Who's for a slice of coronation antelope in jelly?
Royal banquets, menus qui ont marqué l'histoire, and Samuel Pepys on the lash
Food is much on my mind this week since the reprinting of Menus That Made History co-authored with my friend and snooker compadre Vince Franklin has made its way this week to the warehouse prior to being shipped out into the wilds of the nation’s bookshops. This fine piece of news was closely followed by another fine piece of news that a major French publishing house appears very keen to produce an edition en français.
The catch - well, not a catch really, more of a ‘thing’ - is that they want us to write some additional French menus. It’s entirely understandable because while the book is quite international and there are already a few French sections (including Mitterand’s obsession with ortolans, and Asterix and the Banquet), I’m sure a French readership would enjoy more content that is pertinently closer to home.
It will be an interesting project since we’re going to write them in English and then they’ll be translated, so the only place they’ll appear in the original will probably be in future newsletters here. But it will also have an effect on how we write them - we want to keep the tone the same so that it doesn’t clash with the rest of the book, but we won’t need, for example, to explain French words/terms/geography/society as we did in the original. One good thing is that there is plenty of material to work with. I’m not sure how we’d cope if a Kazakhstan publisher wanted the same.
Anyway, to celebrate I’ve added a menu I wrote for Menus That Made History that didn’t make the final cut, the picnic from Five Go Off in a Caravan, 1946.
Hard-boiled eggs
Bread and butter
Cake
Sandwiches
Plums (freshly picked)
Salt
In all 21 of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy (woof) enjoy their food, especially their frequent picnics. This one in their circus-themed outing boasts a typical menu as well as the iconic moment when George points out that: “I don't know why, but the meals we have on picnics always taste so much nicer than the ones we have indoors.” So central to their adventures is al fresco munching that the cover of the modern satire Five Go Gluten Free shows them all on a picnic at which Anne is spiralising courgettes and carrots, while Julian and Dick are revolted by a very green health drink.
What’s not clear is when the original books are set. The first four were published during the second world war, yet this does not intrude on the action. Their well-balanced and never fanciful diet reflects the austerity eating of the period – most of the Five’s adventures were written while food rationing was in place (sugar and sweets came off in 1953, meat and everything else the following year). However, once you start totting up their general consumption, it appears to be well above the allowance. For example, they eat “lashings of hard-boiled eggs” even though the weekly ration for children was three a week (one for adults); in the menu featured here, Anne actually pleads: “Can everyone eat two eggs?”
The over the top descriptions of food are probably included for the same reason that Evelyn Waugh went to town on them in Brideshead Revisited. In the 1959 revised edition of his novel which first came out in 1945, he admits that as he was writing at a bleak period of privation and soya beans “the book is infused with a kind of gluttony for food and wine”. The Famous Five picnics are similarly vicarious menus, to be savoured and longed for by the reader.
The Five’s indoor meals are filled with hams and bacon, salads, carrot, and creamy milk. There is plenty of ginger beer too of course and the occasional monster plate of macaroons (Five on Finniston Farm). Chocolates and drinks like orangeade appear after the war, but not in vast quantities and while food remains hearty, it continues to be healthy rather than glamorous. Picnics are more likely to include radishes, tomatoes, cake (cherry, ginger, or general fruit), plus a bone for Timmy, and especially sandwiches – the two years of bread rationing immediately after the war ended have no impact on the Five’s consumption.
Fillings vary but include lettuce and Spam, sardine, cucumber dipped in vinegar, (Five Go Off to Camp), ham (Five on a Secret Trail), potted meat (Five on Kirrin Island Again), and sausagemeat (for Timmy, made by George in Five Get Into Trouble). There is a section of half a dozen pages in Five on a Hike Together devoted simply to making a vast quantity of sandwiches, including cheese, egg, and ham, all packed in grease-proof paper. Two of the most unusual fillings come in Five Have Plenty of Fun (1954) via the Five’s American friend Berta. Dick reads the label of the tin of ‘Snick-Snacks’ and notes that it contains “Shrimp, lobster, crab and a dozen other things all in one tin. Sounds good.” Then Anne finds a tin of ‘Gorgies’ which she assumes is so-named because people gorge themselves on it. No details of what it actually contains are revealed and they are both rare in that foreign food is not usually on the menu.
As it’s the coronation this weekend I’m going to make the spinachy coronation quiche and the somewhat less spinachy coronation chicken. I was delighted to come across a marvellous blog post on the British Library site about the 1429 coronation banquet of Henry VI (coronation eating is also the subject of this weekend’s The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4). It’s well worth a read, not least for the marvellous list of what was on the menu which included (my bold italics):
Boars heads encased in pastry castles decorated with gold.
A ‘custade rooial’ (a type of pastry) enclosing a golden leopard.
A fritter shaped like a sun with a fleur-de-lis.
A fritter shaped like a leopard’s head with ostrich feathers.
A jelly sculpture containing a red antelope, wearing a crown around its neck with a golden chain.
A roasted peacock served in its plumage.
A ‘flampayne’, a pork pie ornamented with leopards and gold fleur-de-lis.
And finally, here is how the always entertaining Samuel Pepys spent the evening of the coronation of Charles II on April 23, 1661 (do read the whole entry on the marvellous online site devoted to the diaries):
At last I sent my wife and her bedfellow to bed, and Mr. Hunt and I went in with Mr. Thornbury (who did give the company all their wine, he being yeoman of the wine-cellar to the King) to his house; and there, with his wife and two of his sisters, and some gallant sparks that were there, we drank the King’s health, and nothing else, till one of the gentlemen fell down stark drunk, and there lay spewing; and I went to my Lord’s pretty well. But no sooner a-bed with Mr. Shepley but my head began to hum, and I to vomit, and if ever I was foxed it was now, which I cannot say yet, because I fell asleep and slept till morning.
Sweet dreams, fellow coronationers.
I'm fascinated by this bit:
'In the 1959 revised edition of his novel which first came out in 1945, he admits that as he was writing at a bleak period of privation and soya beans “the book is infused with a kind of gluttony for food and wine”.'
That is a scarcity trap speaking, as per my Why Aren't I Writing? piece from a few weeks ago. Whenever we don't have enough of something, it becomes all we can think about. When a group of men went on an extremely low calorie diet in 1944 to help scientists understand the impact of starvation, they became obsessed with food (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/520587241):
"they planned to open restaurants, to become restaurateurs. They memorized recipes. They compared food prices of different newspapers. That's what they were doing. The whole time, they sat around looking at food-related issues."
I wonder where else in literature scarcity traps become apparent?