7 APRIL 2007, Page 25

Tales of ‘Stuffing it’ Austen, ‘Eye-opener’ Dickens and ‘Banana’ Waugh

Isuspect gluttony, the excessive consumption of food and drink, was the first of the deadly sins to be committed. The least glamorous of them too. It is universal today, to judge by the number of fatties and the stomach-heaving coverage of food, restaurants, chefs and booze in the media. Ugh! It was always thus. The Bible devotes a lot of space to gulosity in general, let alone the excesses of Lot, Belchezzar, Herod and other esurient characters, killing fatted calves, selling birthright for pottage and glaring examples of edacity.

Gluttony is particularly objectionable in women, both in the act and the consequences. Queen Mary, wife of William III, was a notable chowhound and was said to be able to toss down a quart-pot of beer without pausing for breath. Byron avoided dining in mixed company if possible, as he could not abide watching women eat, ‘except it be a lobster salad’. But then he was squeamish about food, quite apart from his banting, often contenting himself with cold boiled potatoes soused in vinegar. One reason he kicked out Leigh Hunt was that he found his gobbling wife insupportable. Charles Lamb did not like her either. He did not enjoy women writers in general. So many were greedy. He himself had a discerning appetite, with a partiality for Cambridge brawn, and wrote on the subject of food with zest, but he could not bear a pantophagist. Was George Eliot a secret pantryraider? Her shape and solidity attracted the beady notice of Jane Carlyle. There were some outstanding chompers among lady novelists. Dorothy Sayers is said to have literally eaten herself to death.

Jane Austen was certainly not greedy, but nor was she indifferent to food. There is a surprising amount about it in her novels. Maggie Lane devoted an entire book to it, Jane Austen and Food; an excellent read it is too. There is even more in Jane’s letters, where she admitted she liked acting as housekeeper when her mother was away, as then she could provide the dishes she really enjoyed. But the climate of her time, increasingly romantic as well as evangelical, was against women relishing food, or at any rate admitting it. When she was barely a teenager, the Revd John Trusler’s book, The Honours of the Table for the Benefit of Young People, began to circulate. He laid it down that a lady should eat sparingly. To do otherwise was ‘indelicate’, for ‘her character should be rather divine than sensual’.

At this time Jane was penning her rumbus tious juvenilia which contained much voracious eating by females. In one passage, two ladies sit down to a supper of ‘a young leveret, a brace of Partridges, a leash of Pheasants and a Dozen of Pigeons’. In another story, ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, the heroine ‘proceeded to a Pastry-cooks, where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the Pastry Cook and walked away’. There are lipsmacking gastronomic metaphors too: ‘as cool as a cream-cheese’, ‘as white as a whipt syllabub’. When she began on her proper novels, however, Jane conformed to the prevailing notions. All her really greedy characters, such as General Tilney of Northanger Abbey and the Revd Dr Grant of Mansfield Park, are men; unpleasant ones too. Grant is done well, though he only pops up in a few brief passages, and is finally written out of the novel in one devastating clause, ‘when Dr Grant had brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutional dinners in one week’. He is a striking example of Jane’s verbal economy.

By contrast, Elizabeth Bennet never seems to think about food; nor does the divine Anne Elliot, and some females, such as Jane Fairfax, have to be coaxed into eating at all. Nevertheless, food looms in their lives. Emma, if not a great eater, constantly thinks about providing it. Her woman-cook, Serle, is an expert, as even Mr Woodhouse admits. The Ward sisters, of Mansfield Park, were highly food-conscious though this is only hinted. How otherwise did Maria, Lady Bertram, get so fat and immobile? Her sister, Mrs Norris, is hyperactive but is always cadging food and talking about it.

Just occasionally, Jane allows a hungry woman to show the cloven trotter. In Sense and Sensibility, she has the outspoken Mrs Jennings admit: ‘Delaford is a nice place, I can tell you, exactly what I call a nice, oldfashioned place, full of comforts and conveniences; quite shut in with great garden walls that are covered with the best fruit-trees in the country; and such mulberry trees in one corner! Lord, how Charlotte and I did stuff the only time I was there!’ Jane Austen could remember her hunger as a girl. So could Dickens summon up the gnawing pains of a boy who felt himself hollow. His early works are full of meals, smells, cooking and wolfing. In the 12 massive volumes of his letters, food crops up all the time. But so does drink, increasingly. Not that Dickens was an alcoholic, or anything like. But good liquor symbolised many things to him: success, plenty, nay abundance, generosity, hospitality, warmth, glowing, protection. He always carried a flask of brandy, which came in useful when he was involved in the terrible train crash, with Ellen Ternan cowering by his side. He had a touching faith in brandy. He sent his ailing sister ‘a Dozen of fine old Brandy which I hope will do you good’. His letters show him ordering casks of whisky at £35 8s each, barrels of sherry and red wine, ‘six dozen quarts of champagne and six dozen pints’. He believed liquor worked wonders, medicinally and psychologically. He described with relish a restorative mixture he discovered in America, to be taken before rising and called an Eye-Opener. Another, used to cure his ‘American catargh’, was known as a Rocky Mountain Sneezer and made up of brandy, rum, bitters and fresh snow. While working in America, he described his ‘system’:

At seven in the morning, in bed, a tumbler of new cream and two tablespoonsful of rum. At twelve, a sherry cobbler and a biscuit. At three (dinner time) an egg beaten up with a glass of sherry. Between the parts [of his readings] the strongest beef tea that can be made, drunk hot. At a quarter past ten, soup, and anything to drink I fancy. I don’t eat more than half a pound of solid food in the four-and-twenty hours, if that.

The only 20th-century novelist who rivalled Dickens in describing gustation was Evelyn Waugh, especially in Brideshead Revisited, written in wartime and nostalgic for luxurious excess. I read it aged 17, in 1946, when rationing was still in force, and I was delighted in the gastronomy at Paillards in Paris, where Ryder makes Rex, the nouveau, give him a costly meal:

Soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a canaton ii la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bèze of 1904.

Waugh cannot resist punctuating the conversation with culinary asides: ‘The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucous bead of caviare from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.’ Waugh was not a glutton. More like the man in the Punch joke: ‘I’m not hungry. But thank God I’m greedy.’ All the same, I don’t believe his son Bron’s story of Waugh stealing all the family’s banana ration. But, like all good novelists, he believed it his job to pinpoint human urges. And gluttony is surely one of them.