Sunday 16 November 2014

Pea Soup

One of the starters at the First World War Supper Club - see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/first-world-war-supper-club.html - has a fairly long and distinguished history in literature.  Pea soup - which appears in May Byron's Pot-luck, our source recipe book for our 1914-inspired menu - is mentioned in the Ancient Greek play, The Birds, by Aristophanes (first performed 414BC).  The servant of Tereus, an Athenian prince who has been turned into a bird, explains how he must serve his master and bring him all types of food:  "Again he wants some pea-soup; I seize a ladle and a pot and run to get it." 

Tereus's pea soup was probably made from dried peas, as it is only really since the Early Modern period that people have been eating fresh garden peas - Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat notes in A History of Food that fresh peas in their pods were introduced to the court of Louis XIV in January 1660. 

Sunday 2 November 2014

First World War Supper Club

If you're heading out for dinner in the rather exclusive North London area of Primrose Hill, a church might not be your most obvious choice of venue.  However, last night my friend Lou and I took over the kitchens of St Mary-the-Virgin, Primrose Hill, to hold our first ever supper club.  Taking the First World War as our theme, we served up 3 courses - all inspired by dishes eaten widely in 1914 - to 21 paying guests, with all the profits going to the church's youthwork.   



About a year ago, Lou and I began discussing the idea of trying something a little more ambitious in the kitchen than just cooking for family and small groups of friends; so BeckyLou's supper club was born!  Having decided to structure our menu around a theme, in this centenary year 1914 was an obvious choice.  Scouring the internet for inspiration we found an online edition of a cookery book first published in 1914: May Byron's Pot-luck; or, The British home cookery book; over a thousand recipes from old family ms. books.  This book provided a helpful reference point for recipes that would have been eaten in the war-time period, but rather than sticking slavishly to the dishes as they would have been made in 1914 we updated them and added a modern twist to create 1914-2014 fusion-style dishes.