Features

Good books, old friends

Details

By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

Hits: 241

How gratifying it is to suddenly have waiting lists at our public libraries for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, many copies of which seemed doomed to gather dust and become brittle from disuse in the stacks.

My own interest in Austen dates back to high school, when I was inspired by novelist Fay Weldon's brilliant adaptation of Pride and Prejudice for television, aired on Masterpiece Theatre in late 1980, to read the novel on which it was based.

Although I'll admit to being impatient with Austen's sometimes slow-moving, highly descriptive prose, I treasure the satirical eye and witty insights into life in late Georgian and Regency England which have made her works classic.

Likewise, by sticking with the unhurried unfolding of her stories, I have been rewarded with truly masterful turns in plot and transformations in characters.

I own paperback copies of all her novels (I am sure I will have finished reading them before I retire), I have at least three adaptations of her novels in my personal videocassette collection, and I rushed to the cinema as soon as Emma Thompson's Oscar-winning version of "Sense and Sensibility" reached Flint.

In short, I am an Austen enthusiast. You can imagine my excitement when my mother presented me with an entirely new format for enjoying Austen on my most recent birthday. Now I can not only read Austen and see her novels interpreted for television and movies, I can also recreate the food her characters ate using recipes from The Jane Austen Cookbook by food historian Maggie Black and Austenian scholar and biographer Deidre Le Faye (Chicago Review Press, 1995, 128 pages).

Well, okay, I am certainly more interested in reading recipes for "fricassee of turnips" and "chickens with tongues" then in preparing them. Although the authors have supposedly adapted the recipes to modern cooking methods, a brief perusal of them tells me they generally require more time and culinary skill than any working woman of my generation is likely to have. Ragout spaghetti sauce is much more likely to be in our cooking vocabulary than "ragoo of celery and wine."

But, as the blurb on the inside cover explains, the authors have done much more than compile obscure, antiquated recipes for the amusement of fervent Austen devotees. They have also provided a "valuable inquiry into the social conventions that shaped Jane Austen's world and helped to distinguish her celebrated fiction."

The recipes themselves are taken largely from compilations of recipes kept by Martha Lloyd, who lived with the Austen family for a time, and Austen friend Mrs. Phillip Lybbe Powys. The authors also drew on other recipes published from about 1750 to 1820 "to achieve a balanced selection from which complete menus can be composed."

The recipes are divided into chapters for favorite family dishes eaten on an ordinary, everyday basis, dishes used in both small- and large-scale entertainments and food to take on picnics and visits. Methods for pickling, preserving and making wine are also given.

Each recipe includes a verbatim description from the published manuscript in which it originally appeared, followed by a list of ingredients and cooking instructions written by the authors in contemporary terms.

There are recipes for food which are still consumed frequently, such as "roast ribs of beef," but you could probably find equally effective and easier instructions for making it in a contemporary cookbook.

If nothing else we can refer to this recipe collection for explanations of unfamiliar dishes mentioned in Austen's novels and other literature from the same period.

But I suspect most readers will find the chapters prefacing the recipes, in which the authors give a brief culinary history of the period and an analysis of the importance of food in Austen's novels and letters, much more interesting than the recipes themselves.

In a chapter titled "Social and Domestic Life in Jane Austen's Time," the authors describe typical meals for various occasions, often quoting published letters from people who lived during the period. They also describe the schedule on which meals were taken, which not surprisingly varied from household to household according to income level.

The authors list the courses for formal meals in the houses of the well-to-do landed gentry and even give a diagram showing the way a dinner table would be set. They also reveal the tremendous amount of work it took to obtain and preserve food in a time before supermarkets and refrigeration.

A chapter on Austen's novels and letters represents literary criticism at its most palatable level, giving a perspective of Austen and her characters according to their eating habits rather than their actions. Of course, the authors admit that since Austen was writing for her own peers and had "no need to spell out customs of the day … She was much more interested in the social interaction of her characters than in what they ate …"

Although the authors' instructions for making Austenian dishes are complex, the tone in which they have written this cookbook is not the least bit stuffy, and they have made an honest attempt to provide Austen enthusiasts with enough material to have their own Austenian-style dinner, tea or picnic. Unfortunately, the authors only suggest one menu themselves.

Amusing pen-and-ink illustrations from the period interspersed throughout the cookbook's pages help satisfy our appetite for details about Austen and her contemporaries just as much as the descriptions of what they ate do.

The well-researched cookbook includes a list of sources cited by the authors and suggestions for further reading. And, if you are looking for a "new" way to prepare beef, chicken or broccoli, it has a useful "Subject Index of Recipes."

Other literary cookbooks which you can ask for at your local public library include Veronica O'Mare's A Triple, a Coddle, a Fry: An Irish Literary Cookbook (Moyer Bell, 1993), Brenda Marshall's The Charles Dickens Cookbook (Personal Library, 1981), Margaret Lane's The Beatrix Potter Country Cookery Book (F. Warne, 1981) and Gretchen Anderson's The Louisa May Alcott Cookbook (Little, Brown, 1985).

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's research consultant since 1989. She has a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan and works for the Genesee District Library.

• < Prev
• Next >