by Jacky Hyams
Cheese is eaten very carefully. Small morsels are placed – with a knife – on small pieces of bread, brought to the mouth via thumb and finger.
Grapes, cherries or pitted fruits are tricky: the pits and skins are spat discreetly into a hand and then placed on the side of the plate.
Dessert is served to guests in the same order as dinner.
LEAVING THE TABLE
A lady wanting a second glass of wine must not help herself: the gentleman seated beside her must fill her glass. (The wine decanters are handed to the male guests only after the servants have left the dining room.) Around ten minutes after the wine has been passed round the table, it is the hostess who gives a signal for the ladies to leave the room, bowing to the lady of the highest rank. The gentlemen rise with the ladies, the women leave the dining room – in order of rank with the hostess last. Then the men are left to their port and claret, to smoke their cigars or cigarettes; the ladies move to the drawing room for coffee. The men join them later. Dinner ends officially about 30 minutes after this. However, in many country houses, the dinner group plays cards or bridge into the small hours.
THE MENU
Here’s a dinner menu of six courses. (On special occasions there can be many more – between eight and twelve.):
Caviar
Fish soup
Poached salmon with crayfish sauce
Cutlets of pigeon
Chicken Valencia with peas and creamed spinach
Roast woodcock with peas and apricots
Other popular dishes include: Oyster Patties, Braised Celery, Roast Goose, Potato Scallops, Vanilla Soufflé.
Drinks at dinner include French wines, spirits, scotch whisky, sherry and port. They also drink hock, champagne, Sauternes and claret. (Non-alcoholic drinks served during the day include lemon barley water or, in summer, iced tea.)
Dessert is equally elaborate: blancmanges, hothouse fruit from the greenhouse, arranged in silver fruit dishes carefully lined with vine leaves, with the fruit built up in tiers. Often dessert fruit is arranged down the middle of the table amid the flower displays.
Jellies come in huge, fantastic moulds. A tall pillar jelly mould may be created with jellies of different colours, turned out so that each slice is presented in a multi-coloured pattern. A dinner table for twenty people may be decorated with up to a dozen ice-cream moulds in huge shapes.
FRENCH VERSUS RUSSIAN?
The preparation and presentation of food is complex enough, the table etiquette complicated, yet a younger, newly married and less experienced hostess might also face another small dilemma when planning a dinner party – deciding between two distinct styles of serving dinner:
The fashionable service à la russe (Russian style). Here an array of different dishes are cut up on a sideboard, then handed round to the guests who take each dish as a course in itself. Or…
The more traditional style, known as service à la française. This means the food is carved at the table and two large courses, each one including a variety of different dishes, are placed on the table by servants, one after the other. This way, a dinner guest can help themselves and offer their neighbour dishes within reach – and ask for other dishes to be passed, either by another diner or by a footman.
According to the toffs’ bible, Etiquette: Rules & Usages of the Best Society, this traditional style is more complex: ‘A soup or fish course would have been on the table at the same time and would have been removed when the entrées (cutlets, fricassees, boudins, sweetbreads or pâtés) were served followed by the roast.’
The Etiquette Rules recommend the more fashionable (à la russe) style for the confused hostess: ‘It gives an opportunity for more profuse ornamentation of the table, which, as the meal progresses, does not become encumbered with partially empty dishes and platters.’
As a consequence of all this, by 1914, the fashionable set have virtually abandoned the traditional style of presentation – but a hostess might still need to consider it when entertaining older relatives, like the fictional Dowager Duchess of Grantham, who still hankers for her mostly lost world of the ‘old’ ways.
Given the amount of food to be consumed at one sitting, you can’t help wondering how the privileged women manage. They are beautifully clad yet tightly encased in stiff corsetry underneath, making movement extremely difficult. How do they cope with all this stuffing of the face? Put simply: with great difficulty. Fashionable women are expected to have a very small waist with curves above and below. (Very thin women don’t become fashionable until after World War I.) Pecking at each course rather than tucking in with gusto is the only way to maintain a fashionable appearance and a degree of comfort. And, hopefully, keep the flab at bay.
WHAT DO THE SERVANTS EAT?
Though their food would sometimes consist of leftovers or fairly basic, plain food overall, the food the live-in country-house servants eat is, in many cases, quite good. In some big houses, the lady of the house gives the cook a written set of rules for amounts of food permitted for servant consumption each day, according to quantity or value. But quantity aside, much depends on the quality of the cooking; sometimes the cook will refuse to cook for the other servants. Then the kitchen maid has to do the best she can. So in some houses, servants’ meals are heavily dependent on pre-cooked food (leftovers).
The uppers, of course, fare better food wise – particularly if they are in a house where they continue to eat separately from the lowers in their own quarters – dining off high-quality china and tableware. But overall, while the lowers’ breakfast and break-time fare is very basic, the servants’ main meal – the ‘dinner’ served around noon – is fairly substantial and very much ‘meat ’n’ two veg’ type English food fare: stews (usually with cheaper cuts of meat) or offal or roast meat, often served cold (the leftover syndrome).
The vegetables, carrots, cabbage and potatoes on the table are plain, without elaborate sauces or garnish – but they’re home-grown and fresh. The bread is not the sliced white or brown packaged variety we know but freshly baked from the kitchen; the butter is freshly churned, country style. Desserts are plain too, like rice pudding. But there’s often cheese and seasonal fruit around: strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, peaches and apricots. And many houses permit a specific allowance of tea and sugar for their servants, so there are plentiful cuppas available, domestic tasks permitting.
At Longleat, Wiltshire, home to the Thynn dynasty, servant diaries during World War I record an abundance of game for their meals: pheasant, goose, venison, partridge, hare and rabbit, followed by cheese and puddings. Given the fact that the greater majority of the population are not, at any time, enjoying such fare, the advantages of working on a large, well-run estate, food wise at least, are clear.
But what do servants drink? The uppers drink wine with their meals but beer is the traditional servant drink and in previous centuries many country houses brewed their own. So they devised their own rules around beer consumption. These included small beer made available through the day (small beer is weak, with 2.5 per cent or less alcohol content) but stronger ale is strictly rationed – and sometimes only allowed on special occasions, like birthdays. (Men could drink double the amount that women were permitted to drink.) But after the nineteenth century, country houses start to buy in their alcoholic drinks and eventually abandon their own brewing. Cash is sometimes offered to servants in lieu of beer as part of the deal – ‘beer money’ – but servant alcohol abuse is often a problem – and alcohol abuse itself remains a huge social difficulty in Edwardian times, with thousands regularly prosecuted for drunkenness.
As a consequence, some country houses have very strict rules around alcohol and staff access to their vast wine cellars. Those whose work involves hanging around, waiting for their masters, especially in towns and cities where pubs are plentiful – and warm – are the most prone to alcohol problems: footmen, for example. Cooks and butlers are also prone to over-tippling or taking one-over-the-odds sometimes. Given
the amounts of spirits and wine consumed by their masters, it’s difficult to say how rigorous the toffs might be when it comes to monitoring the servants’ intake. After a long day supervising the kitchen, is it so surprising that Cook might reach for the sherry bottle?
A DIET MAINLY CONSISTING OF BREAD
Between 1909 and 1913, a survey was conducted in Lambeth, South London, of a large group of working-class families, detailing how they fed, clothed and housed themselves on very low incomes. Conducted by Maud Pember Reeves and other members of the socialist Fabian Women’s Group, the survey was published as a book, Round About A Pound A Week. This £1 (twenty shillings) was a standard wage then, a sum these families, often with several children, struggled to live on. The book’s publication created a furore and was an important stepping stone in the ongoing campaign towards a fairer society and the welfare state. Here’s what it says about the diet of these ordinary working Londoners:
Without doubt the chief article of diet in a twenty shilling budget is bread. A long way after bread come potatoes, meat, and fish…potatoes are generally 2lbs for one penny, unless they are ‘new’ potatoes. Then they are dearer…
Meat is bought for the men and the chief expenditure is made in preparation for Sunday’s dinner, when the man is at home. It is eaten cold by him the next day.
The children get a pound of meat ‘pieces’ stewed for them during the week…
Bread, however, is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked: it is always at hand, and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands, and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals in the day. Dinner may consist of anything, from the joint on Sunday to boiled rice on Friday. Potatoes will play a great part, as a rule, at dinner, but breakfast and tea will be bread.
THE UNHEALTHY EATERS
Both poverty and excess bring considerable health problems. The rich multi-course diet of wealthy Edwardians, the large amounts of meat, sugary foods washed down with sherry, hock, champagne or liqueurs leads to stomach and digestive illnesses. Diet-related health problems include jaundice, gallstones and gout. And for the poor, their limited diet and lack of knowledge about nutrition means malnutrition is widespread. At the time of the Boer War in 1899–1902, Army recruiters are shocked to discover that many would-be recruits are too undernourished to fight.
TEATIME
Here’s a vivid description of a child’s view of the Edwardian ‘at home’ afternoon tea ritual written by Constance Spry, a well-known writer of recipe books at the time.
These were dressy affairs in more ways than one. Tatted doilies, ribbon bound plate handles and tiered cake stands, impiously nicknamed ‘curates’, gave scope for competitive ingenuity – and a source of revenue for bazaars.
White kid gloves were de rigeur (a must). Woman’s crowning glory was her hair, and she made the most of every bit of it. Glace silk petticoats swished, veils twisted themselves into knots no sailor would care to name, and immense feather boas framed the face in a seductive and feminine manner…whatever the hallowed day might be had a personality of its own; you could recognise it from the moment you came downstairs in the morning. The kitchen hummed with activity. The fire had to roar, the oven got hot, and was to be no nonsense on the part of anyone.
