When it comes to food at Christmas, in addition to the foodstuffs usually eaten – mince pies, turkey, Christmas cake – another traditional feature is the amount of food consumed. We expect to spend more money on food, to have our kitchen cupboards and fridges full to bursting and to eat so much that our New Year’s Resolution yet again has to be to go on a diet and start going to the gym. Continue reading “Christmas feasting”
Tag: The Mill on the Floss
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)