Consuming Interest
The Queen's Apricots
By ELIZABETH DAVID
NEVER shall I tire of reading Dorothy Hart- ley's Food in England.* This book is by far and away the most intelli-
gent and convincing work about English cook- ing ever written. (The Englishman's Food,t Sir Jack Drummond's great history, is in another category, it does not deal with practical cookery.) It was first published in 1954 and, after some years unaccountably out of print, is now re- issued. Two guineas for Miss Hartley's 700 mar- vellous pages makes unique value. Had the new impression contained an enlarged index and a more serious bibliography, it would be worth twice as much. Food in England is, after all, an important historical chronicle of English cooking from early medieval times up until the late 1940s —the emphasis is on rural and popular cooking— illuminated with a bounteous quantity of quota- tions and recipes, many of these unique. Miss Hartley is a professional social historian and her sources are immensely far-ranging. We dart from
Piers Plowman to The White Wide World, from Geraldus Cambrensis to a seventeenth-centurY work on sugar plantations and an eighteenth- century catalogue of household furniture. Neither authors nor titles are indexed. By no means all are mentioned in the bibliography, and wheh they are it is often in a way far too vague for MY taste. In the text we may get a name, a date, 3 title, hardly ever all three together. I pray that the mistake will one day be rectified whatever the cost.
These ungrateful complaints apart, it must be said that all else in Miss Hartley's book joy unconfined. The way she makes English food sound so appetising, so fresh, so innocent almost, is something to marvel at. With con' summate skill she avoids almost every Pitfall' Nothing is quaint or folksy here, Miss HartleY is far too serious to tumble over into smock' and-pitchfork bathos. She gets away with descrih' nig dishes called Muggety Pie—made with the umbilical. cord of a calf—and Peggy's Leg"– striped toffee, Liverpool Irish—almost even with Cab Shelter Sauce because she makes no arch or wistful comments. She simply makes ns see such things as part of the natural order of English popular or country household life and cookery. Some of her historical deductions are extraordinarily illuminating :
APRICOT STUFFING FOR HAMS
This is erroneously considered an America° innovation; it is certainly Cape Dutch, but vie think it originated in Oxfordshire conteor porarily with the growing of Moor Park aPri; cots, which hang so golden against the Cotswolu, stone walls. The rather hard 'thinning apricot! are to be preferred for this stuffing (though It may be made very well with dried apricots), Fruit-stuffed hams were baked wrapped 10 crust in the brisk bake-ovens, and made 1°.` only special occasions, such as the Wool Fair, as they did not keep 'in cut' like ordinary hoh, hams. The apricots are roughly chopped to the stones out, and put with an equal quantity of fine white breadcrumbs and a little salt all pepper into a pot with just enough watec tO prevent them burning until the juice runs (them should be just enough juice to soak the crumbs). If the apricots are juicy enough, there4 is no -need to pre-cook the stuffing at all, an it can, with advantage, be packed in raw. (1-b! point is that you want the apricot juice to soo• the crumbs before they are rendered water proof by the melting lard in the ham.) Press the stuffing into the hambone hole' wrap the ham in its paste cover, and bake, letting it grow cold before cracking off the crust. As a refinement, the apricot kernels are, cracked and splintered over the sugar-glaze ham in place of blistering.
This is probably a Cotes Wold recipe, as the Moor Park apricots would be thinned about the time of sheep-shearing suppers, for which the hams would be cooked.
Reading this recipe returns me to Elizabeth * Macdonald, 42s.
t Cape, 36s. First published 1939, revised edition, 1958.
Jenkins's description in Elizabeth the Great § of the Queen's love of English wild flowers and English fruit, and of how once she packed one of her own little work-baskets full of beautiful apricots and had it carried to the French Ambassador, that he might see the fair- ness of English fruit. The Queen must have been especially proud of English apricots, for they had been brought here, I read in my Cassell's Domestic Dictionary, so the story goes, by a man who had been her father's gardener— and a Catholic priest. Another tale of which one would like more details. Did Queen Elizabeth know about fine English hams, too? Surely, for Miss Hartley tells us elsewhere in her book that York hams originally acquired their great repute through being smoked over oak sawdust from the building of the Minster—and that is just one arresting example of how, in Miss Hartley's world, one thing grows out of another and every- thing makes sense and nothing is ever wasted. The pastry crust in which your ham is cooked is not thrown away, even if you have no animals to eat it, because some of it at least is dried and grated instead of bread to make raspings for the ham; and as for the rind you have peeled off, you may wrap it round a joint of venison to lubricate that dry meat while it is cooking—`the salt rind will redden the venison but that is no harm, and the flavour will be excellent.' That sends you to other venison recipes, and you find the dripping trough of the cider barrel pressed into the service of the kitchen; the venison lies soak- ing in it all night before cooking; then you look for more about cider cookery; you find that hard windfall pears may be packed in a tall pot with alternating layers of vine leaves and a sprinkling of spices; the pot is filled up with as much cider as it will hold, and, according to a sixteenth-century recipe, the pears are stewed all night `when the fire be low, or in the oven after the bread is drawn.'
On every page, in almost every paragraph of this book, there is some such logical explanation for archaic recipes, some moment of the past come to life. More, better, there are hundreds of drawings to show you such things as the working of ancient roasting spits and cooking ranges, how brick ovens were constructed, precisely how meat and vegetables should be packed in layers into stew jars, exactly how cooked chickens were packed for long sea voyages in melted suet in a wooden tub or kit, how a pudding should be tied in a cloth for boiling, how a trout from the stream is wrapped in a leek leaf for grilling. These illustrations are Miss Hartley's own, and, with the exception of Beatrix Potter, I can think of no other English illustrator who has shown so much loving observation of humble household things, of kitchen crocks and pots, of jars and jugs and mugs and old kitchen implements, of the shapes of pies and pasties and loaves, of wild berries, of wild mushrooms, mountain herbs, meadow herbs, marsh herbs and kitchen-garden herbs (and we are told the proper uses of each), of dairy apparatus, cheese presses, cider presses. Heaven help us, Miss Hartley can extract poetry even from a drawing of two forks and a freshly boiled green pease pudding.
§ Gollancz, 1958.
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