Pomanders

In the malodorous past, elegant people sometimes carried around on their persons delightful things called pomanders, which diffused lovely scents all around them and made life more bearable. They were scent receptacles of various sizes, and could be made of metals studded with precious stones, or porcelain, or even various types of fruit embedded with cloves. They usually hung on a chain and could be made to dangle around the neck or the waist or from the hand. The famous portrait of Lady Jane Grey (or is it Catherine Parr?) has her wearing a sort of belt with a largish pomander that hangs almost to the ground. It must have been a great sign of aristocratic disdain when some noble held a pomander to his or her nose while passing through a crowd of stinky plebeians, as I have seen in a painting from the nineteenth century of Cardinal Wolsey (from the fifteenth) so doing.

Scroll to the bottom of this Socity of Creative Anachronism page for some old recipes for making a pomander, and a modern alternative involving beeswax in place of ambergris, among other things: http://www.elizabethancostume.net/paintedface/index.html#14

Apparently one must be careful not to put rosewater into the rest of the ingredients: the author describes the reaction of the admixture as "volcanic"!

On the Santa Cruz Public Library's website there is a pomander recipe for which one needs more mundane ingredients,: http://www.santacruzpl.org/readyref/files/m-p/pomand.shtml

I think this would be a charming gift to give someone, myself included, as on the way to campus I walk by some nasty frat houses that leave their trashbins in a deplorable state of disarray!

Expect a picture of Lady Jane Grey and her pomander when I get to a computer that will let me put it here, as I am on a silly school computer right now!

À bientôt!