Sops and dripping (with a few more fats thrown in)

We came to St Mary’s church in the Suffolk village of Wood Ditton, searching for a particular gravestone and its epitaph to a local man described as a gourmand. On the first of March 1753, William Symonds was interred in St Mary’s graveyard and, at his own request, his stone has a small iron dripping-dish affixed to its front, protected by a rusting iron grille. A former turnspit to the late Duke of Rutland at Cheveley in Cambridgeshire (although some records state he was a gamekeeper too), Mr Symonds reached a great age of eighty. As he lay dying of an undetermined affliction, his last wishes were that his stone might tell the tale of his demise. They are believed to be his own words:

“Here lies my corpse, I was the man,

That loved a sop in the dripping pan;

But now, believe me, I am dead:

See here the pan stands at my head.

Still for sops till the last I cried

But could not eat, and so I died.

My neighbours, they perhaps will laugh,

When they do read my epitaph.”

Poor Mr Symonds had endured that most terrible of afflictions for a man who loved his grub- an inability to eat coupled with a raging appetite for something comforting and indulgent as he approached his death. His dripping pan has turned to rust, and the remains are barely visible behind the protective iron grille, but the faint ghost of his epitaph is visible, engraved on the thick stone slab. The words took some time to decipher in the cold bright light of a March afternoon, although the word ‘dripping’ retained the most clarity. I like to imagine that William Symonds would have been pleased by that.

How on earth did a man of his modest means manage to eat his way to a dripping-related death? His access to meat-dripping belied his fiscal and social class because dripping was generally not freely available for poorer working people. However, his love for it might be explained by his occupation as a turnspit to the Duke of Rutland, which seems to have provided him with a steady supply of fats. There isn’t a huge amount of information about William Symonds (as you might expect), but a life spent proximate to the dukedom means that there is some documentary evidence of his life with them. In records from Cheveley Park dated 1896, he was described as “an eccentric lad” who had filled an important office for many years, helping to roast the game and meat from livestock provided by the ducal estate.

For William, it must have been extremely arduous work in unpleasantly hot conditions. Indeed, records of the Tudor turnspit boys who worked at Hampton Court give some idea of the travails turnspits endured because when they divested themselves of their upper clothing to cool down, they were commanded to ‘no longer to go naked or in garments of such vileness as they do now.’ William would have required every drop of that meaty sop to build the upper-body strength and musculature required to keep the spit turning for hours on end. It wasn’t only humans who turned these spits though. First mentioned in documents from 1576, specially bred small dogs were trained to run in a wheel that turned a roasting spit and to make them run faster, hot pieces of coal might be tossed into their metal cage. But by 1850, dogs had fallen out of popularity because of the creation of inexpensive, mechanical spit turning machines called clock jacks and by the turn of the century, both human and canine turnspits had become obsolete. The invention of closed ovens further accelerated the decline of cooking over an open fire although of late, cooking over live fire has had its own renaissance in modern British restaurants - it has always been commonplace in many diasporic restaurants though.

(Turnspit dogs at work: illustration from 1800 from Remarks on a Tour to North and South Wales )

The word ‘soup’ derives from sop or suppa (meaning the slices of bread onto which broth or cooking juices was poured). Sops were commonly known as pieces of bread dipped into the drippings from the spit-roasted meat. A pan placed underneath the spit collected its juices. Another type of sop came from bowls of pottage or gruel. When the bread had ‘sopped up’ and was soaked in liquid, meat juices or fat, the trick was to convey the sop as swiftly as possible to the mouth before it disintegrated in the hand. Joan of Arc liked to sop her bread with wine instead of cooking juices. Wealthier people in the Middle Ages threw their trencher bread (so-called because it functioned as an early plate for meat and sauce) out to the dogs, despite it being sopped in a good sauce. Sometimes the trencher bread would be cast out to the waiting poor too.

Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat (in the book ‘A History of Food’) tells of St Patroclus, a third-century saint from Troyes, who managed to survive on barley bread dipped into water and sprinkled with coarse salt. In this practice, he anticipated the early days of soup when a crust or piece of bread would be placed at the bottom of a low bowl, and the gruel or other liquid then poured over it. We can see the origins of the Tuscan bread-thickened soups, the French garbures and onion soups, and the Spanish gazpacho. There are echoes of sops in what we call French toast (pain perdu) and in a fifteenth-century Italian recipe for suppa dorata, where pieces of bread are dipped in beaten egg, sugar and rosewater, then fried in butter and served encrusted with more sugar. Think of Zuppa Inglese too, where the bread is replaced by sweet cake, which is then soaked in wine or rum and blanketed in thick custard. When I make bread and butter pudding I always ‘sop’ my bread, meaning I leave it to soak in its eggy, milky bath. In Italy, food historian Ken Albala tells of a sturgeon-based dinner in his book, The Banquet, in 1584. Wealthy guests feasted upon sturgeon eggs and beaten flesh of the fish, the latter in a thick soup and served with sops, followed by sturgeon meatballs in a spicy sauce. There were sixteen sturgeon-based platters of food to get through in total, a mighty feast even though some of the courses had a more humble culinary etymology.

Also, at the humbler end of the scale, there’s dripping cake- or bread- which was once eaten in many British regions, although it is rarely heard of now. The Gloucestershire version of this bread, baked in the oven from dripping flour, brown sugar, spices, currants and raisins, had a toffee-like layer at the base of the cake that formed as it baked. Dripping cake gets a mention in Tom Brown’s Schooldays:

“Tom, by a sort of instinct, knew the right cupboards in the kitchen and pantry and soon managed to place on the snuggery table better materials for a meal than had appeared there probably during the reign of his tutor, who was then and there initiated, amongst other things, into the excellence of that mysterious condiment, a dripping-cake. The cake was newly baked, and all rich and flaky; Tom had found it reposing in the cook’s private cupboard, awaiting her return, and as a warning to her, they finished it to the last crumb.”

In Yorkshire, dripping is spread onto good bread and goes by the name of ‘mucky sandwich/bread’ although this habit is not unique to this fine region. My maternal grandparents, who both hailed from the Midlands, kept a large china cup in the fridge, filled to the brim with beef dripping from the Sunday roast, the fat solidifying into a creamy layer over a good two inches of rich beef jelly. Over the week, it would be used to enrich gravies and pastry or spread onto hot toast and melt. On an especially good day, I would be given a plate of bread fried in dripping, golden and caught around the crust and spread with beef jelly. My grandfather would reminisce about school football where, at half-time, he would wolf down fat-sopped sandwiches with a dollop of his mother’s homemade piccalilli to cut the grease. That Sunday joint kept the family in clover for most of the week, although amusingly, he went on to become a vegetarian in his late teens.

Sops and dripping platefuls are found wherever meat forms part of the diet, although they don’t always incorporate rendered beef fat. Go to Hungary, and you’ll find that they have their own version of mucky bread, which is known locally as fatty bread: goose fat from the well-known Hungarian goose is spread on bread, sprinkled with paprika and eaten with finely chopped peppers and onions. However, Lucy Antal, a Hungarian food campaigner living in Merseyside, tells me that goose is quite a seasonal thing, eaten at Michaelmas and in the winter and, “I would say that pig fat or lard is far more common and popular for the Zsíros Kényir or fatty bread. There is also a lot of chicken fat or schmaltz from the Jewish influences that appear within Hungarian food, so equally chicken fat is spread on bread, sprinkled with salt and then topped with sliced onion, peppers (the pale jade Turkish style peppers- not those awful Dutch things) and then paprika and eaten - either as a breakfast, snack or for supper.”

 “I have eaten Zsíros Kényir at home and also as a sort of tapas in a bar to soak up the alcohol,” she says and tells me about another variation on this theme called pogácsa - “a cream cheese-based scone traditionally served with the rendered bacon pieces from melting down lard on top.”

“The traditional Hungarian pig is a Mangalitza - which is a curly hide pig that has a very good covering of fat,” and “from a bacon fat perspective - we have szalonna  - not dissimilar to the lardo of Italy - which is pretty much a slab of pure pig fat with a streak or two of flesh running through it. This can be melted over an open fire or grill then placed on toast/ bread or very thinly sliced (lardo style) and layered over hot toast.” Antal describes meals “garnished with a piece of szalonna cut to resemble a cockscomb and crisped up.”

Dripping and renderings are infinitely varied in their use, as Jonathan Meades writes: “Beef dripping. Delicious on toast. A scouser’s madeleine. Good for chips and Yorkshire Pudding and anything else that comes from north of the Trent.” You’ll find ‘mucky fat’ sandwiches across West Yorkshire, and you can buy mucky fat too. “Barm cake, roll, bun, oven bottom, batch, cob, stottie, softie bridie, muffin, oggie, bap or buttery will all taste better with a lashing of mucky fat,” says this blog. You’ll find references to it in the writings of Doris Lessing, PD James, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood; it is an important part of the robber tea in The Box of Delights by John Masefield, was eaten by Milly Molly Mandy, and was the heart of the school night supper offered to boarders in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series.

Yorkshire Slang @YorkshireSlang

Bread wi mucky fat 35p a slice! #Bargin

In classical literature, a sop was clearly so prized that it was deemed a suitable bribe for Cereberus, the three-headed dog of Pluto, which guarded the infernal regions' gates in Virgil’s Aeneid. When a person died, the Greeks and Romans would put a cake in their hands as a sop to this fearsome creature, who might therefore allow them to pass without molestation in exchange. Here we see the sop gains a secondary meaning as a bribe or salve. There exists the possibility that Mr Symons recognises that his much-prized sops might ease his suffering and might also provide him with a swifter and easier passage to eternal life. Or might he have been trying to bribe death to not come for him? We cannot be sure about that, but I was told that my own grandfathers sop sandwiches were so coveted by his footballing friends that he could probably have arranged to have the match thrown in exchange for a few bites- the equivalent of having Cereberus in goal.

I feel warmly towards Mr Symonds. Morton’s Sixpenny Almanack and Diary take a dim view of one’s vices being ‘considered a fitting subject for perpetuating in stone’ when it published his epitaph. Indeed Mr Symonds acknowledges his own excess of appetite and I am inclined to approve of a man who wanted to cheer up his own neighbours whenever they visited the graveyard and church. Clearly, Wood Ditton locals appreciated his little joke because when the original stone was accidentally broken during wedding party festivities at St Mary’s Church around 1871, it was removed and repaired. The stone was re-erected with the original dripping pan in place.

Further reading on dripping, tallow, and pork fat:

On the Hungarian use of rendered fat, Lucy Antal recommends this article, which is pretty accurate from her own recall.

“There was a gentleman – I think they called him a captain of industry – he liked his bread and dripping. If we had roast beef – we did more often then, especially in winter – he’d whisper to me before we left the dining room, ‘Mrs P, I’ll be round to the kitchen just before bed.’….He loved his bread and dripping. He told me that he’d had it as a boy.” (P D James in The Lighthouse)

The British were using the noun “dripping” as far back as the 15th century: a reference to “drepyngpannes” (dripping-pans) was published in an Act of Parliament in 1463, according to the OED, and references to “dripping” started to emerge from 1530 onwards. (A drepyng of rost meate.)

Regula Ysewijn on Yorkshire pud and dripping.

Margot Nash’s film about Australia’s Great Depression of the 1930s goes by the name ‘Bread and Dripping’, which gives you a clue about this food’s sustaining nature.

Nikki Miller-Ka’s piece about the southern bacon grease jar inspired a Twitter thread.

How to render bacon fat.

A comprehensive guide to the rendering of fats and how to cook with them, here.

The wonderful Shane Mitchell writes about Britain’s dripping history for Taste Magazine, and here’s Gareth May on the same subject for the Independent.

Fat-tailed sheep are a valuable resource in Middle Eastern regions where the fat is used for cooking and preserving food. They are so important that images of these sheep have been immortalised in rock paintings, mosaics, and on canvas for centuries. Think of it as ‘Middle Eastern schmaltz’, writes Miriam Kresh or, as Middle Eastern confit (although we could refer to confit as ‘European Qawama’). Annissa Helou writes of its declining popularity in health-conscious Uzbekistan and offers some ancient Syrian recipes from the book itab al-Wusla ila al-Habib here.

The importance of fats to the diet of Indigenous Americans.

A lovely piece about pork fat and the delicious things made with it in Germany and Austria.

(Library of Congress: The Prince of Wales (George IV) asks, “Dear Mother, pray let me have a sop in the pan.”)