Last month I spent a long weekend in the Lake District, the beautiful area in North West England renowned for its lakes, mountains and literary associations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles and Mary Lamb, Robert Southey, Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin all lived there at some point in their lives. Continue reading “The Lake District: Poetry and Grasmere Gingerbread”
Category: Poetry
Easter baking
Like Christmas, Easter provides the keen cook with the opportunity to spend hours in the kitchen. There’s the traditional dinner of roast lamb – the springtime counterpart to the roast turkey Christmas dinner.
And when it comes to baking, Easter offers its own slightly lighter variants of Christmas delights, which stlll contain many of the same ingredients, specifically dried fruit, nuts and marzipan. Instead of the heavy fruited Christmas cake there’s the simnel cake, which can be made at the last minute, dispenses with the icing and makes a real feature of the marzipan. And the dense alcohol-rich fruited filling of the mince pie gives way to the lightly fruited and spiced hot cross bun. Continue reading “Easter baking”
Food for Angels
In my last post on Milton’s Paradise Lost I referred to the episode where, prior to the Fall, the archangel Raphael visits Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and dines with them. Continue reading “Food for Angels”
Forbidden Fruit
In my previous two posts on Jacobean revenge drama I explored the way the playwrights use food for nefarious purposes or to symbolise corruption (see here and here). In Paradise Lost (published 1667), John Milton retells in a long epic poem the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, a narrative with food at its heart. Continue reading “Forbidden Fruit”