GUARDSMAN: Here is a rural fellow
That will not be denied your highness’ presence.
He brings you figs.
CLEOPATRA: Let him come in. (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra) Continue reading “Fig and Walnut Tarte Tatin”
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)
Rout cakes – part 2
In my last post I wrote about rout cakes in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Vanity Fair by Thackeray (1847-48). Rout cakes were small rich cakes, flavoured with dried fruit and alcohol, which were commonly eaten at large parties and evening assemblies. Continue reading “Rout cakes – part 2”