Dear friends,
Apologies and sighs, sighs and apologies. It has been a tricky week for playing with y’all. I wouldn’t blame you for shaking your head in disgust. Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina? Prepare to Meet Your Slackerina, more like! You’re right, of course, but all I can do is beg your indulgence just one more time.
I am on my way to the library, to once again do battle with the Rare Book room. I have found some amazing things in the catalogue, such as a manuscript copy of The Form of Cury, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) extant cookbooks in English, a collection of recipes by the cooks at the court of Richard II, edited by Samuel Pegge. (Cury means “cooking” in Middle English, and is pronounced “kewry.") I am dying to get my hands on this, to sit in an overheated room and actually touch history, but the catalog notation contains that dreaded appendix: PERMIT REQUIRED. As I told a friend, I’m hoping that the process to get that permit does not mirror that of Jane Juska, author of A Round-Heeled Woman, who had to plead her case to a pair of snotty misogynists before she was allowed access to the Berg Collection to look at the Anthony Trollope manuscripts. True, I do have the Egg Board watching my back, and I have a nice reference in the form of Andy Smith, who taught my New School class, but I still fear it may take more than that.
Dear friends, I knew that I would not emerge from this fellowship, this month in Arkansas, with a fully-formed book, but the more I read, the more I understand how a project can snowball. (Hi, Snowball.) I could easily see giving up five years of my life to pursue the history of the egg. Anne Mendelson, the author of Stand Facing the Stove, the biography of Joy of Cooking authors Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, said that she had anticipated taking a year to research and write her book. She took ten. And my ne plus ultra culinary heroine, Karen Hess, has apparently been working on a book about Thomas Jefferson for close to ten years, and has produced a text that would make Clarissa look like Life’s Little Instruction Book. When Andy Smith told us this story in class, everyone laughed, but I knew.
Since I am in a Karen Hess mood, I’ll leave you with a passage from her introduction to Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery (Columbia University Press, 1981), transcribed and annotated by Mrs. Hess. This passage, about the bounty of fish available in Atlantic waters in the seventeenth century, is a distillation of everything I love about Mrs. Hess’s writing: her meticulous sense of scholarship, her amazing palate, her respect of sound kitchen technique, her love of beautiful produce (meant here in the broadest sense of ingredients, not just fruit and veg), her anger at the degradation of our food supply and our palates, and her desire to memorialize what we have lost forever. If you wonder why I piss and moan about my own writing so much, it is because Mrs. Hess set the bar very, very highly for me, and even though we have never met, I am loathe to disappoint her.
The fish recipes are of exceptional interest. You may not be tempted to try the virtually medieval way to boyle a Carpe in its Blood (C 187), but you surely will not be able to resist reading about it. Most of the recipes are perfectly suitable for today, or would be if one could but find the fish. It is not so much the problem of the varieties available. It is true that we have neither true sole nor turbot, and that our oysters are quite different, but that is hardly serious compared to the problem of quality. Some of the finest fish of the great Atlantic swam within sight of English shores and, for the rest the English were intrepid seafarers, and fishing boats were often equipped with ingenious sea water flow-through “keeps.” There were fine streams everywhere and all estates had large ponds where lake fish were kept. It beat refrigeration. What fish had to be kept was pickled (there are delightful recipes in our manuscript), dried, or salted. Again, it beat refrigeration. And there was no pollution to speak of—no oil spills, no insecticides, no chemical wastes, no atomic fallout. All salt and fresh water creatures must have had a fine clean taste that none of us has ever tasted, nor ever shall.
As soon as I finished typing that paragraph, I found an even clearer distillation of Mrs. Hess’s talents, at the end of a paragraph on game cookery, one that speaks volumes to me: “Not one of the sauces is sludged up with a grain of flour.” Testify.