The empress of ice cream

Editors Note

For many decades the sheaf of seventeenth-century papers discovered in the Great Library at Ditchley Park, which subsequently came to be known as the Ditchley Bundle, remained largely ignored by scholars. Like many texts of that turbulent period it was written in code, one apparendy even more impenetrable than that employed by Samuel Pepys. It was not until the sale of the Bundle, along with dozens of other old manuscripts, to America in the late 1990s that an archivist - actually a bright young intern from Wellesley - wondered what might happen if the source material were written not in English but in French, and the hitherto private journal of Louise de Keroualle, mistress to King Charles II, was revealed to the world.

It seems that at some point during her time in England Louise began to write in her native tongue an encrypted account of her life at the English court. Whether this was to alleviate homesickness, as an insurance policy in case of arrest, or, as has most recently been suggested, as a kind of substitute for the confession she could no longer make to a priest - being by now, of course, in a state of unrepentant mortal sin - we cannot know. Nor do such speculations arise naturally from the manuscript itself, which in places reads more like a modern political strategy document or manifesto for a united Europe than a memoir; and which, despite her ostensible position in the royal household, actually contains far less in the way of salacious detail than, for example, Pepys’ diary does. In making these extracts I have concentrated on Louise’s personal experiences of the court and her circle, rather than on her involvement in the grand intrigues and plots that preoccupied much of Europe at the time, which are already ably described elsewhere.

Carlo .Demirco’s treatise - if that is not too grand a word for the preface to a practical book of recipes - needs far less introduction. Food historians have long been fascinated by the history of ice cream and, in particular, by the faet that the first recorded mention of it anywhere in the world comes in England, on the menu of a ceremonial feast given by King Charles II for the Knights of the Garter in 1671 - the same year, incidentally, that Louise became his mistress. Carlo Demirco is not the only person who can claim to be ice cream’s progenitor - one must also consider rival accounts such as Lucian Audiger’s Ln Maison Ke^lee^ published in Paris in 1692 - but it is the only one which explains all the known circumstances, such as the fact that at the Garter Feast the royal confectioner served only a single bowl of ice cream, for the king’s table alone; and which contains recipes to back up his assertions: recipes, moreover, many of which are still in use today.

Demirco’s book - first printed in 1678, translated into five languages by the end of the century, repubhshed during the great ice cream craze of the Georgian era as The Book of Ices, and only forgotten once modern refrigeration methods finally made his techniques outdated - may seem an odd companion piece to the secret, encrypted memoir of a royal courtesan, particularly one as generally unpopular as Louise, whom both the public of her own day and modern historians alike tend to view as an’ unprincipled representative of a particularly avaricious age. Perhaps the pubhcation, finally, of these parts of her journal may go some way to presenting her in a different light. Intriguingly, there is good evidence that the two documents - the recipes and the diary - once lay side by side together in the Bundle during its long sojourn in the library cupboard: the kitchen stains which adorn the pages of The Book of Ices suggest that, at some stage in the intervening three hundred years, the Bundle was discovered and only Demirco’s volume removed, being subsequently put to a use of which its author would surely have approved.

PART ONE

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