When we had done, [the waiter] brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
‘How’s the pie?’ he said, rousing himself.
‘It’s a pudding’, I made answer.
‘Pudding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, bless me, so it is! What!’ looking at it nearer. ‘You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding!’
‘Yes, it is indeed.’
‘Why, a batter-pudding,’ he said, taking up a table-spoon, ‘is my favourite pudding! Ain’t that lucky? Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see who’ll get most.’
The waiter certainly got most. (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens) Continue reading “Eating someone else’s food”
Category: 19th century literature
Christmas Cake
Christmas is a favourite time of year in literature, with its appearance serving many different narrative functions. Continue reading “Christmas Cake”
Damson cheese
In my last post I wrote about Mr Glegg in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss who loyally admires his wife’s questionable culinary talents. Amongst her ‘renowned’ delicacies, the narrator mentions the ‘venerable hardness’ of Mrs Glegg’s damson cheese. Continue reading “Damson cheese”
The Loyal Husband
Mr Glegg, being of a reflective turn, …had much wondering meditation on the peculiar constitution of the female mind as unfolded to him in his domestic life: and yet he thought Mrs Glegg’s household ways a model for her sex: it struck him as a pitiable irregularity in other women if they did not roll up their table-napkins with the same tightness and emphasis as Mrs Glegg did, if their pastry had a less leathery consistence, and their damson cheese a less venerable hardness than hers: nay, even the peculiar combination of grocery and drug-like odours in Mrs Glegg’s private cupboard impressed him as the only right thing in the way of cupboard smells.
(George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss)