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.

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.

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.

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

 

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.