The Take-Away in Literature

It was a nice little dinner ...being entirely furnished forth from the coffee-house 

(Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)

Until I visited Pompeii - during a holiday on the Amalfi coast a few years ago - I had always assumed take-aways were a recent invention.  But in the ancient Italian city devastated by the  volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD the streets were lined with thermopolia, service counters opening onto the street where people could buy food to take away.  There were more than 200 of these in Pompeii, and the remains of houses show few traces of kitchen and dining areas, suggesting that cooking at home was unusual.

Charlotte Bronte and food

Today marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte, the eldest of the three novelist sisters.  Having previously blogged about food in Jane Eyre (published 1847), I thought that today would be a good opportunity to revisit these posts and what we learn about food in Bronte's best-known novel.

Portrait of Charlotte Bronte at the Bronte Parsonage Museum

As I reread these posts I noticed the way Jane's relationship with food in the novel mirrors her journey to self-realization as a woman able to lead her life as she chooses.

Eating Out

I love eating out almost as much as I love cooking.  And living in London as I do, I'm lucky enough to have an amazing array of restaurants within easy reach offering me all types of food.  
And it's not just dining in fine establishments - which to be honest I hardly ever do - which I enjoy.  I love cafes, pub food, pizza chains and so on.  It's partly the social element - since my eating out in London is always with friends or family - but also the enjoyment of having someone cook (and perhaps more importantly wash up and tidy away!) for me.

Thinking back over the posts I have written I realise there have been very references to eating out.  Shakespeare's comic creation Falstaff, whom I wrote about here, eats and drinks regularly at the Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap and, although I did not blog about it, in Pride and Prejudice Jane and Elizabeth Bennet break a journey from London to Hertfordshire at an inn and dine at 'a table set out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords'.

Hot Cross Buns

One of the things I love about food is the way that different foods mark out the year, its changing seasons and its various festivals.  I particularly love cooking at Christmas and Easter,  partly because many of the things i make on these occasions are once a year treats: the rarity of mince pies, Christmas cake and simnel cake makes both the making and eating of them all the more exciting.

At Easter Hot Cross Buns are top of my baking list.  This year, with it being an early Easter, school only broke up yesterday.  And what could be a better way to start my Easter holidays than by rolling my sleeves up and throwing flour all around the kitchen. Whilst supermarkets stock very tasty Hot Cross Buns, I love the satisfaction of making them myself, even if it means that with the rising and baking time I don't get to eat them until half-way through Good Friday.  Today's batch only came out of the oven just before lunchtime!

Don't blame the cook!

Everyone who cooks knows that cooking is an unpredictable business.  A faithful recipe we have cooked time and time again to perfection doesn't come out as we expected it to.  You take your eye off the clock for one minute and a burning smell begins to emanate from the oven.  You take a beautifully-risen cake out of the oven, and when your back is turned it sinks.

But just sometimes it is not the cook's fault!

In Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House (1852-1853), a searing indictment of the English judicial system, the cook at the Sol's Arms, a tavern in the vicinity of the London courts, is unfairly maligned.