"Miss Eliza's English Kitchen"

[fiefoe]

A pleasant read in the style of "The Wolf Den" and "The Dictionary of Lost Words". Annabel Abbs resisted the temptation to include actual recipes in the novel.

• I untie the string and pull at the paper, my mind racing and dancing. As if someone has climbed inside my head with an egg whisk and turned my brain to a fine froth.
• My mind, which a few minutes ago was whisked to a foaming peak, goes very small and tight and still. Like a hazelnut.
• Our recipes have been plundered, rearranged upon blank new pages, emptied of her elegant tilt and turn of phrase, her sly humor. The bones remain—cold graceless lists of instructions and ingredients—assigned now to a Mrs. Beeton, whoever she may be.
• I pause, for the rhythm is not quite right. Perhaps far-off bowers of blue is more pleasant on the ear than a dome of unbroken blue. I mouth the words, letting them slip over my tongue and echo in my ear . . . Far-off bowers of blue . . . ... I feel as though I have no place in the vast stinking skirmish that is London.
• I stare at his empty palms and feel my insides—my spirit, my audacity—being scooped out and cast away.
• His eyes swivel around and around, like windmills. Well-fed windmills.
• The sheet is bunched and tangled around her with big knots at her shoulders, knees, and hips, so she looks more like a twist of dirty laundry than a human being.
• “You exposed too much of yourself in that last volume,” adds Mother. “There was an indiscretion that made some of our neighbors look upon me most curiously. You should never have published them under your—our—name, my dear. They were overwrought, too revealing.”
• “What’s a soufflé?” I sigh, for that is how the word sounds. Soft and sweet as a summer breeze. I repeat the word in my head: Soufflé. Soufflé.
• “How grand,” I murmur, thinking of the drama of it all, and how a kitchen is like a puppet show, a fairy tale, and how good it must feel to have none of the violent hunger that comes on me and Pa and Mam
• rings of apple like the softest, palest leather.
• “For you, Ann.” In his grimed palm sits an oozing chunk of honeycomb as big as a plover’s egg. <> I clap my hands in delight, my tongue waggling with greed. As we eat our gruel I make the clots of chewy wax last as long as possible, pushing them around and around my mouth, pressing them against my molars, sucking on them ’til they slip sweetly down my throat.
• I open the book and feel the same sense of satisfaction as when I held it in my hands for the very first time, struck by how the neat orderliness of printing had transformed the inky sentiment of my verse. Molded it into something with greater clarity. Bestowed upon it a weightiness and significance. And detached it from me, the final severing of an umbilical cord.
• blows her nose again. “What am I to pack? I’ve received no instructions . . . The jelly molds? The cut-glass finger bowls? And what of all these spices? They’re worth a pretty fortune.” She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues—ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass—the pale trembling light.
• As befits a superior boardinghouse, it is spacious, well furnished, and situated well away from the town’s open drains. And yet it feels all wrong, like a poorly cut coat.
• “But you were not cooking!” The word cooking bolts from her mouth as if she cannot get shot of it fast enough.
• I’m not the person who once ran a school, who inspired intelligent girls to excel, who accompanied wealthy young ladies on their grand tours. No—I am someone else entirely now and there can be no return. Sometimes I wonder if my past experiences have rendered me, in some obscure way, feeble... Poems by Eliza Acton. I cannot forget the many times I ran a fingertip over my name, not from conceit or from pride but because it showed me who I was. Because, in some strange way, it placed me in the world.
• take a freshly whetted knife and pare the rind from two lemons. The world slips away. I feel my eye, my nose, my palate yielding, and I think how satisfying it is to scrape at a lemon, to lose myself in its sharp bright song. <> I have started to see poetry in the strangest of things: from the roughest nub of nutmeg to the pale parsnip seamed with soil... comparing the process of following a recipe to that of writing a poem. Fruit, herbs, spices, eggs, cream: these are my words and I must combine them in such a way they produce something to delight the palate. Exactly as a poem should fall upon the ears of its readers, charming or moving them. I must coax the flavors from my ingredients, as a poet coaxes mood and meaning from his words.
• And yet able to read . . . and so very responsive to my lavender lemonade. As if she has a thread of poetry running through her.
• When my thoughts stop churning, I listen for the scurrying creature but it’s gone. I wish Hatty would snore, or toss and turn, or shout out in her sleep. Like Mam and Pa do. But she just lies there very still.
• says Ma’am likes the cinders separated from the ashes and reused. <> “You must put the ashes on the black currant bushes in the garden,” she adds. “But first you move the fenders and the fire irons, throw in the damp tea leaves to keep the dust down, then it’s the raking and sifting. After that you clean away the grease, then black and polish the stove.”... But always do it early while the range is still warm so that a good shine comes up.
• I wish she would stop asking what I think, for it flummoxes me when I have a throbbing finger and so many other things to think about. But this question is particularly flummoxing because her life is ordered and beautiful and I don’t see a bit of chaos anywhere. Chaos, I want to tell her, is when your mother doesn’t know who you are and cannot control her insides and takes the knife to her own hair for no reason.
• I had expected some disarray from her intrusion into my solitude. Instead her presence has set me alight. She is such a slither of a girl.
• I feel a sense of purpose, a sense of being myself. As if I have been given some tacit permission to exist.
• How strange this world is—that no woman must admit to the pleasures of the table. She must prepare the table, of course. But without feeling. And she must eat of it—if only to live—but without expressing any pleasure in the process. For us of the fairer sex, food must be merely functional.
• I wonder what sort of mother sends her daughter into service with broken boots and no stockings. But as I think this, a shutter closes in my mind, as if it is too cramped to dwell on thoughts like this.
• I frown, confused. “You pretended to be ill so that I would have to see his—his sausage?” <> “They like it when that happens,” she says, her face flushed and shining with the drama of it all. “It’s part of their little game. And we must egg him on before he gets his comeuppance.”
• She smiles at me, one of those smiles that sweeps over me and makes me think I am walking on a cushion of warm rosy air.
• “I am a poet!” My words have such weight and heft I could reach out and pluck them from the very air. Finches flit from the hedgerow, and in their chirpings I seem to hear an echo of myself: I am . . . I am . . . I am.
• “Hatty,” I hiss. “What does ‘Jewish’ mean?” <> “It’s a religion,” she says, not sounding very sure of herself.
• For a second I contemplate telling her I am indeed a poet. But then Mother fills the silence with her picked-clean voice. “My daughter was a poetess, but now she has an important writing commission from an important London publisher.”
• her eyes closed, her face set hard. “I have heard so many tales of servants like this . . . they loathe their mistresses and find any way they can to sabotage them. If we allow it, we will go the way of France, where the servants chopped the head from every master and every mistress.”
• And then I do something that no mistress should do with her kitchen maid. I take her in my arms and hold her to me, stroking her hair, patting her back. “I am so sorry, Ann. I am so very sorry,” I whisper. And in my mind’s eye, I am imagining her as Susannah. My Susannah.
• (Duck seller:) “Tell the maid what picks ’em to use a deep bucket, otherwise your house will be full of feathers with every gust of wind.”... Beside the sink, unscrubbed turnips and parsnips sprawl amid clods of mud. The sugarloaf has been left unwrapped and is alive with wasps. The egg baskets are empty. The dishcloths have been discarded in a damp mound. Crumbs snap and crunch beneath my feet.
• Indeed all aspects of domestic management would be yours and yours alone.” She looks at me in a very pointed way, as if this twisting conversation is leading somewhere and I am too truculent to see it.
• I have heard of cooks who turn a tidy sum selling feathers and bones to the rag-and-bone men or selling beef dripping from the back door. Even rancid fat can be sold for soap, I’m told.”
• Bizarrely, I have a sudden image of my feelings in recipe form: one pound of fresh despair, three pecks of very firm frustration, five ounces of pure guilt, a strewing of newly cut regret, and a few grains of self-pity.
• “Teakettle broth then? Boiled with the best mutton bones.” The woman wipes her hands up and down an apron stiff with dried blood and dirt. “A ha’penny to you, lady. Unless you want parsnip peelings too?”
• Sound on, thou dark unslumbering sea! ... Thou sea-bird on the billow’s crest (by Felicia Hemans, The Last Song of Sappho)
• “I shall teach you, exactly as my father taught me,” I reply, keeping my tone steady to conceal the racing of my pulse. “Carving with propriety and self-possession is a skill every woman should possess.”
• Oh, how I dislike all this pretense! Why can’t I look directly into his eyes and tell him I am a published poet, with a checkered past and a commission to write a cookery book?
• I taste the fish and feel a jolt of pleasure. The buttery sauce is unctuous and rich, its flavors unveiling themselves in layers: garlic, white ginger, bruised coriander seeds, lemon juice, the subtlest hint of turmeric. The flakes of fish are meltingly soft but still with bite.
• “Oh, Miss Eliza,” I gasp. “Is there to be no cookery book now you are to be Mrs. Arnott?” <> She sighs, such a big sigh the room echoes with it, like a wind from the chimney that has no escape.
• She stops when I enter, a thin sculpted smile frozen upon her face.... Mr. Thorpe gives a flash of well-picked teeth, then strokes at his mustache.
• It is quite unlike the kitchen at Bordyke House, which is lofty and airy and where the smells of food sit comfortably side by side. Here, in this dark constrained space, they brawl and scrap.
• “It kills the tongue. How can you enjoy an elegant flavor—like chervil or bay—if you eat curry?” <> “You may be right,” I say, thinking how peculiar it is that talking to Louis is so much more enjoyable than talking to Mother or Mrs. Thorpe. Snatches of my dream come back to me . . . the sweet sticky scent of splitting figs . . . Louis . . . I swallow quickly, as if to swallow down the self-disgust that accompanies such a perverted dream.
