The Civilizing Effects of Food

When I first blogged about food in Robinson Crusoe I promised that I would - like the eponymous protagonist - try cooking with goat, as soon as I sourced some goat meat - see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/food-survival-manual.html  Well, goat meat has arrived at my local farmers' market, so I couldn't resist the opportunity to try it out. 

Goats provide Crusoe with his main protein source on the island.  And not only does he consume their flesh, but he also drinks their milk and uses it to make butter and cheese, all part of Crusoe's attempts to plant an area of Western civilization on this uninhabited desert island in the southern part of the Caribbean. 

The link between food and civilization is developed further when Crusoe encounters Man Friday on the island, rescuing him from his captors who are on the point of killing and eating him.  Realising that Friday himself is also a cannibal - he suggests to Crusoe that they eat his dead captors - Crusoe embarks on a mission to civilize and Christianize Friday.  He does this through teaching him how to cook, thereby persuading him of the tastiness of non-human flesh.   

Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday by Carl Offterdinger (1829-1889)

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. 

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. 

Quinces

For this post I am going to break my rule of literary chronology, leaving the early 18^th century novel for the time being in order to revisit the late 16^th century and an author who has featured frequently in this blog, namely Mr William Shakespeare.  And the cause of this literary rewind is the quince, the strange, knobbly pear-like fruit which, as the Observer food writer Nigel Slater says, “can’t be eaten raw” and is “a devil to peel”.[1]  We have a quince tree in the garden and about a month ago my landlady challenged me to find some literary/culinary uses for the plethora of fruit that ripen and rot very quickly if not picked and made good use of; I like a challenge, so the research began.

Quinces come from the same family as apples and pears.  They are thought to have originated in parts of Asia, including Armenia, Georgia, Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, and were subsequently introduced to parts of the Middle East and eastern and central Europe, including Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Greece.  The quince’s early arrival in the countries of the Middle East has led to speculation that references to fruit in the Bible which have often been translated as “apple” may in fact be references to quince: examples include The Song of Solomon 2:3 “As an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men” and most famously the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis 3 with which the snake tempts Eve, and Eve then seduces Adam.[2]  Though were the snake to have tempted Eve with a quince, we have to assume he would have cooked it first as it’s impossible to believe that Eve would have succumbed to the sour inedible raw fruit!  Once cooked though, with the addition of sugar or honey, the quince softens and becomes far more appetising. 

The Luxury of Time

One of the most interesting features of Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe is the detailed accounts of how the protagonist learns to survive on an uninhabited desert island.  Once he has built and furnished his shelter, he begins a journal (using paper and ink that he had found on the wrecked ship) and, through this, documents his attempts to build his own version of English society on the island.  He describes making different shelters, building a boat, civilizing a savage – Man Friday whom he rescues from cannibals - and, most importantly for my purposes, growing and cooking food.

In my last post – see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/food-survival-manual.html - I wrote about the goats that live abundantly on the island which are Crusoe’s principal source of meat – he does also eat turtle and wild fowl – and his only source of dairy food.  But whilst the goats provide ready food – they just need to be captured or shot, then cooked – other food requires time.  Fortunately Crusoe – who spends 28 years on the island – has plenty of that.