you can put on almost anything?
Mushroom ketchup predates tomato ketchup; it dates back to (at least) the eighteenth century, and the first published recipes for it were British. For many generations it has been a standard condiment on British tables and a component in many sauces and gravies. You can still buy it in bottles from English grocers; George Watkins brand is the easiest to find on the Internet.
Traditional mushroom ketchup is a thin liquid, unlike tomato ketchup. Its place in a flavor profile, like fish sauce or soy sauce, is to provide salt and umami flavoring. Essentially, it is the juice rendered from salted chopped fresh field mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, which is boiled down and spiced. Modern mushroom ketchup contains vinegar, which is not strictly traditional but still very well-loved; but it is also possible to make your own in the traditional way.
Mrs. Beeton has a very straightforward recipe that starts with a formula based on how many pecks of mushrooms are used.
472. INGREDIENTS.—To each peck of mushrooms 1/2 lb. of salt; to each quart of mushroom-liquor 1/4 oz. of cayenne, 1/2 oz. of allspice, 1/2 oz. of ginger, 2 blades of pounded mace.
Mode.—Choose full-grown mushroom-flaps, and take care they are perfectly fresh-gathered when the weather is tolerably dry; for, if they are picked during very heavy rain, the ketchup from which they are made is liable to get musty, and will not keep long. Put a layer of them in a deep pan, sprinkle salt over them, and then another layer of mushrooms, and so on alternately. Let them remain for a few hours, when break them up with the hand; put them in a nice cool place for 3 days, occasionally stirring and mashing them well, to extract from them as much juice as possible. Now measure the quantity of liquor without straining, and to each quart allow the above proportion of spices, &c. Put all into a stone jar, cover it up very closely, put it in a saucepan of boiling water, set it over the fire, and let it boil for 3 hours. Have ready a nice clean stewpan; turn into it the contents of the jar, and let the whole simmer very gently for 1/2 hour; pour it into a jug, where it should stand in a cool place till the next day; then pour it off into another jug, and strain it into very dry clean bottles, and do not squeeze the mushrooms. To each pint of ketchup add a few drops of brandy. Be careful not to shake the contents, but leave all the sediment behind in the jug; cork well, and either seal or rosin the cork, so as perfectly to exclude the air. When a very clear bright ketchup is wanted, the liquor must be strained through a very fine hair-sieve, or flannel bag, after it has been very gently poured off; if the operation is not successful, it must be repeated until you have quite a clear liquor. It should be examined occasionally, and if it is spoiling, should be reboiled with a few peppercorns.18
The late 19th century English compendium An Encyclopædia of Practical Cookery contains no fewer than five recipes for mushroom ketchup. Some of them are for large quantities of mushrooms, with the largest clearly an industrial size batch calculated in multiples of seven pounds. All of them call for letting the salted mushrooms sit for a few days, and there is some variation in cooking time and spicing,19 but the recipes are all substantially the same as Mrs. Beeton's.
In the twentieth century, Dorothy Hartley offers a more downsized, seat-of-the-pants version that involves laying down and salting mushrooms as they come in, until your earthenware crock on the back of the stove in your cottage is full. If you chop your mushrooms small and fill up a wide-mouth Mason quart jar or similar nonreactive container, you should be able to get a useful quantity of mushroom ketchup out of a one-pound experiment. Just keep the contents protected from light (in a cabinet or under a cloth) and loosely capped so the mushrooms don't dry out while you're building up your collection.
Put all peel, stalks, broken mushrooms, and the spicy rich black old ones (too ripe to cook otherwise), into an earthenware jar, strewing them with salt. Cover the jar and set it at the back of the stove to keep warm. You can keep adding to it whilst the mushrooms last, salting each layer lightly and pressing down well.
When the jar is full, and the dark liquid flowing, set it in the oven and give it a good, steady boiling. Strain through muslin, pressing well, and for each quart of liquid add an ounce of black pepper and three to four blades of mace or a quarter of a nutmeg broken to bits.
Give it a good boil-up, and strain into hot, well-scalded bottles, which cork immediately. If put into sterilised bottles, it will keep indefinitely, but the delicate aroma of mushrooms is naturally fugitive, and a bottle once opened should be used quickly.20
The eighteenth-century food blog Savoring the Past has a recipe21 based on a video put up by their business, Jas. Townsend & Son Inc., that is well within a normal modern cook's capacity. It is sourced from a 1747 recipe in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.22 I didn't choose this recipe for my first attempt because it's a little more elaborate than I was looking to do for a first time. But the photo tutorial and the video would be very useful no matter which recipe you choose to follow and however you choose to flavor your mushroom ketchup.
After reading several historic recipes I came up with the following composite recipe to make my mushroom ketchup. Since I could not immediately get ahold of some Agaricus campestris, I used brown immature Agaricus bisporus, i.e., cremini mushrooms. White immature Agaricus bisporus, button mushrooms, would do fine also.
Wipe the mushrooms well with a soft cloth to remove any dirt (I used an old linen dinner napkin). Do not wash!
Dice mushrooms into a nonreactive bowl, salting periodically as you go, 1 tablespoon at a time. (You could probably use a food processor for the chopping.) Let sit an hour or so.
Stir it all up with your hands: the texture will be spongey, bubbly, squishy, and still granular from the salt, but the mushrooms should already be casting off liquid. Weigh it down (I used a plate and a clean weight); let it sit 24 hours.
Pour into a steel, glass, or ceramic cookpot. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for an hour, well covered.
Line a strainer or colander with a soft clean cloth. (Use doubled cheesecloth, a jelly bag, old linen tea towels, an old T-shirt, or the like. I have been known to steal new cotton shop rags from my husband's stash to use from time to time.) Set it in a bowl and pour in the contents of the cookpot. Let sit to drain.
When it is cool enough to handle, squeeze out the liquid with your hands and pour it into a pint jar. Stir in the spices and let sit overnight. Leave the mushroom pieces in the strainer to drain overnight.
Next morning, reclaim the small amount of juice the mushrooms have cast off, pouring it into the jar. Strain the juice through the cloth again, thus removing the spices from the liquid, and pour the juice into a bottle for storage. It amuses me to reuse a soy sauce bottle for this.
Yield: about a pint of opaque, very dark brown thin liquid that looks for all the world like soy sauce. Label and keep refrigerated. It will be fine unrefrigerated for a while, but has a shorter shelf life than some condiments, so try to use it up as fast as a Hobbit would.
I also spread the squeezed mushrooms on a baking sheet and put it in the oven at 180F to dry for six hours. They dried down to less than one cup of very dark mushroom gravel which I stored in a tightly covered glass jar. The dried mushroom bits can be used to add texture as well as salt and umami to sauces or soups.
I like the mild nutmeggy overtone in the flavor very much. I didn't notice much ginger, oddly; the cayenne left a tingle on my tongue but nothing objectionable, and the salt level was entirely manageable as well. I'd like to do more research into how commercial mushroom ketchup was flavored in the period 1915-1945 and see how close I can get to that.
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Lindariel has been a Tolkien fan for nearly five decades and a fandom author for nearly six months. She is Team Vairë and enjoys wearing obscure JRRT fangirl tees. Her happy place is a mallorn tree. When she's not reading or writing, she might be tablet weaving Tengwar inscription bands or planning a Tolkien garden.