Tag Archives: Mr. Darcy

Bits and Pieces of a Regency-era Feast

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This year I shan’t do much cooking for Thanksgiving. Much more fun to read about it. And eat someone else’s.

Thanksgiving – when the people who are the most thankful are the ones who didn’t have to cook. – Melanie White

There were many pitfalls in assembling the ingredients for an early nineteenth century feast, especially if one lived in an urban environment. Never mind the actual cooking.

For instance, I use Irish butter for baking because it’s so flavorful and seems to produce lighter, flakier biscuits and such. A Regency-era cook would have chosen a different variety:

In examining tub butter, and particularly the Irish, look at and smell to the outside next to the cask, which is often white in appearance like tallow, and quite rank (!) in smell.

But cooks both past and present would agree young turkeys are best for roasting. Mature turkeys (more than eight months old) went into the stew pot or a casserole. It took a knowledgeable housekeeper in Jane Austen’s day to avoid being snookered into purchasing a tough old bird.

“..the toes and bills, if (the bird) be young, will be soft and pliable, but will feel hard and stiff if old.”

Norfolk turkeys, then as now, are considered the best among the breeds. This black tom is a magnificent specimen, being true to his Spanish ancestry. via wikicommons

One also had to ferret out unscrupulous cheesemongers. These were merchants who stuck brass pins into cheese rounds to create the appearance of blue mold, and thus market the product as aged.

And beware bad eggs:

“If fresh, (the egg) will feel warm when the tongue is applied to the biggest end ; but if stale, it will be cold. An egg, when quite fresh, will sink at once when put into cold water; but if rotten, it will swim.”

Young peas with pearl onions are a Thanksgiving favorite–in our household, at least. But before modern methods of preservation, one had to labor to keep the vegetable green weeks after harvesting. The technique involves boiling them when fresh, then drying them with a cloth.

Afterwards:

“..set them once or twice in a cool oven to harden a little; after which put them into paper bags, and hang them up in the kitchen for use. — To prepare them when wanted, they are first to be soaked well for an hour or more, and then put into warm water and boiled with a little butter.”

We drink both white and red wines at Thanksgiving. Sometimes rosé. The array of wines at a Georgian-era dinner table was impressive: gooseberry, strawberry, raspberry, elderberry, mulberry and blackberry. Red, black and white currant. Birch, spruce and juniper. Cherry, morella, peach, apple, orange, lemon, parsnip and quince. From honey: white mead, walnut, cider white and cowslip. Raisin (tastes like sherry!) Ginger, rhubarb, sage, gilliflower and turnip. Barley and sycamore. Rose and fig.

Even juniper:

“To make juniper berry wine: Take of cold soft water, 18 gallons; Malaga or Smyrna raisins, 35 lbs.; juniper berries, 9 quarts; red tartar, 4 ounces; wormwood and sweet marjoram, each 2 handfuls; British spirit, two quarts, or more. Ferment for ten or twelve days. — This will make eighteen gallons.”

Nowadays they say the juniper berry will cure that ‘cedar fever’ wintertime allergy.

In England, the juniper tree is in decline. This is not the case in Texas. photo via Texas A&M AgriLife Extension

Pies, of course, are a traditional part of the Thanksgiving feast. I serve store-bought pecan and pumpkin. Meat pie recipes attributed to favorite Pride and Prejudice characters abound on the internet. A fruit pie would not ordinarily grace Mr. Darcy’s table but I did find a recipe from his time period for a lemon pie. It is neither meringue nor pudding, but a tart embellished with icing.

It takes two weeks to make:

Over the course of a fortnight, soak six lemons (oranges may be substituted) initially in salt water, to be changed out for fresh. Afterwards, boil and cut the fruit into thin slices. Add the liquor of six pippins (dessert apples pared, cored and quartered, boiled in a pint of water) to the lemon or orange juice. Boil the mixture in a pound of sugar for fifteen minutes.

“…then put them into a pot and squeeze in two spoonsful of the juice of either orange or lemon, according to the kind of tart; put puff paste, very thin, into shallow patty-pans. Take a brush, and rub them over with melted butter, sift double refined sugar over them, which will form a pretty iceing, and bake them.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

Quotes taken from: The Complete Servant, being a Practical Guide to the peculiar Duties and Business of all descriptions of Servants.., by Samuel and Sarah Adams (1825)

The authors state they served various well-to-do families for a combined total of fifty years.

Regency Impudence: Jane Austen

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“..certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.—It depends upon the character of those who handle it.”

–Emma

Thus the heroine describes Frank Churchill, who has surprised her by admitting he posted to London merely to get his hair cut. She knew him to be a charming fellow, with good address and a handsome appearance. From this she inferred him to be of good character and sensibility.

