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’.  

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’.

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'. 

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!