Food: A Survival Manual

The summer sun and the holidays mean I haven’t blogged for a few weeks.  But whilst I was sitting on my tropical holiday island – well, okay, the Costa Brava – one of my chosen books for holiday reading was the account of a man’s experience on a desert island, namely Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is one of the earliest novels written in English.  A first-person account of the protagonist’s experience of being shipwrecked on an island off the coast of South America for more than 28 years, the novel can be read in a number of ways.

Food for Angels

In my last post on Milton's Paradise Lost I referred to the episode where, prior to the Fall, the archangel Raphael visits Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and dines with them - see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/forbidden-fruit.html

Eve crushes grapes to make a non-alcoholic drink and makes mead - presumably also without alcohol - from berries, and also "from sweet kernels pressed / ... tempers dulcet creams" (Book V, ll. 346-47).  I assume that by kernels Milton means nuts and that Eve makes some form of nut cream to feed Raphael.  

As luck would have it, there are seventeenth-century recipes for almond cream, a dish that I am familiar with. The Accomplish'd Lady's Delight In Preserving, Physick, Beautifying, and Cookery - how's that for the title of a cookery book! - published in 1675, provides the following recipe:  

Forbidden Fruit

In my previous two posts on Jacobean revenge drama I explored the way food adopts more negative connotations, being used for nefarious purposes or to symbolise corruption (see   http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/apricots.html and  http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/the-corrupting-effects-of-food.html).  In Paradise Lost (published 1667), John Milton retells in a long epic poem the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, a narrative with food at its heart.  As originally narrated in chapter 3 of the Biblical book of Genesis the serpent, the most cunning of all God's creation, tempts Eve to eat from the one tree in the Garden of Eden that God has forbidden her and Adam from eating from, namely the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Eve subsequently persuades Adam to eat; cursed by God, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden and sin is brought into the world. 

In his twelve book epic treatment of this short Biblical myth, Milton indulges the reader with long descriptions of the naturally-occurring fruits in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve’s pre-lapsarian meals and then the actual consumption of the forbidden fruit.  In Book V the archangel Raphael visits Adam and Eve, and Eve – like a model 17^th century housewife – prepares a meal. 

She gathers, tribute large, and on the board

Heaps with unsparing hand; for drink the grape

She crushes, inoffensive must, and meaths

From many a berry, and from sweet kernels pressed

She tempers dulcet creams.  (ll. 343-47)

There is an emphasis on abundance – food grows plentifully in the Garden of Eden, and earlier in Book IV Adam and Eve are described as eating nectarines which the “complaint boughs / yielded them” (ll. 332-333); the food is freely offered up to them.  The only food referred to is fruit, and no actual cooking is involved (there is no reference to heat being applied to the fruit).  Instead, Eve crushes grapes to make unfermented (non-alcoholic) juice, makes mead from berries and from seeds or nuts produces some type of sweet cream.   

 Raphael dines with Adam and Eve from a painting by William Blake

The Corrupting Effects of Food

In my last post I wrote about apricots in The Duchess of Malfi and how they were used to ascertain the Duchess's suspected pregnancy.  Once the pregnancy - and the Duchess's marriage to her steward Antonio, her social inferior - were confirmed, the Duchess's villainous brothers set out to destroy her and her family (see http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/apricots.html).

The idea that food, rather than being a form of celebration or sustenance, can have a more malevolent side to it, seems to be a popular idea in the early 17th century Jacobean revenge drama.  At times it is used metaphorically, particularly in relation to sex.  In Thomas Middleton's play, The Changeling (c. 1622), the villainous servant, De Flores, afflicted with a facial deformity, considers the possibility that he may be able to persuade his mistress, Beatrice-Joanna, to sleep with him in return for his killing her unwanted suitor, Alonzo.

Apricots

As we bid farewell - for the time being - to Shakespeare, and move on a few years into gory Jacobean revenge drama, we say hello to the apricot. It has been speculated that the apricot originated in either Armenia - about 50 different varieties of the fruit are grown there nowadays - India or China. By Roman times apricots had spread into the Mediterranean region, and they have been known in England since the 16th century; one story says that Henry VIII's gardener introduced apricots to England from Italy in 1542.

In fact Shakespeare does make reference to the apricot more than once.  In Richard II (first performed 1595) in a scene set in the Duke of York's garden, gardeners, overheard by Richard's queen, discuss the neglect of the garden with clear parallels being made to the disordered state of the kingdom.   The senior gardener instructs his companions to "bind ... up young dangling apricocks" (III, 4, 29), the weight of which are forcing the tree's branches to bow down, just as unruly children (ie. subjects) oppress and burden their parents (ie. the monarch).  Then in A Midsummer Night's Dream (written c. 1594/5) the Queen of the Fairies, Titania, bewitched by a magic potion to fall in love with the donkey-eared weaver, Nick Bottom, tells her fairy attendants to feed her new lover with "apricocks and dewberries, / With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;" (III, 1, 144-45)

Whilst Shakespeare's references are rather slight and undeveloped, apricots - and the eating of them - play a more important role in John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi (written c. 1612-13).