• Of course the dinner was excessive, each dish flaunting its own convoluted brilliance.
• He pauses and knocks his fist on his chest. “That is my art. To give joy and life, even as Death snaps his jaws.”
• “No, something else is at play,” she says, decisive. “I seen how she looks at you. It’s not normal.” <> I feel a strange thing when she says this. Confusion and pleasure—rolled up like a hedgehog, soft and prickly at the same time.
• Whose life is made more bearable when I pretend Mam is dead? The little attic room sours around me. I drag back Hatty’s talk of how Miss Eliza favors me. But it’s too late.
• Imagine a generation from now. We shall be at the mercy of overpriced Frenchmen and the foul contaminated food of the street.” <> “Don’t preach at me, Eliza. Where is your feminine humility?”
• I glance at Ann and think how it might have been if she didn’t know her place so well, how we might have shared a rebellious and irreverent chuckle at Mother’s expense. As sisters might. As friends might. But Ann is too dutiful, too submissive, to overstep herself like that.
• Her cramped lettering is all angles and points, and she has had the audacity to name her own dish the Good Daughter’s Mincemeat Pudding. Laughter of the unkind and sarcastic sort bubbles up in me.
• She lowers her voice. “My dream is to write a cookery book of Jewish dishes. I have started collating them, but it is slow and delicate work.” <> “I too!” I say, enthralled at meeting someone with the same impudent ambition as me.
• As if she too is aware of its implied shame. The kitchen, with its labor, heat, and reek, is humiliating enough. But our interest in food carries a taint and shame of its own. The hint of profligacy, of appetites, carefully concealed in weights and measures and instructions. But there nonetheless . . . Louis the chef’s words swim into my head: the joy of being an animal.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letitia_Elizabeth_Landon
• so I tell of how Mam made “tea” by soaking crusts of burned bread in boiling water, how Pa took the roof from his mouth by eating only raw onions with his bitter moldy bread, ... It’s only when I turn around that I see her eyes are wet, that she is wiping discreetly at a tear. I twist quickly back to the fire for the sake of her pride. But something inside me soars like a bird. I have made my mistress cry with the force of my words. In the same way that her words, her poems, brought me to weeping, so mine have done the same to her.
• “Yes, Miss Eliza,” I say, happy that my words have brought her to this, to a new chapter in our book.
• eager children, their faces as sharp and bright as pinheads,
• I stare at him, confused. “A gentleman with two legs for Mrs. Kirby? For my mam?”
• I have made her a sepulchre, I think. A gravestone as respectable as any. I arrange the loaf of Bavarian brown bread and the pat of butter and the jar of cream to make a crucifix.
• And what if I cannot cultivate feelings of fondness for her? What if it starts and ends only with the fret of bedbugs?
• Do I have the attributes of a good mother? Does Susannah belong to me because I bore her or to Mary who raised her? What makes a mother? <> As I drop the final peeling into the bowl, I have an overwhelming sense of wanting. Of wanting Susannah for myself. Of wanting to possess what is rightfully mine.
• “Oh yes. Paupers from the workhouse are treated likewise, only their hearts are chopped open. With idiots, it’s the skull. Cracked open like a nut, they say. They can’t very well bury them after that, can they? So they tip ’em in a lime pit.”
• Seems he’s partial to eel, but he don’t use the skins which dry very nice and make a lovely garter for gentlemen with aching knees. We could scratch a living, the two of us.”... But as I think this, something tugs at my insides, sucking out all the air in my lungs. I wipe my eyes and think of Mam, of all the hours she spent helping me with my letters. Did she teach me to read and write so that I can scratch a living?
• Susannah may not have her blood mother but I am determined she has her independence, that she has choices. For without choices, we are nothing.
• Suddenly I no longer want to be anonymous. Not even for Susannah. In my mind’s eye I see my book—sixty editions of it—with my name emblazoned across the opening page and stalking down the spine. There is something about this image that makes me tremble, even as it makes me feel taller, less flimsy.
• And for a second I am envious of how uncomplicated her life is. She has felt hunger and cold, of course. But she has never battled her own ambition, or felt the sting of spinsterhood with all its untold duties, or experienced the lashing tongue of disapprobation. She simply lives.
• It occurs to me that although this glorious pudding is her creation, Ann is partly my creation, and I am partly her creation. Cooking and tasting have provided their own stage and we are performing on it at this very moment.
• For reasons that were stupid and regrettable, I left Bordyke House. Miss Eliza asked me to stay and help with her next book, which was to be on nothing but bread. But we had been too long together—cooking side by side fifteen hours a day for ten years—and she had become quite the preacher. Always angry about poverty and the injustices of life