I have watched with unwavering concentration, miracles of sleight of hand. I have seen tightly gloved women balance a cup and saucer in the air, negotiate a knotted veil, and convey a tremulous cucumber sandwich from hand to mouth without a fault. Seldom have I had the satisfaction of seeing even a bit of tomato misfire.
The white gloves, in consideration of which the bread and butter had been rolled, might come to grief over hot buttery toast or too-soft sugar icing, but what of it?
Such offerings on the altar of delicate behaviour only added lustre to a reputation of refinement.
Come Into the Garden, Cook by Constance Spry
ESCOFFIER
Often known as the ‘king of chefs and chef of Kings’ Georges Auguste Escoffier is a major figure in the development of modern French cuisine, earning a worldwide reputation as a director of the kitchens of the ultra-fashionable watering holes, the Grand Hotel, Monte Carlo and the Savoy Hotel in London. The gourmandizing Prince of Wales is a huge admirer of Escoffier and when he becomes King Edward in 1901, Escoffier is in charge of the banqueting for his Coronation. One of Escoffier’s most famous dessert recipes, served in a silver bowl, is Pêche Melba (Peach Melba) in honour of Dame Nellie Melba, the Australian singer, a frequent guest at the Savoy. His cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903, continues to be a source of inspiration for chefs everywhere to this day.
PICNICS
The idea of dining outdoors started in the Victorian era. But with the introduction of the motorcar as transportation for food and picnic equipment, picnics became very popular in the summer months. Special picnic recipes evolve and new tableware is created to serve the potted cheese, potted pâtés, sandwiches and cakes that can now be enjoyed more readily outdoors.
BRANDED FOODS AND TAKEAWAYS
For the middle-class families with money to spend, commercially produced foodstuffs are starting to become more common by now. Things like baking powder, gelatine and tinned foods are readily available. In fact, many branded foods that are familiar to us now emerged in the Edwardian era. Brands and products like Marmite, Oxo, Birds Custard, Lyles Golden Syrup, Colman’s Mustard, Heinz Ketchup, Typhoo Tea, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and Perrier water are first launched at this time. There is even a very early version of Cup a Soup, called Edwards Dessicated Soup.
Street food, or takeaway food, is increasingly popular in London, particularly fish-and-chip shops or the more traditional pie shops, selling meat pies with mash and jellied eels (chopped eels in aspic).
SPOT THE NEW RICH
In a very grand house, families dine off gold and silver plate – the closet containing the plate often contains enough silver cutlery to serve hundreds of guests. In homes like Welbeck Abbey, the home to the Duke of Portland, the closet contains a complete cutlery service in gold to serve fifty people. Snobbish aristocrats know that one sure way to spot ‘new’ money at dinner parties is by looking at the cutlery. If the fish knives and forks match the rest of the cutlery, you are dining in a ‘new money’ house. How to tell? Ancestral silver never includes special cutlery for fish.
RECIPE FOR KEDGEREE
The origins of kedgeree go back to India: it became a popular breakfast dish in Victorian times – brought back from India by colonial administrators. It’s the ideal leftover dish; it can be eaten hot or cold. Here’s a simple recipe that will serve four people:
500g cooked, smoked haddock (cook by gently poaching the haddock in a saucepan for 10 minutes). When cooled, remove any skin or bones and flake the haddock gently into large pieces.
40g butter
1 large white onion finely chopped
500ml stock from the poached fish
200g washed basmati rice
1 teaspoon mild curry powder
2 tablespoons double cream
2 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf parsley
4 hard-boiled eggs, shelled and cut into quarters
nutmeg and ground pepper
Method:
Heat a small amount of the butter in a large frying pan. Gently cook the chopped onion.
Heat the fish stock in a separate pan.
Add the rice to the onion and stir well. Lower the heat. Sprinkle over the curry powder and mix well.
Add fish stock and stir through. Bring to the boil, then simmer for ten minutes until rice is cooked.
Stir in the remaining butter and cream. Add a pinch of ground pepper and a very small dash of nutmeg. Add the cooked fish and fold through the cooked rice.
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br /> Then add the chopped parsley and finally the chopped eggs.
Recipe from chef, Miles Collins
RECIPE FOR HOT VANILLA SOUFFLÉ.
The soufflé is a very popular Edwardian dessert. Here’s a simple recipe for four people:
25g butter
25g plain flour
150ml milk
25g caster sugar
vanilla essence
4 eggs, separated
Method:
Heat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 5.
Prepare a thoroughly greased 150mm (6-inch) soufflé dish.
Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the flour.
Cook together gently for 1 minute.
Gradually stir in the milk, beating constantly to ensure the sauce is smooth.
Bring to the boil, stirring constantly.
Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and just a quarter of a teaspoonful of vanilla essence. Leave until the saucepan is cool enough to handle comfortably.
Beat in the egg yolks, one at a time.
Whisk the egg whites stiffly and fold carefully through the soufflé mixture.
Turn into the prepared dish and bake in the centre of the oven for 30–40 minutes.
Serve immediately.