Seems he might have to go back for another haircut.

Now she is not so sure.

Tonnish gentlemen valued a good barber, particularly one who was awake on every suit in the dressing of hair. But Mr. Churchill wasn’t seeking such services because they were scarce in the country. He went to London at great expense and difficulty to attend to his appearance because of the reaction such impulsive conduct would provoke in others.

He was proud, impudently so, of his folly.

Impudence is the lightning rod that strikes the placid treeline of Regency society. Jane Austen uses the impudent character to put her heroes and heroines in a bustle. Her Churchills and Willoughbys and Wickhams bring conflict and disorder to what would normally be harmonious and orderly.

What Marianne saw in him I confess I shall never know.

‘Brandon is just the kind of man,’ said Willoughby one day when they were talking of him together, ‘whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.’

— Sense and Sensibility

Austen heightens the tension the impudent character brings by placing him very near to his polar opposite. Fully aware of this contrast, the impudent Willoughby does not shrink from commenting on Colonel Brandon’s character.  He is so far unrepentant of his impudence he can scarcely refrain from making the insult so exquisitely wrought in the passage above.

What a bore to be like Colonel Brandon. Now this is impudence indeed!

Mr. Wickham is perhaps the most impudent of Austen characters. Without him, the delicious sparring between hero and heroine would be rather less so. It is near the end of  Pride and Prejudice when the author unveils the tip of impudence’s sword, sharpening folly’s dull blade without warning.

When Wickham returns after marrying Lydia, darling Lizzie is amazed.  She expected Lydia to declare herself well-satisfied, for that gel is unthinking folly itself. But Wickham had been positively constrained to enter into wedlock. Chagrined was he? Indeed, no! Miss Bennet learns a valuable lesson from this unveiling, leaving her to resolve privately that henceforth she will “draw no limits in future to the impudence of an impudent man.”

But my favorite illustration of Wickham’s impudence is delivered by Mr. Bennet.  Mr. Collins has the effrontery to warn against an alliance between the rector’s daughter and Mr. Darcy. Couched in the following ode to such unconscious foolishness, Mr. Bennet makes a despairing admission.

“I cannot help giving [Mr. Collins] precedence even over Mr. Wickham, much as I value the impudence and hypocrisy of my son-in-law.”

Mr. Collins is completely unaware of how offensive his conduct is, immersed as he is in self-satisfaction. Mr. Bennet finds this amusing. But he views Wickham’s behavior with grim dismay.  Lydia’s happiness has been placed in careless, selfish hands.

Her father is particularly bothered since he knows Mr. Wickham knows. Impudence is very self-aware. It appreciates the consequences of its conduct.

And impudence doesn’t care.

 

 

John Keats: Mr. Darcy

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“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.

“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”

— Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

One of a surfeit of sequels, I daresay.

One of a surfeit of sequels, I daresay.

A surfeit of anything, be it lampreys or love, can be a bad thing.

This notion was well-known to Austen heroines like darling Lizzie and beloved Anne. Indeed, during the Regency, the rise of Romanticism in art was viewed with some alarm because it unleashed longing, passionate love. If it could be confined to the landscape of nature and politics, then all should be well.

And then along came Keats.

Despised “above all” by Byron, John Keats (1795 – 1821) remains the most enduring poet to inform us on Regency love. And, as Mr. Darcy pointed out in that discerning way of his, poetry is so necessary to love that the latter could not exist without it.

Keats felt the same way.

Long before he was known for his love poetry, his friends knew him as a man of love. Keats was, they said, a loveable as opposed to an amiable man. The painter Joseph Severn said “there was a strong bias of the beautiful side of humanity in every thing he did.”

However, Keats struggled to translate his sympathy for all things loving onto paper. When he managed to produce something, his work was subject to vicious criticism. Some said his verse was the vulgar product of a “Cockney poetaster,” that his writings shall have “our very footmen composing tragedies” and turn the heads of “farm-servants and unmarried ladies.”

He corresponded with Wordsworth and lived with Leigh Hunt, but the way these men wrote poetry seemed particularly unsuited to Keats’ desire for expression. His inspiration was Shakespeare, whose Twelfth Night mentioned death caused by a surfeit of music.  Like the Bard, Keats needed to explore love in its full expression, with all its “World of Pains.”

And then along came Fanny Brawne:

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
— Bright Star by John Keats
Bright Star

The passionate Bright Star, considered to be his love verse to Fanny, burst forth like a comet, the glorious Hyperion and Ode to a Grecian Urn in its blazing wake. These works have risen above all other poems of the Regency and indeed, higher than any other, of the nineteenth century.

Keats died young, suffering from the great love he bore his bright muse. His poetry is still the food of love today, and is one of Regency love’s greatest legacies.