Consuming Interest
Cookery at Bordyke House
By ELIZABETH DAVID original, anything lifted from Miss Acton is
mistakable. With With rare exceptions, given a5
ble coming from sources she considered relia
beyond question, every recipe she wrote had tested in her own kitchen at Bordyke House 111 Tonbridge, where she lived and kept house. firic her mother. Details which few cookery Write think important enough to include in their 1.fl. structions are meticulously noted down by M1scis Acton. When, for example, she gives jam an jelly recipes, she tells how the results differ froolr year to year according to whether the sumole was wet or dry, the fruit picked early or late. 3 Not for her the all-purpose jam reciPes--,, pound of fruit to a pound of sugar—of todaY; cookery books. For each preserve she spectacle the precise variety of fruit suitable; the rrieth°,..50 and sugar content often differ very widely. -ft", Orange or Stonewood plum, she says, is veil; insipid when ripe, but makes an excellent Prn.eit serve if used at its full growth, but while st hard and green. For this jam she orders f°11ff and a half pounds of sugar to six pounds fruit. Red Imperatrice plums, a very sWeteo variety, require only two pounds of sugar six pounds of the fruit to make 'a very rich pre- erve.' Mogul or Magnum Bonum plums, Bullace n111/11s, Mussel plums, greengages, each has its separate formula. She studies the making e't strawberry jelly every season following the first appearance of her book and in the 1855 edition devotes a whole page to fresh explana- lift; some varieties of strawberry yield th.inner juice than others, and jelly from these ‘f\Ill require longer boiling than that from a rich 414, is therefore not so brilliant in colour and r,etains less of the authentic flavour. There is much all this to explain what sometimes seems InexPlicable—why a recipe successful several 3eats running should suddenly produce a failure. . Miss Acton knew, and by instinct and sheer ihnlelligence rather than by experience (this was u Wledge. You couldn't not learn from her. °Ile example of the Acton technique which 1 have always admired is demonstrated by the simplest possible recipe for sole cooked in cream. After first preparing some very fresh middling-sized soles with 'exceeding nicety,' you are to simmer them for two minutes only in boiling salted water; you lift them out, drain them, and put them in a wide pan with as much sweet rich cream as will nearly cover them; the dish is seasoned with pounded mace, cayenne and salt. You cook the fish 'softly, from six to ten minutes or until the flesh parts readily from the bones.' She directs then that you at once 'remove them to the serving dish, stir the juice of half a lemon to the sauce, pour it over the soles and send them immediately to table.' She gives an alternative flavouring for the sauce, 'some lemon rind may be boiled in the cream, if approved,' and says that you can thicken it should you think it necessary (Miss Acton, one fancies, did not) with a small teaspoonful of arrowroot very smoothly mixed with a little milk before the lemon juice is added. She then, in two lines, recapitulates the whole recipe. 'Soles, 3 or 4; boiled in water 2 minutes. Cream, -1 to whole pint; salt, mace, cayenne; fish stewed, 6 to 10 minutes. Juice of half a lemon.' These summings-up, entirely Miss Acton's own inven- tion and then quite revolutionary in English cookery writing, were copied by Mrs. Beeton, who chose to place them at the head of each recipe, where they carry much less impact. What Miss Acton then does, in a final brief paragraph, is to throw out a fresh piece of in- formation. 'In Cornwall, the fish is laid at once into thick clotted cream and stewed entirely in it—and uses it to bring the reader back to what she considered the vital initial instruction---‘but: this method gives to the sauce, which ought to be extremely delicate, a coarse fishy flavour which the previous boil in water prevents.' These final lines provide a clue to what makes good cookery instruction. The author's little piece of knowledge about Cornish regional recipes opens up new possibilities for us, she lets us know that she has tried variations and tested the Cornish cream recipe, she thinks it slovenly, she prefers her own, she tells us why. If we can't be bothered with the processes she recom- mends, we know what to expect. Once I had a project for editing a modern edition of Eliza Acton's book, and realised in time not only that it would be preposterous to tamper with her work, but also why Longrnans had never had it brought up to date in the manner of Ward, Lock's Becton books. Although a masterly innovator in style and method, Miss Acton, born in the last year of the eighteenth century, was writing of a kind of cookery already doomed. One sees that her book was really the last expression, and I think the greatest we have in the English language, of pre-Industrial Revo- lution taste in food,, a taste which SmolIett, and Jane Austen, and Lord_ Byron would all have recognised. In 1846, the year following the pub- lication of Modern Cookery, there was launched a product called Bird's Custard Powder. Real modern cookery was on its way.
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