Tag Archives: food

Upping the traffic

Updated on January 9, 2014 by Janet Mullany

I read somewhere in my ~~time wasting~~ serious research online that the way to improve traffic to a blog was to cover certain topics so I thought I’d give it a try.

First, PETS. Here’s Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, of whom Boswell wrote:

I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;’ and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

COLIN FIRTH Picture of Colin Firth with wet shirt for no particular reason.

Next, FASHION. PROMENADE COSTUME. From Ackermann’s January 1814: A Plain cambric robe, with long gathered sleeve and high arched collar, trimmed with net lace or muslin. A Spanish lappelled coat of fine orange Merino cloth; full epaulette ornaments on the shoulders: the whole lined throughout with white sarsnet, and trimmed with a raised border of white velvet or swansdown. A small, provincial bonnet of the same material as the coat, ornamented with a full curled ostrich feather. White spotted ermine or Chinchilli muff. Gloves grey or light blue kid. Half-boots of orange-coloured jean, or velvet. But she still looks cold.

You may not ever have considered that when COLIN FIRTH plunged into that pond he might have encountered certain aquatic life forms. His attitude of discomfort may well have been not because he appeared in a state of undress but because he was anxious to get rid of certain attachments to his person…

There is actually a bit of dialogue, struck from the script that goes as follows:

Darcy: Madam (bows). Would you have some salt upon your person?

Elizabeth: Salt, sir?

Darcy: A match, then?

Elizabeth: Oh, certainly. (Takes a matchbook from her reticule)

Darcy: The Meryton Go-Go Swingers’ Club? Ridiculous. Matches haven’t even been invented yet. I suppose I’ll have to wait until I get into the house.

… Bringing us onto the next hot topic of HEALTH. I thought this picture spoke for itself. I hope you appreciate that I passed over some truly disgusting pics to find one that showed the business but would not make you lose your lunch.

Talking of which, FOOD is always popular too, but I thought that instead, for a change, we’d have RICHARD ARMITAGE. Although I did find several artistic shots of his behind, I hate to tell you that it looked OK but pretty much like anyone else’s. Unless you were on very intimate terms with Mr. Armitage (and someone certainly was) you’d never have known whether it was his or his bottom double’s.

So there you have it, the Big Popular Topics and I expect our numbers will soar.

But seriously, is there anything you’d like to see us blog about here that we haven’t yet covered? Any celebrity bottoms?

Posted in Frivolity, Jane Austen | Tagged cats, Colin Firth, Fashion, food, health, Pets, Richard Armitage | 6 Replies

On Holidays, Period Food, and What We Feed Our Characters

Updated on December 6, 2013 by Gail Eastwood

Having finally finished the clean-up from Thanksgiving (the wedding crystal goblets I have to wash by hand tend to decorate the kitchen counter for days), I am now looking ahead to the next holidays, and more meals to be planned in celebration. Special occasions and special food always go together. Do you have a traditional holiday food you make or fondly remember? For Christians, this past Sunday was the first Sunday in Advent, the season leading up to Christmas, and in some parts of England, is also known as “stir-up day” –the day you are supposed to stir-up the batter for your Christmas cake or pudding so it will have enough time to age properly. (The day can also be the last Sunday before the start of Advent.) There’s a double meaning to the name, as one of the old texts used by the church for the start of Advent begins “Stir up , we beseech thee O Lord” and one site claims “this activity of stirring-up the ingredients symbolizes our hearts that must be stirred in preparation for Christ’s birth.” Christmas cakes (aka fruitcakes) have a pedigree as long as the technique of using rum or brandy to preserve food. “Plum Pudding” was also around long before the Victorians popularized it as “Christmas pudding”. Either one could include meat with the dried fruit in their early forms, but one is baked and the other was boiled –steamed in later times.

For someone who’s not a great cook, maybe it’s ironic that I’ve always been interested in period food, but it comes honestly from my interest in the daily life of other times. The Regency isn’t my only pet period –I’m a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism and indulge in medieval interests, too. I collect cookbooks on period food, and recently added Dinner with Tom Jones: Eighteenth Century Cookery Adapted for the Modern Kitchen, by Lorna Sass (1977, the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Sass also wrote To the King’s Taste (Richard II) and To the Queen’s Taste (Elizabeth I).

I can’t believe I found this treasure in my church yard sale!! I recommend it as a research gold-mine; it has notes about menus, how dishes should be arranged on the table, and all sorts of extra goodies besides the recipes, and while it covers a period slightly earlier than our beloved Regency, back then things did not change as rapidly as they do now. Casting about for what to feed our characters, a ragoo of asparagus or heavens, yes, a chocolate tart(!) might be just the thing we need to serve them. And the book is illustrated with delightful sketches of county life by Thomas Rowlandson (behaving properly for a change).

On my Christmas list is another cookbook just released last month which should also be of great interest to us all —Dinner with Mr Darcy by Pen Vogler, a new addition to the existing canon related to food in Jane Austen’s books and life. Besides recipes inspired by Jane’s novels and letters, it also promises notes about table arrangements, kitchens and gardens, changing mealtimes, and servants and service, etc.

Both of these books use Hannah Glasse’s first cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), as a chief source. A reviewer of Vogler’s book (http://tinyurl.com/mlrxl6j) says this was “one of the first commercial cookbooks to capture the public imagination and was used by middle-class families like the Austens well into the 19th century.” Does food history interest you? Do you care about what our story characters eat? (The book I’m editing now for reissue, The Captain’s Dilemma, has a running joke about the family’s inventive but not very good cook.) What are some of your favorite resources?

I wish you all very happy holidays and some memorable meals with friends and family, whatever you celebrate!

Mr Collins (Tom Hollander) distracts Elizabeth Bennett (Keira Knightley) from her meal in the 2005 ‘Pride and Prejudice’ -Photo Credit: Rex Features/Everett Collection

Posted in History, Jane Austen, Regency, Research | Tagged Christmas, Christmas cake, food, holidays, period cooking, plum pudding, Regency, research books | 13 Replies

Considering Culinary History

Updated on April 18, 2013 by susanna

Susanna here, rejoicing that it’s Friday at last. I’m hard-pressed to think when I’ve been more eager to see a week come to its end.

I’m currently reading Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, by Bee Wilson. It’s a fascinating look at the history not of food, but of the implements we use to cook and eat it. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I’ve already learned so much. For example, 19th century vegetables weren’t anywhere near as overcooked as you’d expect based on the long cooking times advised in early cookbooks, because cooks were advised to simmer vegetables rather than cook them at a fast boil, and also because they’d pack a lot of vegetables into a small saucepan rather than a smaller amount in a larger pot like we do today.

Consider the Fork

And here’s another fact that surprised me tremendously: You know how most people have a natural overbite, and if you don’t, your orthodontist will work to give you one? Apparently that’s a recent development in human history, and isn’t the result of a genetic change–it’s developmental, based on how we eat. When you look at older skeletons, you generally see incisors that meet edge-to-edge. The overbite starts to emerge 200-250 years ago in Europe, but 800 to 1000 years earlier in China. In both cases, the change happened first among the upper classes.

The probable explanation? Forks and chopsticks. Once people started carrying food to their mouths already bite-sized rather than tearing it apart with their teeth, their incisors started to grow in differently.

I’ve long been fascinated by culinary history, and I’m starting to incorporate it in my writing. In my July release, A Dream Defiant, my heroine is a naturally gifted cook. She’s a commoner, an ordinary English village girl following the drum in Spain with her soldier husband, and her dream for after the war ends is to take over the inn in her home village, which has a reputation for dreadful food, and turn it into a place all the travelers on the Great North Road will stop to linger over their dinners. And I have an unfinished manuscript I’m thinking of dusting off where one of the characters is a French chef I created to contrast with every fussy, melodramatic French chef ever written. The manuscript in question is a paranormal, so if you picture Anthony Bourdain, Vampire Hunter, armed with garlic and cleaver, you wouldn’t be far off.

