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.

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’.