Life After Life 5: Almond Choc-Chip Cake

My latest post on food in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life can be found at my new domain http://frompagetoplate.com/2016/08/19/life-after-life-5-almond-choc-chip-cake/

Please note that I will no longer be linking through from this site to my new site.  If you wish to keep receiving notifications when I publish a new post please sign up as an email subscriber on the new site.  The sign-up box is on the top right hand side immediately below the banner picture.

Life After Life 2: Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Gateau)

Read about Black Forest Gateau in Life After Life in my latest post on my new website http://frompagetoplate.com/

Life After Life 1; Sole Veronique

My new post - on which I embark on cooking as many recipes as possible from Kate Atkinson's prize-winning novel, Life After Life, is now available on my redesigned blog at:

http://frompagetoplate.com/2016/07/25/life-after-life-1-sole-veronique/

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A Literary Compendium of 20th century English Food

My new post - on Kate Atkinson's Life after Life - is now available on my redesigned blog at http://frompagetoplate.com/

You can also sign up to receive new posts by email by following the instructions on the top right hand corner of the blog.

Dear readers

Please note that I have moved my blog to a new site.  It can now be found at http://frompagetoplate.com/

All being well all new posts should continue to be emailed out to you and will direct you to the new site.

Best wishes

Becky

The Seductive Power of Strawberries

D'Urberville began gathering specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently, selecting a specially fine product of the 'British Queen' variety, he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.
'No - no!' she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her lips.  'I would rather take it in my own hand.'
'Nonsense!' he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in.  

  (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles)

In my last post I wrote about literary links between food and seduction, ending with Alec d'Urberville's seduction of Tess through strawberries.  Whilst strawberries on their own - provided they have been grown naturally in plenty of sunshine - can be beautifully sweet and delicious, needing no other accompaniment, I wanted to find a recipe that would present them in their full glory and have a meaningful relationship with Hardy's novel.

Food and Seduction

Food and sex have always been linked: from romantic meals to the alleged aphrodisiac qualities of certain foods - according to an article in The Independent these include asparagus, celery and pomegranate: see here  

Food and Country Life

There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast.  The churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come.  Whenever this happened the dairy was paralyzed.   Squish, squash, echoed the milk in the great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.

(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

The Take-Away in Literature

It was a nice little dinner ...being entirely furnished forth from the coffee-house 

(Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)

Until I visited Pompeii - during a holiday on the Amalfi coast a few years ago - I had always assumed take-aways were a recent invention.  But in the ancient Italian city devastated by the  volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD the streets were lined with thermopolia, service counters opening onto the street where people could buy food to take away.  There were more than 200 of these in Pompeii, and the remains of houses show few traces of kitchen and dining areas, suggesting that cooking at home was unusual.

Charlotte Bronte and food

Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte, the eldest of the three novelist sisters.  Having previously blogged about food in Jane Eyre (published 1847), I thought that today would be a good opportunity to revisit these posts and what we learn about food in Bronte's best-known novel.

Portrait of Charlotte Bronte at the Bronte Parsonage Museum

As I reread these posts I noticed the way Jane's relationship with food in the novel mirrors her journey to self-realization as a woman able to lead her life as she chooses.

Eating Out

I love eating out almost as much as I love cooking.  And living in London as I do, I'm lucky enough to have an amazing array of restaurants within easy reach offering me all types of food.  
And it's not just dining in fine establishments - which to be honest I hardly ever do - which I enjoy.  I love cafes, pub food, pizza chains and so on.  It's partly the social element - since my eating out in London is always with friends or family - but also the enjoyment of having someone cook (and perhaps more importantly wash up and tidy away!) for me.

Thinking back over the posts I have written I realise there have been very references to eating out.  Shakespeare's comic creation Falstaff, whom I wrote about here, eats and drinks regularly at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap and, although I did not blog about it, in Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth Bennet break a journey from London to Hertfordshire at an inn and dine at 'a table set out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords'.

