Wednesday 23 December 2015

Christmas Cake: the final touches

And then, at tea...the ice cake loomed in the centre of the table like a marble grave.  
(Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales)

A few weeks ago I blogged my recipe for Christmas cake , but of course what makes a Christmas cake more than just a rich fruit cake is the wonderful marzipan and icing that adorn it.  I cannot understand the marzipan-haters that people our world.  For me, the marzipan and - to a lesser extent the icing - are the best bits of the cake.

Tuesday 22 December 2015

A Child's Christmas

Until now I haven't written about children's literature -  mainly because I thought this was an area I would move on to once I had exhausted food in the adult classics of English Literature (if I ever do!). But with my thoughts turning to Christmas, I remembered Dylan Thomas's charming A Child's Christmas In Wales and its references to seasonal fare.  

Sunday 29 November 2015

Christmas Cake

Christmas is a favourite time of year in literature, with its appearance serving many different narrative functions.  It provides an occasion for characters to be reunited - as in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) where Tom Tulliver returns from school to his family.  Christmas can also provide drama, such as the Christmas meal in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861), during which the soldiers hunting the escaped prisoners - including Magwitch, whom the protagonist Pip has supplied with his sister's Christmas pork pie - arrive and disrupt proceedings.  In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, published 18 years earlier in 1843 Christmas provides the motivation and opportunity for personal change, with the miserly Scrooge learning to love and give after he is visited by an array of ghosts.

Sunday 22 November 2015

Venison Pasties

This summer I went to see The Beaux' Stratagem at the National Theatre, one of my favourite London haunts.  The play, which was first performed in 1707, less than two months before the death of its author, the Irish playwright, George Farquhar, is a late Restoration play.

Restoration drama refers to the plays written and performed following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.  In 1642, at the height of the English Civil War, with the Parliamentary Puritans in power, all theatres were closed by an Act of Parliament and remained so for the next 18 years.  To the Puritans, and their leader Oliver Cromwell, theatres were places that encouraged immoral and debauched behaviour.  

The re-opening of the theatres in 1660 paved the way for a new type of drama that was different from what came before.  Restoration plays were characterised by their comedy, their sexually explicit content, their contemporary setting and the first use of professional actresses - in earlier drama, women's roles had been played by men.

Sunday 1 November 2015

The Fig in Literature

Driven as I was to cook with figs when they arrived in my organic box a few weeks ago I knew I was on safe ground with them as far as literature was concerned since I had just finished teaching Antony and Cleopatra in which Cleopatra has the poisonous snake that will kill her brought to her concealed in a basket of figs.


The Death of Cleopatra by Reginald Arthur (1871-1934); I wonder if the basket on the right, with greenery emerging from it, is supposed to be the figs

Of course in Shakespeare's play the figs are simply there as a diversionary ruse, and are not eaten at all, so I embarked on my quest to find what literary record there might be of their consumption.

Sunday 25 October 2015

Agincourt

With everyone blogging or tweeting today about the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to 'revive' my Henry V recipe.  The Battle of Agincourt is the dramatic high-point of Shakespeare's history play, a battle in which, against all the odds, the vastly outnumbered English won a definitive victory against the French.

Like all Shakespeare plays, Henry V contains shifting moods and contrasting scenes.  In a play that celebrates an amazing military victory, there are unsurprisingly rousing and patriotic speeches, the best known of which is the "Crispin's day" one delivered by Henry to motivate his dispirited troops immediately before the battle (Act IV, Scene 3).  But there are also moments of sorrow and difficult decisions: Henry has to abide by the rules of military engagement and order the execution of his former drinking companion, Bardolph, for "robbing a church".  And, of course, there are moments of humour, which is where the food comes in.

For symbolic purposes, Henry's winning army contains officers from all regions of the British Isles, including Fluellen from Wales.  Fluellen cannot cease boasting of his Welsh heritage, and of that of Henry himself, who was born in Monmouth in 1386.  When Henry admits his pride in being a Welshman and in wearing the leek, Fluellen expresses his delight in his Welsh accent:


All the water in Wye cannot wash your majesty's Welsh plood out of your pody, I can tell you 
that: God pless it and preserve it, as long as it pleases his grace, and his majesty too.  
                                                                                                                             (Act IV, Scene 7)

For more on this - and the leek tart it inspired - read here

 

Saturday 17 October 2015

Fig and Walnut Tarte Tatin

GUARDSMAN: Here is a rural fellow
That will not be denied your highness' presence.
He brings you figs. 
CLEOPATRA:        Let him come in. 
                              (William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra)

Usually the book comes first, and then the recipes - that was the founding idea behind this blog.  In my attempt to trace the way food has been written about in English literature over time, I have been picking up and rereading (or skimming through) key texts in a chronological order (more or less), finding interesting references to food and then devising recipes inspired by them.

