Food in Books, a Continuing Series - AN Wilson's Resolution

One of the many intriguing aspects of Captain Cook's personality, as portrayed by AN Wilson in his novel Resolution, is the detailed attention the great explorer gives to preventing scurvy on his ships. Cook is also pictured as a leader who, when he can, (and quite often there are long periods of food shortage while away from land for weeks at a time), ensures that those under his command have opportunities to enjoy celebratory meals, even when in very remote places.

Fortunately, Wilson does not merely tell us in vague terms about these meals but describes them fairly thoroughly, which means, hurray, that there is quite a lot about food in the book. Here are the highlights:

1. At one point those aboard are treated to

"mussels, with wild celery which grew abundantly on the rocks".

2. On another occasion, there is a:

"late supper of roasted chicken, sweet potatoes, followed by a banana duff laced with one of Pattinson’s very finest egg custards, [which] put most of the human beings on board in a very good humour."

3. Slightly less tempting, to my mind, on another occasion some of those aboard enjoy:

"a fine dinner of roast albatross and Saur Kraut at the Captain’s table, after which they all toasted him in the excellent brandy which had been brought aboard at the Cape. Returning to their cabins they reeled – unsure how much this was owing to the swell, and how much to the Captain’s good Cognac. A kind of dew settled on everything."

4. Later, the entire ship is treated to a slap up meal, although rather largely of the liquid variety:

"There was plenty of rum for all of them. One of the hogs which he had been taking to breed in New Zealand was roasted. His own cabin was crammed with the gentlemen, and as many officers and petty officers as could be squeezed in, the others eating as usual in the gun-room. They drank Madeira, claret, brandy and rum. From below decks where the men were enjoying rum came the roar of song. Although there was the slightest of swells, everyone to be seen on deck swayed from side to side as if in a typhoon."

Intriguingly, the meals described in the book are all shipboard, even though a large part of the novel is set on dry land. This may simply serve to highlight how much more memorable meals are in situations where you don't get them very often. In any case, as a lover of food in literature, I appreciate the detail given of these various feasts.

Health Warning

Before I get accused of encouraging a wave of gluttony across the many nations of the world, I should point out that eating can make you fat. To illustrate the point, let us have a look at what Patrick Leigh Fermor saw when he went to the Hofbrauhaus in Munich in the winter of 1933/34 (from the book A Time of Gifts):

"The trunks of these feasting burghers were as wide as casks. The spread of their buttocks over the oak benches was not far short of a yard.and they branched at the loins into thighs as big as the torsos of ten-year-olds and arms on the same scale strained like bolsters at the confining serge. Chin and chest formed a single column, and each close-packed nape was creased with its three deceptive smiles. Every bristle had been cropped and shaven from their knobbly scalps. Except when five o'clock veiled them with shadow, surfaces as polished as ostriches' eggs reflected the lamplight. The frizzy hair of their wives was wrenched up from scarlet necks and pinned under slides and then hatted with green Bavarian trilbys and round one pair of elaphantine shoulders a little fox stole was clasped. The youngest of this group, resembling a matinee idol under some cruel spell, was the bulkiest. Under tumbling blonde curls his china blue eyes protruded from cheeks that might have been blown up with a bicycle pump, and cherry lips laid bare the sort of teeth that make children squeal. There was nothing bleary or stunned about their eyes. The setting may have reduced their size, but it keyed their glances to a sharper focus. Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in fork load on fork load of ham, salami, Frankfurt, krenwurst and blutwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which sprang out again instantaneously on cheek and brow. They might have been competing with stop watches, and their voices, only partly gagged by the cheekfuls of good things they were grinding down, grew louder while their unmodulated laughter jarred the air in frequent claps. Pumpernickel and aniseed roles and bretzels breached all the slack moments but supplies always came through before a true lull threatened. Huge oval dishes, laden with schweinebraten, potatoes, sauerkraut, red cabbage and dumplings were laid in front of each diner. They were followed by colossal joints of meat – unclassifiable helpings which, when they were picked clean, shone on the scoured chargers like calves' pelvises or the bones of elephants. Waitresses with the build of weight lifters and all-in wrestlers whirled this provender along and features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre's banquet but all too soon the table was an empty boneyard once more, sound faltered, a look of bereavement clouded those small eyes and there was a brief hint of sorrow in the air."

Cake Time

Following on from yesterday's delicious lunch description from Jane Gardam, here is tea, as promised:

"For tea ... we had small thick triangles of rye bread and butter, small thin triangles of white bread and butter. scones with butter and home-made strawberry jam in a glass dish with the strawberries hanging whole in the jelly, suspended like rubies. We had Sally Lunn and Sad Mary and sponge cake with jam in the middle and icing on top - plain white. We had fresh lemon-curd tarts and raspberry tarts, each the size of a fifty-pence piece and light as flakes. We had an English Swiss roll, not sticky and with bitter chocolate filling, not sickly black cherries. And - bother the boy, it had taken five hours - we had an old English Lenten Simnel cake soaking with soft marchpane, soft as honey, light as air ... 'You are of course mad,' said my husband, 'but at least there is now one Swiss in the world who won't forget that the English respect food.'"

Another Reading Feast

Having spent many years bewildered by the lack of publicity received by the writer Jane Gardam, I rather rashly offered to do a 1p review of something by her for the Dabbler the other day. As a result, I'm rereading her collection of short stories, Going into a House Darkly and I've just come across a great food passage that I really ought to have included in this post, had I remembered it.

It is part of a story about a woman who is trying to prepare a very bright young Swiss boy for a Common Entrance exam, which includes an imaginative essay element. They boy appears to have no imagination and the English relatives with whom he lives cook nothing but baked beans - usually burnt.  The teacher decides to invite him to lunch and give him really good food, in the hope that it may 'unlock one shred of his soul'.

This is what she gives him:

"We had ... little lemon soles, hot and curly and light and crisp, in breadcrumbs and with lemon juice. Then we had sirloin of Scotch beef, not en croute but just as juicy; and green vegetables and small carrots with parsley butter and chopped, uncooked onion. The potatoes ... I parboiled and then shoved far back in the top of the oven for seventeen minutes in hot olive oil ... [They] came out of the Aga like golden, crunchy, soft-centred flowers. Then we had redcurrant water ice, the redcurrants from Rusham Farm, and for the damson tart a jug of cream from Solley's Farm at Worth, thick and yellow. The cheeses were Cheddar - I'd spent a long time choosing the finest of five good ones - a local chevre and a perfect double Gloucester.

The pastry for the tart was the best I had ever made. I'd iced the knife as well as the water and the bowl. It was crisp but flaky. Almost transparent. The damsons sat darkly inside it basking in a congealing sticky lake of crimson juice and sprinkled with hard brown sugar. They looked comfortable as fat black ladies in a spa."

She also gives him tea, which I will save for tomorrow.

Nothing is Lost

If you look hard enough, everything is on the Internet - including Judi Dench in the play I mentioned

Marcel's Citrus Epiphany

Speaking of food in novels, when one of my daughters was still at school, they

Yum

Ages ago I got excited about descriptions of food in novels and, reading JG

The Very Hungry Reader

Ages ago, I mentioned how much I love reading about meals in fiction. Now I've discovered someone who goes further - and cooks the meals she discovers in her books.

Eek

I thought I was safe. I'd read things by Peter Robb before - while he can sometimes be a bit wordy, he did produce an interesting article about Marcia Langton and I very much enjoyed Midnight in Sicily (especially the bits about food). Although not hugely interested in things to do with fashion, I've got a daughter who is. Therefore, all things considered, Robb's article in the current issue of the Monthly about the designer called Akira Isogawa seemed like a reasonable choice to pass fifteen minutes with, while I waited for my mother at the doctor's. Probably not entirely gripping, I thought, but I'd be able to talk to Anna about it - maybe.

What I did not expect, sitting in a scruffy waiting room in Yass, New South Wales, listening to the receptionists discussing the baby shower they'd just attended and the extraordinary increase in the weight of the showeree, was a trip to the deepest darkest crevices (and I use the word advisedly) of Pseuds' Corner:


"Akira's dresses express a female eroticism unknown in the West since the end of the French dix-huitième. The ineluctable metaphor is the flower. The overlapping petals, the seductive colours, the opening outward around the central fleshly fact of sex.


The meticulour renderings of beautifully cut and exquisite fabrics remind me of shunga. Akira's eyes widen again: 'You mean the very detailed...?' Yes, I do. The erotic prints that show male and female genitalia vastly enlarged and maniacally detailed. Every fine black pubic hair, every little raised vein on a huge engorged phallus. The myriad folds of a moistly receptive vagina. Impeccable coiffures, the intertwined folds of rich silks. Sex as an expression of the social arts.


A deep eroticism is at the heart of Akira's dresses and their appeal for adult women. In one beautiful image from a follower of Hokusai, the woman is on all fours, seen largely from behind and her hindquarters are at the centre of the image. A mostly concealed man delicately probes the pleats of her vagina with his fingers. A commentary explains redundantly that 'the focal point of the scene is the female genital organ, re-echoed in the sexual symbology of the oysters next to the basket.'


This delicate and voluptuous image leaps to blazing life in its single piece of fabric, a shred of it still wound around the woman's waist, the rest cascading to the floor between the two bodies. It's a beautiful plain deep red, and its outline seems almost jagged because the fine material has been treated to create an expanse of tiny peaks in its surface, like a distant mountain range. I've just seen this colour and this material on one of Akira's racks.


Leaving Christiane in Akira's Woolahra shop one day, I find I want to wear a dress."

I, on the other hand, doubt if I will ever want to wear one again.

Have You Got the Bottle?

Should you be a student of literature casting about for a dissertation topic, may I suggest 'The Milk Bottle in the 20th Century Novel' as an idea? It came to me when I was reading A Fairly Honourable Defeat, which includes milk bottles as a recurring motif.

They are first introduced about halfway through the text:

'The kitchen smelt of decaying matter. It was difficult to trace the source. "I must get rid of all those milk bottles", thought Tallis. Some of them contained weird formations resembling human organs preserved in tubes. It was quite difficult to get these out of the bottles and the last time he tried to he stopped up the sink.'

They recur later, functioning as a measure of one character's energy:

'He did not feel strong enough to tackle the milk bottles',

and again, further on, compounding the breakdown of his marriage:

'They staggered together, knocking over a row of half empty milk bottles ... The kitchen floor was covered with broken glass and stinking yellowish milky mess ...Tallis stared at jagged glass and crumpled newspaper and milk which had already dried into thick yellowish pats and errant gleaming globes of wine-dark Baltic amber. He stared down into a world that had been utterly changed.'

Eventually, they are noticed by another, stronger character:

'Julius scrutinized the kitchen with a faint frown, noting the milk bottles.'

It is he who, by the end of the novel, manages to overcome them:

'"What did you do with all those milk bottles?" said Tallis. "I washed a few and put them outside and I put the rest in the rubbish tip across the road."'

In Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, milk bottles play an even more prominent role. Indeed, one of the characters is so in thrall to them that she fills her shed with the things:

'Then, as the day was fine, she went into the garden and picked her way over the long uncut grass to the shed where she kept milk bottles. These needed to be checked from time to time and occasionally she even went as far as dusting them. Sometimes she would put out one for the milkman but she mustn't let the hoard get too low because, if there was a national emergency of the kind that seemed so frequent nowadays, or even another war, there could well be a shortage of milk bottles.'

This character becomes so concerned when an acquaintance inadvertently leaves an alien milk bottle in her possession that she wraps it up and seeks her out in a library to return it:

'Marcia crept up behind [Letty] as she browsed among the biographies.

"This is yours, I think, " said Marcia in an accusing tone, thrusting the wrapped milk bottle towards her.

"A milk bottle?" Of course, Letty did not remember the occasion and Marcia had to explain it, which she did, loudly, so that other people turned round and the young blond-haired library assistant seemed about to make some kind of protest.

Letty conscious of tension in the air, accepted the bottle without further question.'

If someone as ill-read as me can find two instances so easily, I'm sure there must be many more references to this quintessentially English obsession scattered through the fiction of the twentieth century. I look forward to following the glittering academic career of whichever enterprising young scholar chooses to investigate this fascinating and thus far thoroughly overlooked area of research.

A Feast of Reading

I’ve been reading a book called A House is Built, which I was supposed to read at school when I was thirteen (I always said I’d get round to it eventually.) It’s a pretty much forgotten novel these days, and, although entertaining - and, arguably, an early feminist parable - it isn’t really especially good. It has two authors, which could account for the book’s slightly uneven tone, the tendency for characters to be introduced and forgotten about and a fairly jerky plot. ‭I think it was probably selected for the New South Wales curriculum because it is ‬set in Sydney in the‭ ‬1840s and‭ ‬50s and so it provided a bit of history to pupils in a fictional form.

And anyway it's not all bad. One delightful thing about it, in fact, is its vivid descriptions of food. At a lunch party we are told exactly what dishes are provided for the children:‭ ‘… ‬great plates of nice wholesome brown bread and butter,‭ ‬blue-rimmed bowls of barley broth, lightly boiled eggs,‭ ‬earthenware pots of honey,‭ ‬pitchers of milk and lemonade,‭ ‬pyramids of pale yellow pears,‭ ‬pie dishes of milky rice pudding in paper frills ...', and we are given just as much detail about what the adults will get:‭ ‘... ‬cold chicken decorated with beetroot stars‭ … ‬breasts of chicken in aspic,‭ mou‬lds and pies and spiced meats,‭ ‬salads,‭ ‬tall glasses of celery,‭ ‬an epergne of grapes in bacchanalian abandon,‭ ‬cremes and jellies,‭ ‬made with art and clarified with eggshell,‭ ‬glaces fruits,‭ ‬gâteaux and wines.‭’

‭Given how much time we spend eating - and indeed how much time characters in fiction spend at table - such close attention to what’s consume‬d is actually surprisingly rare. For example, I’ve just looked at one of my favourite scenes from Dickens - the dinner party given by the Veneerings‭ (‘‬bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London’‭) - and realised that, alt‬hough we see the characters called into the dining-room‭ (“‘‬Dinner is on the table‭!’ ‬thus the melancholy retainer,‭ ‬as who should say,‭ ‘‬Come down and be poisoned,‭ ‬ye unhappy children of men‭!’”) ‬and gathered around the table‭ (‬which like everything else in the house is so new that it is‭ ‘‬in a state of high varnish and polish‭’, ‬its surface,‭ ‬like that of its owners,‭ ‬smelling‭ ‘‬a little too much of the workshop and‭ … ‬a trifle sticky‭’,) ‬we are told nothing of what is eaten.

I’ve also had a quick flick through some novels by Evelyn Waugh, Henry James, F Scott Fitzgerald and DH Lawrence and, despite the fact that in all of them the characters never stop lunching and dining together , we rarely glimpse a thing they eat. Admittedly, Lawrence does allow a rather saucy girl some oysters in Women in Love, but I think he is more interested in insinuating something about the person eating the oysters than in the pleasurable experience of the eating itself. Similarly, Katherine Mansfield describes lots of food in The Germans at Meat, but not to give us the pleasure of thinking about the delicious dishes on offer - all she wants is to show us what greedy pigs her fellow boarding house guests are so that we will sneer at them with her.

‭In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the character called Chip (who may, I suppose, be named after a snack?) thinks about food a great deal. However, although he spends a rather gruesome half hour walking around a shop with $78.40 of salmon stuffed down his trousers ‘like a cool loaded diaper’, you could hardly claim his story was a celebration of ‘fine dining’. ‬

John Galsworthy bangs on about saddle of mutton for a bit in Forsyte Saga - ‘No Forsyte has given a dinner without a saddle of mutton. There is something in its succulent solidity that makes it suitable to people of a certain position. It is nourishing - and tasty; the sort of thing a man remembers eating. It has a past and a future, like a deposit paid into a bank’ - but it is obvious he is not interested in the experience of consuming the thing but only in its symbolism. ‭

James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a book anyone thinking of converting to Catholicism should read very carefully), is guilty of a similar trick. He conjures up a pretty delicious sounding Christmas dinner: ‭‘... the warm heavy smell of turkey and ham and celery rose from the plates and dishes and the great fire was banked high and red in the grate and the green ivy and red holly made you feel so happy and when dinner was ended the big plum pudding would be carried in, studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, with bluish fire running around it and a little green flag flying from the top’ ‭but only so that poor old Stephen Daedalus can feel guilty about his ‘gluttonous enjoyment of food’ later on.

Towards the end of the novel - after Stephen has made his confession and feels his soul is ‘made fair and holy once more’ - Joyce repeats the exercise. He describes how: ‭‘On the dresser was a plate of sausages and white pudding and on the shelf there were eggs ... White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea. How simple and beautiful was life after all!’‭but he isn’t trying to remind us of the joy of plain dinners; he merely wants to highlight Stephen’s state of religious fervour, in which even sausages become sacramental.

‭Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French give food more of a starring role in their fiction than we do. You don't need me to tell you how Proust has made the madeleine the most famous biscuit in all literature, but he is not alone. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert is also more than willing to describe what is being eaten by his characters, even if it does not lead to the kind of transcendent moment described by his colleague. He shows us Madame Bovary enjoying a maraschino ice and details a ‘supper, with plenty of Spanish and Rhine wines, soups a la bisque and au lait d’amandes, puddings a la Trafalgar and all sorts of cold meats with jellies that trembled in the dishes.’

He also tells us all about cheminots - ‘small, heavy, turban shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars’ heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured.' Unfortunately, this latter description, which starts so innocently and ends so ghoulishly foreshadows the most horrible eating scene I’ve ever come across in literature - the one in which Madame Bovary ‘seized the blue jar, tore out the cork, plunged in her hand and withdrawing it full of a white powder ... began eating it.' The powder is of course the poison that kills her.

‭No survey of literature would be complete, of course, without reference to the work that towers over all others - The Compleet Molesworth, (okay, I admit it - the only reason I dragged myself through all that other dreary stuff was so that I could establish my credibility before quoting from Willans and Searle yet again). As befits a masterwork, The Compleet Molesworth does not let us down when it comes to eating. Contained within its covers we find not just passing references to meals but an entire chapter devoted to the subject. The food described is hardly mouthwatering, I admit, but it's a lot more cheering than Madame Bovary's final gulp:

‭Skool Food
‭or THE PIECE OF COD WHICH PASSETH UNDERSTANDING

‭1. ETIQUETTE

‭Many boys find themselves quite incapable of not making any rude comments on skool food. This is hardly good maners hem-hem and i must impress on all cads and bounders who sa poo gosh when they see a skool sossage to mend their ways

‭When face with a friteful piece of meat which even the skool dog would refuse do not screw up the face in any circs and sa coo ur gosh ghastly. This calls atention to onself and makes it more difficult to pinch a beter piece from the next boy.

‭Rice PUDINGS and jely in the poket are not a good mixture with fluff and the ushual nauseating contents. Sometimes you can chiz a bit of pink mange into a hankchief but it is apt to be a bit hard to manage when bloing the nose. peason hav tried green peas up the sleeve but no good really as they all come shooting down again.

‭We in our skool are proud of our maners which maykth us the weeds we are and when grabber shoot peas from peashooter at the deaf master we are much shoked i do not think. Nor do we make lakes of treacle in the poridge or rivers of gravy through the mashed potatoes perish the thort.

‭AT TABLE

‭Aktually whatever boys may sa about skool food the moment deaf master sa lord make us truly etc. whole skool descend upon food with roar like an H bomb and in 2 minits all hav been swept bare. We then hav time for interval of uplifting conversation
‭i sa e.g.
‭i think aldous huxley is rather off form in point counterpoint, peason. And he repli i simply couldn’t agree with you more rat face but peason is very 4th rate and hav not got beyond bulldog drummond. Anyway then the next course come and all boys disappear in a cloud of jely blanch mange plums and aple while treacle tart fly in all directions.

‭WITHDRAWAL

‭When the repast is finished the head of the skool or headmaster should wait for a moment until the conversation shows some small signs of flagging then rising to his feet he indicates that the meal is at an end and the lades may withdraw.

‭Aktually if he waited for the conversation to flag he would be sitting there until tea time when it would all begin agane. Wot he does is to bawl Silence at the top of his voice separate three tuoughs who are fiting and the whole skool charge into the corridor except molesworth 2 who is pinching the radio malt.