What delicious things are you hoping to taste this weekend? I’m planning to bake cookies for the first time in ages.

Posted in Research, Writing | Tagged food, research, Susanna Fraser | 8 Replies

Hedgehog cakes, etc.

Updated on February 8, 2013 by Amanda McCabe/Laurel McKee

Last week I talked about one of my favorite winter pastimes–climbing under the electric blanket and watching movies until it’s spring again. This week, my #2 winter favorite–eating! Regency-style (sort of).

I’m not much of a cook. I just don’t have the patience for it, beyond stuff like omelettes and pasta carbonara. But I love to eat (and I’m sure my hips will love me for it, come May and sundress time!). And, if you look at portraits of people like our friend Prinny, obviously people in the Regency shared my appreciation for yummy cuisine.

Regency dinner parties were quite different from my own, of course. No bagged Caesar salads and boxes from the Mandarin Wok. Louis XIV’s court at Versailles (no slouch in the dining department) established the custom of dining “a la francaise”, i.e. all the different dishes at each course were placed on the table at the same time. Diners could then help themselves (or let footmen help them) to whatever was nearby. I imagine this would mean that the guests couldn’t sample all the dishes, so you would have to be sure an interesting selection was near each guest. It would be terrible if your favorite was waaay down the table! In France, important feasts could include up to eight courses (including my favorite, dessert), and last many hours. In England, it seems that even very formal dinners were usually in three courses (also including dessert!), after which ladies could retire to the drawing room for tea and gossip, and the men could remain behind for drinking.

But even the abbreviated courses meant dinner could last hours. In 1829, in a book titled “Apician Morsels”, the author wrote, “Five hours at dinner table are a reasonable latitude when the company is numerous and no lack of good cheer.” In “The Experienced English Housekeeper” (1769), Elizabeth Raffald pointed out “As many dishes as you have in one course, so many baskets or plates your dessert must have, and as my bill of fare is twenty-five to each course, so must your dessert be of the same number and set out in the same number.” Thus making 75 dishes. At a party in 1767, Sir William Lowther offered 180 dishes at his home in York.

The first course usually consisted of soups and stews, vegetables and boiled fish and meats, followed by “remove” dishes of more fish or meat. The second course sounds similar to me–vegetables, meats, fish, with exotic pies and other savory baked fare like “gumballs” and “cheese wigs.” (FYI, gumballs were made from eggs, flour, sugar, butter, mace, aniseed, and caraway seeds mixed together in a paste, then baked. Cheese wigs–er, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe another Risky can enlighten us!). Dessert was then the crowning glory. In 1750, Horace Walpole wrote “All the geniuses of the age are employed in designing new plans for dessert.” At a party given by the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk in 1756, dessert was “a Beautiful Park, round the edge was a Plantation of Flowering Shrubs, and in the middle a Fine piece of water with Dolphins Spouting out water.” Beats a carton of Hagen Dazs Dulce de Leche, I guess. 🙂

A very large household could employ their own confectioner, but smaller households would usually make use of independent chefs. In 1763, Viscount Fairfax held a party for 18 people, and the invoice for dessert (provided by William Baker) was 16 pounds, which included the rental of the glass structures necessary to display the dessert.

I recently came across a slightly modified recipe for Hedgehog Cake, which I may (or may not) attempt soon. Cake and custard, ummmmm. (If you’d like the recipe, just let me know!)

Hopefully winter will be over soon!

Posted in Regency, Research | Tagged food, Regency Dining | 7 Replies

Which Christmas Would You Want?

Updated on February 1, 2013 by Laurie Bishop

It seems to me that I would have done very well with a Regency Christmas. As far as I can determine, there was little in the way of celebration, especially as we now know it, in the Regency period prior to 1815. Customs such as Yule-log burning and decorating with greenery were apparently considered rustic by those of a more elevated position, who left the more primitive celebration to those who were more common. One did dine with one’s friends, and practice charity to the poor at Christmas time, but it was “undignified” to celebrate in any more frivolous way.

Well…I do have a struggle between wanting to do the season justice and dreading its demands. I so love the end results–the sparkling house, the cooking smells, the evergreen, the red ribbon and lights, the candles, the wrapped gifts resting mysteriously under the Christmas tree in the pale light of dawn. BUT…the big BUT…fate seems to conspire to keep me from getting there.

Being a single woman keeping her own house, one would think I could have it under control. Not so. Between a full time job, writing, housekeeping and the deepening snow I soon discover that it is DECEMBER 18TH AND I HAVEN’T SENT OUT ANY CARDS YET. And that is just the beginning.

I know that my stress is shared from my friends. At work, I hear one fretting about the cost of a child’s preference of gift, another bemoaning having to visit the mall yet again, and another worried that her grown child will not be able to visit. There are some who seem to be able to do it all and more, of course, but I can only think of them with awe.

Back to Christmas in the Regency…something about the very simplicity of their celebration appeals to me, although I am inclined to be a bit contrified in my views, because I favor the evergreen and holly and mistletoe and the roaring fire. I like the empasis on charity, too–and food. Who can’t like food?!

Okay, now I have arrived at something. I decide to look up some Regency Recipes in a handy reference, THE NEW FEMALE INSTRUCTOR, published in 1834.

TO ROAST GOOSE
“After it is picked, the plugs of the feathers pulled out, and the hairs carefully singed, let it be well washed and dried, and a seasoning put in of onion, sage, and pepper and salt. Fasten it tight at the neck and the rump, and then roast.” [My note–I am assuming the insides were cleaned out; I imagine this was thought to be understood!]. “Put it first at a distance from the fire, and at degrees draw it nearer. A slip of paper should be skewered on the breast-bone. Baste it very well. When the breast is rising, take off the paper; And be careful to serve it before the breast falls, or it will be spoiled by coming flattened to the table. Let a good gravy be sent in the dish.”

Good heavens. The goose is looking like a bit of work. I had no idea my goose could go flat. I decide to pass on to dessert.

PLUM PUDDING
“Cut a pound of suet into small pieces, but not too fine, a pound of currants washed clean, a pound of raisins stoned, eight yolks of eggs, and four whites, half a nutmeg grated, a tea-spoonful of beaten ginger, a pound of flour, and a pint of milk. Beat the eggs first, then put to them half the milk, and beat them together; and by degrees stir in the flour, then the suet, spice, and fruit, and as much milk as will mix it well together, very thick. It will take four hours boiling. When done, turn it into our dish, and strew over it grated sugar.”

Not so bad. Not very different than certain of today’s recipes, especially if you have one that has been handed down in the family. A lot of work, still do-able. But I’m not too keen on the suit. I wonder what it will do to my cholesterol levels.

Better consider what to drink.

ENGLISH SHERRY
“Boil thirty pounds of sugar in ten gallons of water, and scum it clear. When cold, put a quart of new ale-wort to every gallon of liquor, and let it work in the tub a day or two. Then put it into the cask with a pound of sugar candy, six pounds of fine raisins, a pint of brandy, and two ounces of isinglass. When the fermentation is over, stop it close; let it stand eight months, rack it off, and add a little more brandy. Put it in the cask again, and let it stand four months before it is bottled.”

Ahem. Nothing to drink until next year. Oh, hey, just give me the brandy.

Perhaps I will stop bemoaning today’s Christmases. Either that, or I will go back in time as a wealthy woman with a cook and a full housekeeping staff. Until then…

Link–more recipes: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~awoodley/recipes/xmasrecipe.html

Link–Jo Beverley’s page on the Regency Christmas, done much better than I could have done: http://members.shaw.ca/jobev/xmasarticle.html

Cheers!

Where’s that brandy???

Laurie

Posted in Regency, Research | Tagged Christmas, christmas pudding, cooking, food | 5 Replies