But sometimes the food comes first, usually as a result of seasonal pressures.  When the trees in the garden are bowing down with quinces or damsons, then something needs to be done with them.  And if that means skipping around a bit in literature and losing my chronological path, so be it.

Saturday 19 September 2015

Damson cheese

In my last post I wrote about Mr Glegg in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss who loyally admires his wife’s questionable culinary talents.  Amongst her ‘renowned’ delicacies, the narrator mentions the ‘venerable hardness’ of Mrs Glegg’s damson cheese.

Recipes for fruit cheeses – quince, apples, blackberries and gooseberries can also be used – date back to the 13th century; like jam, they are made by cooking fruit and sugar over a low heat until the mixture thickens – once cool, it will set.  However, fruit cheeses use less sugar than jam, and are traditionally eaten – in slices – as an accompaniment to savoury food – e.g. meat or cheese.  In Delightes for Ladies, a book of recipes and household hints published in 1609, Sir Hugh Plat includes a recipe for damson cheese in which the damsons are cooked to a pulp with rosewater or wine, before adding sugar.



Sunday 13 September 2015

The Loyal Husband


Mr Glegg, being of a reflective turn, …had much wondering meditation on the peculiar constitution of the female mind as unfolded to him in his domestic life: and yet he thought Mrs Glegg’s household ways a model for her sex: it struck him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll up their table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs Glegg did, if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson cheese a less venerable hardness than hers: nay, even the peculiar combination of grocery and drug-like odours in Mrs Glegg’s private cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in the way of cupboard smells.  
                                                                                            (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss


Mrs Glegg is the aunt, on the maternal side, of Maggie Tulliver, the high-spirited, rebellious heroine of George Eliot’s 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.  Mrs Glegg's argument with her brother-in-law, Maggie's father, about his son Tom's education is a catalyst for a dispute over £500 that Mrs Glegg has lent the Tullivers, the first in a series of events that leads to Mr Tulliver's financial downfall.


  
'George Eliot at 30' by Francois D'Albert Durade (1849)

Interested in the behaviour of others, simply so she can compare it unfavourably to her own, Mrs Glegg has ‘both a front and a back parlour in her excellent house … so that she had two points of view from which she could observe the weaknesses of her fellow-beings and reinforce her thankfulness for her own strength of mind.’  Even her husband is not free of her scrutiny: retired from his business as a wool-stapler he now takes delight in his garden, an activity Mrs Glegg regards as ‘folly’ for, as the narrator notes, one of a wife’s responsibilities is to be ‘a constituted check on her husband’s pleasures’.  

Sunday 23 August 2015

Rout cakes - part 2

In my last post I wrote about rout cakes in Jane Austen's Emma (1815) and Vanity Fair by Thackeray (1847-48).  Rout cakes were small rich cakes, flavoured with dried fruit and alcohol, which were commonly eaten at large parties and evening assemblies.

The earliest printed recipe for rout cakes that I could track down dates from 1806, from Mrs Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery.  However, George Gascoigne advertised his new shop in the Leeds Intelligencer of Monday 6th July, 1795, noting that amongst the desserts he served up were ‘rout cakes’.

Thursday 20 August 2015

Rout cakes 1

Mrs Elton was a little shocked at the want of two drawing rooms, at the poor attempt at
rout cakes, and there being no ice in the Highbury card parties.  (Jane Austen, Emma)



Mrs Elton is one of Jane Austen's dislikeable female characters.  She arrives half-way through the novel as the new wife of the vicar of Highbury, Mr Elton.  Mortified to have been rejected by the novel's protagonist Emma Woodhouse, and offended that she had been trying to create a match between him and her friend, Harriet Smith, of dubious social origins, Mr Elton leaves Highbury for Bath.  When he returns he is engaged and, as he makes clear to his parishioners - knowing that the gossip will spread and reach the ears of the woman who has turned him down - 'he had not thrown himself away - he had gained a woman of 10,000 pounds or thereabouts'. 

