Dinner with Lord Hawksfield (March 1, 1814)

While I've been having a lot of fun with Pen Vogler's Dinner with Mr Darcy (2013), my notes for the family dinner in Chapter 6 of An Independent Heart are based on Jane Grigson’s English Food (1974). Her recipes – and her awareness of the seasonal availability of food – are very traditional.

Dinner: simple family dinner, two courses; 10 people

Winterweed soup

Baked carp with soft roe stuffing and egg sauce

Boiled fowl with lemon sauce

Root vegetables

Baked apples, custard, jam tarts

No game – the breeding season has started

Roast saddle of lamb – too early

Young lamb, when killed from six weeks to three months old, is called spring lamb, and appears in              the market as early as the last of January, but is very scarce until March. Lamb one year old is called a yearling. 

 

The author biography at the beginning of Grigson's book lauds her “erudition”, which sounds a bit daunting but simply means that she doesn’t take things for granted. Her book was published in 1974, but her sources go back to the sixteenth century. “We need to renew and develop the old tradition of Hannah Glasse [1747], Elizabeth Raffald [1769], Maria Rundell [1827] and Eliza Acton [1845]”, she says in her introduction (pp. 1–3, at p. 3). “A good many things in our marketing system now fight against simple and delicate food. Tomatoes have no taste. The finest flavoured potatoes are not available in shops. Vegetables and fruit are seldom fresh. Milk comes out of Friesians. Cheeses are subdivided and imprisoned in plastic wrapping. ‘Farm fresh’ means eggs which are no more than ten, fourteen or twenty days old. Words such as ‘fresh’ and ‘home-made’ have been borrowed by commerce to tell lies.” Today one might add ‘organic’ and ‘bio’. 

Things have improved, fortunately for the historical novelist (not to mention environmental issues and animal rights). With awareness of supply chains growing, it is much easier to think about where food comes from and to imagine a world where there was no supermarket, no deep freeze, less imported food; where storage and preservation were what got you through the winter. “In England on the whole the food descends less from a courtly tradition than from the manor houses and rectories and homes of well-to-do merchants – latterly from a Jane Austen world,” Grigson says. Her recipes refer back to and reference cookery books from four centuries. This is wonderful for the writer, because it helps prevent anachronistic bloopers. Reassuringly she adds, “The first mention of a dish, the first known recipe for it, can seldom be taken as a record of its first appearance.” 

 

As an example she cites Poor Knights of Windsor: “Who’s to say whether Pain Perdu […] is really English or French; both in England and France it was a dish of the medieval court. Did the English call it payn pur-dew out of the kind of snobbery we can still recognize, or because they took it from France? And if they took it from France, where did the French take it from? It’s a marvellous way of using up stale bread, especially good bread, and who’s to say that earlier still the Romans, or the Greeks before the Romans, didn’t see the point of frying up bread and serving it with something sweet? In England today Pain Perdu has been anglicised into a nursery or homely dish, Poor Knights of Windsor. In France with brioche to hand, or the light pain de mie, Pain Perdu remains a select dish gracefully adorned with brandied fruit and dollops of cream under such names as Croûte aux Abricots.” Having had occasion last summer to make croûte aux mirabelles with leftover brioche and a newly-made jar of brandied mirabelles that refused to seal and had to be used up, I can heartily agree!