Hot Cross Buns

One of the things I love about food is the way that different foods mark out the year, its changing seasons and its various festivals.  I particularly love cooking at Christmas and Easter,  partly because many of the things i make on these occasions are once a year treats: the rarity of mince pies, Christmas cake and simnel cake makes both the making and eating of them all the more exciting.

At Easter Hot Cross Buns are top of my baking list.  This year, with it being an early Easter, school only broke up yesterday.  And what could be a better way to start my Easter holidays than by rolling my sleeves up and throwing flour all around the kitchen. Whilst supermarkets stock very tasty Hot Cross Buns, I love the satisfaction of making them myself, even if it means that with the rising and baking time I don't get to eat them until half-way through Good Friday.  Today's batch only came out of the oven just before lunchtime!

Don't blame the cook!

Everyone who cooks knows that cooking is an unpredictable business.  A faithful recipe we have cooked time and time again to perfection doesn't come out as we expected it to.  You take your eye off the clock for one minute and a burning smell begins to emanate from the oven.  You take a beautifully-risen cake out of the oven, and when your back is turned it sinks.

But just sometimes it is not the cook's fault!

In Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (1852-1853), a searing indictment of the English judicial system, the cook at the Sol's Arms, a tavern in the vicinity of the London courts, is unfairly maligned.

Who Stole the Tarts?

The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne .... In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large dish of tarts upon it: they looked so good, that it made Alice quite hungry to look them - "I wish they'd get the trial done," she thought, "and hand round the refreshments!" (Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)

A few weeks ago I popped along to the British Library to see their foyer exhibition of Alice in Wonderland which is on until 17th April - http://www.bl.uk/events/alice-in-wonderland-exhibition. The exhibition - which is well worth a visit - opened in November 2015, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll's novel.  Featuring the original manuscript and hand-drawn illustrations, the exhibition goes on to look at later editions - and illustrations - of the children's book, and to consider the way the novel has been reimagined and reappropriated in different societies and cultures.

Midnight Feasts

When we went upstairs to bed, [Steerforth] produced the whole seven shillings' worth, and laid it out on my bed in the moonlight, saying: 
'There you are, young Copperfield, and a royal spread you've got.'

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

As a child I longed to go to boarding school.  Not because I hated my family, but because of the books I read about boarding school life.

The ones that stand out in my memory are the Malory Towers and St Clare's series by Enid Blyton. The varied personalities of the schoolgirls - who always included at least one 'foreigner' for added glamour - coupled with the eccentric teachers, created a tantalising world that was  so far removed from my Devon schooldays.  And the 'fun and mischief' they got up to - as it says on the blurb of my ancient copy of Third Year at Malory Towers - was equally appealing to my diligent and well-behaved nine year-old self;  I would never dare to be naughty, but I could live vicariously through Blyton's creations.

David Copperfield's Batter Pudding

In my last post, about eating other people’s food, I wrote about the episode in David Copperfield where the young David ‘loses’ his meal to the hungry waiter in the Yarmouth inn.  As well as drinking David’s ale and eating his chops, he also dives eagerly into his ‘batter pudding’:

'Why, a batter-pudding,' [the waiter] said, taking up a table-spoon, 'is my favourite pudding!  Ain't that lucky?  Come on, little 'un, and let's see who'll get most.'
The waiter certainly got most.  

Eating someone else's food

When we had done, [the waiter] brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
'How's the pie?' he said, rousing himself.
'It's a pudding', I made answer. 
'Pudding!' he exclaimed.  'Why, bless me, so it is!  What!' looking at it nearer.  'You don't mean to say it's a batter-pudding!'
'Yes, it is indeed.'
'Why, a batter-pudding,' he said, taking up a table-spoon, 'is my favourite pudding!  Ain't that lucky?  Come on, little 'un, and let's see who'll get most.'
The waiter certainly got most.   David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Why is it so often the case that what someone else is eating is so much more enticing than what is on our own plate?   I have vivid memories of primary school lunches when I would have done just about anything to eat my friend's white sliced bread sandwiches and chocolate bar rather than my Mum's home-made soup, though nowadays I think I got the better deal.

And how much more difficult it must be if you have nothing to eat, but all around you is food, as is the case with the waiter in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1849-50).