Sunday 26 July 2015

A Jane Austen Summer Party

The idea was to host a summer picnic party in my North London garden - a 21st century version of the Box Hill party in Jane Austen's Emma, but hopefully minus the 'downright dullness' that Emma feels and recklessly seeks to overcome by participating in Frank Churchill's cruel games which lead to the humiliation of the annoying, but harmless, Miss Bates and Emma being soundly reprimanded by Mr Knightley.  The food -  like all the food in my blog - would be inspired by food and meals referenced in Austen novels, though with a 21st century twist on them and an adaptation for vegetarians, whose needs are not recognized in early 19th century novels!

Saturday 20 June 2015

The Denial of Food

When food is referred to in literature, it is usually - not surprisingly - because characters are eating it.  And when characters don't eat, it is usually because they have been deprived of food or the food is inedible, as is the case with Jane Eyre at boarding school - see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-hungry-child.html

However, there are also literary characters who refuse to eat the food that is set before them, deliberately starving themselves and making themselves ill.  In Jane Austen's Emma, Jane Fairfax, orphaned niece of the impoverished Miss Bates, has a poor appetite which Miss Bates comments on at any opportunity:  ‘they had to listen to the description of exactly how little bread and butter [Jane] ate for breakfast, and how small a slice of mutton for dinner’ (ch. 20).


Jane Fairfax at the picnic at Box Hill (from the 2009 BBC dramatization)

Saturday 6 June 2015

A Danish Break

A deviation from my journey through food in English literature, but after a recent short break in Copenhagen I felt inspired to try my hand at a bit of Danish baking, and blog about it.  So this post is more about moving from the pages of the guidebook – rather than those of literary texts – to the plate.
Copenhagen is a very user-friendly capital city.  With a city population of just over 1, 200, 000, and an area in size of 88.5km2 (almost half the size of London), Copenhagen’s main sites are easily accessible by foot if you stay centrally.  Whilst there are a number of sites to see, Copenhagen is also the kind of city that it is nice – and practical – to wander around in, stopping off now and again for a coffee (and a pastry!).

Interesting sites – literary / culturally – inspired include the following:

Monday 4 May 2015

The Cooking Protagonist

Charlotte Bronte's most famous novel Jane Eyre (published 1847), narrates in the first person the journey of the protagonist Jane Eyre to adulthood.  Following a miserable childhood, the orphaned Jane finds self-worth through her work as a governess, becomes independently wealthy following the death of a relative and finally - after a few obstacles along the way - marries the man she loves, her former employer, Mr Rochester.

Early on in her employment at Thornfield Hall, where she is governess to Mr Rochester's ward, Adele, the daughter of his former mistress, Jane is called on to abandon her teaching duties and help with the cooking.  Mr Rochester has been absent from Thornfield for a while, when news comes that he will be returning in three days with a party of "fine people".  All hands are put to work getting the house ready for this distinguished gathering, and Jane is no exception.  As she notes in chapter 17: "Mrs Fairfax (the housekeeper) had pressed me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping (or hindering) her and the cook; learning to make custards and cheese-cakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish dessert-dishes."


Mrs Fairfax and Jane Eyre in the 2011 film version of Bronte's novel


Friday 17 April 2015

The Hungry Child

As we move into the 19th century, novels begin to take more of an interest in childhood. Whilst Jane Austen touches on the childhood of some of her protagonists (Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland and Fanny Price), novelists writing slightly later develop the childhood of their protagonists as a key element in their plots. Such writers include Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre (1847), and Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1860).

Food is a key element in childhood. When we look back on our childhoods we often remember what we ate and we associate events and places with food. We remember the food we loved as a child, and the food we hated but were forced to eat. So it is no surprise that food is a recurring feature in many of these novels about childhood.

The absence of food – and its consequence, hunger – is also a frequent occurrence. Perhaps that is no surprise with Bronte and Dickens whose child protagonists experience abuse and poverty: from Oliver Twist’s plea for more food in the workhouse, to David Copperfield having to sell his clothing in order to buy food, the scarcity of food is only one of many ways in which the children suffer. Critics have also argued that the preoccupation with food and hunger in Victorian novels reflects both contemporary changes in food production and distribution brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and moments of terrible food scarcity, such as the potato famine of the 1840s (http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html). A national obsession with food in the first half of the nineteenth century makes its way into the literature of the period.
Oliver Twist asks for more by George Cruikshank (1846)

Saturday 28 March 2015

What Do Hypochondriacs Eat?

From Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice who complains constantly about her "nerves" and is "taken ill immediately" when she is informed of Lydia's elopement with Mr Wickham, to the never present but much discussed Mrs Churchill in Emma, whose illnesses the narrator notes “never occurred but for her own convenience”, hypochondriacs frequently appear in Jane Austen's novels.

That the illness is imagined, rather than real, is often observed not just by the narrator but also by other characters.  In Persuasion, Charles Musgrove speaks to his sister-in-law, Anne Elliott, the novel's heroine, about his wife's supposed indisposition:  "I wish you could persuade Mary not to be always fancying herself ill."  Anne finds herself in an uncomfortable position, confided in by both parties in the marriage, with her sister subsequently complaining: "I do believe if Charles were to see me dying, he would not think there was anything the matter with me.  I am sure, Anne, if you would, you might persuade him that I really am very ill - a great deal worse than I ever own."

Tuesday 10 March 2015

Muffins

The English muffin – the yeasty bread-like concoction eaten usually at either breakfast or tea, as opposed to the American cupcake version that is possibly more widely consumed nowadays – dates back more than two hundred years.  The eminent cookery writer, Elizabeth David, in English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) includes recipes for muffins that date back to the mid-18th century, though she suggests they must be of considerably earlier origin. 

Many of us will recall the children’s nursery rhyme about the muffin man: 

Do you know the muffin man?
The muffin man, the muffin man.
Do you know the muffin man
Who lives on Drury Lane?

Saturday 14 February 2015

Game for the Gentry

In my last post I discussed, with reference to Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel, Pamela, the way food is frequently used as an indicator of social status in literature - http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/food-and-social-status.html  Jane Austen, writing in the last decade of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, produced novels which combine romantic fiction with social satire.  Her characters mainly come from the landed gentry - landowners who do not need to work to earn an income - though there is significant stratification within this social class dependent on characters' wealth.  When food is mentioned in Austen's novels it is drenched in social significance and ideas of status. 

Sunday 25 January 2015

Food and Social Status

 
 
From the groaning tables of King Arthur's court in the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html) through to Mrs Portman’s pea soup in Thackeray’s short story, “A Little Dinner at Timmins” (http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/pea-soup.html) , food has been used by writers as an indicator of wealth and social status. 
Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel, Pamela, first published in 1740, is greatly concerned with social status and the possibilities of social mobility.  Pamela Andrews, the novel's 15 year-old protagonist, is a maidservant in a country house in which she has worked since the age of 12.  When the novel opens, Pamela's mistress has just died, leaving her in the service of Mr B____ (his full surname is never given), her former mistress's son.   Mr B___________ is attracted to Pamela but since she is not his social equal, instead of proposing marriage to her, he does everything in his power to seduce her.  He offers her money, hides in her closet, abducts and imprisons her and threatens her when she refuses his offer to become his mistress. 
 
Mr B____ finds Pamela Writing by Joseph Highmore (1743-4)
Despite Mr B________’s attempts, Pamela is determined to keep her virtue.  Whilst Richardson’s emphasis on Pamela’s sexual purity may seem rather old-fashioned and priggish nowadays, his giving a voice to a servant girl and making her the protagonist of his novel was a radical move.  At a time when servants would have been considered almost the property of their masters, and expected to obey their every wish, Pamela’s insistence on her right to do as she likes with her body and her refusal to succumb to his desires or accept his money marks her out as extremely brave.  As she says to Mr B____, when he reprimands her for speaking so bluntly to him and forgetting her place, “Well may I forget that I am your servant, when you forget what belongs to a master.”  She also challenges the prevailing belief that her low social status makes her an acceptable object for his depravity, “O Sir! My soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess; though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave.”  

Saturday 3 January 2015

Bread

It seems strange that it's taken me a year of blogging - and 800 years or so of English literature - to write about bread when it is such a staple food. In the Bible story of Adam and Eve, the first human beings, God punishes Adam with hard work, saying, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground" (Genesis 3: 19). Bread, the most basic of foodstuffs, will only be earned through back-breaking labour.

In English literature, an early reference to bread occurs in an Anglo-Saxon riddle (one of the more than 90 included in the Exeter Book, a 10th century anthology of Old English poetry). Whilst the answer to the riddle is bread, this riddle, like many of the period, is intentionally ambiguous with a sexual subtext. Scholars have estimated that approximately one third of the riddles - all composed by monks - could be solved as penis (whilst also having a more mundane solution). The riddle reads: