Tag Archives: holidays

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

Ball Monday

Updated on April 5, 2010 by Diane Gaston

From British Folk Customs by Christina Hole:

“In Oxfordshire, even now, older people sometimes refer to Easter Monday as Ball Monday, because of the numerous ball games that used to be played on that day. Stoolball, knurr-and-spell, trapball, ninepins, handbasll, bowls and football were all customary pastimes of the Easter holidays.”

Not so different from “March Madness” or the opening of the baseball season, when you think of it, except it is part of Easter celebration.

Even though the most sacred of the Christian holidays, Easter’s celebrations have come from pagan origins. The word “Easter” comes from the Saxon goddess of spring, Ostara, who is said to have turned an injured bird into a rabbit that laid rainbow-colored eggs–but only one day a year! Both rabbits and eggs are, of course, common fertility symbols.

I can imagine some of our Regency characters playing “ball” games with eggs. Egg Toss–throwing eggs in the air and catching them until they break. Egg Shackling–grasping a hard-boiled egg in one’s right hand and using it as a weapon to strike the eggs of other players. The winner is the one with the intact egg at game’s end. Egg Rolling, still traditional in Northern England, Scotland, Ulster and the Isle of Man–rolling colored hard-boiled eggs down a slope until they are cracked and broken, at which time they are eaten.

Which brings me to my UNDONE theme. The word undone can mean “destroyed” or “opened,” just like an Easter egg rolled down a hill on Ball Monday!

Don’t forget! It is All Undone at my new blog this month. Tomorrow I’ll announce last week’s winners. Wednesday I’ll tell you about Michelle Willingham’s and my Drive By Booksigning, and Friday I feature the second of my four anthology mates, Louise Allen, whose story in Pleasurably Undone is Disrobed and Dishonored. Yes there will be prizes both days!