The author E. Nesbit was a joint founder of the Fabian Society. Thus it was that she knew my great grandparents. I encountered her only in her fiction. “The Story of the Amulet” was and is a favourite. The children in the book make visits from the present (1905) to the past: one of their journeys is to a city so ancient that there is disagreement among scholars as to where its ruins are to be found. Babylon. Here is an account of the children eating with the Queen.
“She just ate with her fingers, and as the first dish was a great tray of boiled corn, and meat and raisins all mixed up together, and melted fat poured all over the tray, it was found difficult to follow her example with anything like what we are used to think of as good table manners. There were stewed quinces afterwards, and dates in syrup, and thick yellowy cream. It was the kind of dinner you hardly ever get in Fitzroy Street.”
Somehow the reference to Fitzroy Street makes the whole thing the more real. And Nesbit has already described the kind of food that is eaten in Fitzroy Street, a mutton chop, for instance: “as it lay on the plate it looked like a brown island in the middle of a frozen pond, because the grease of the gravy had become cold, and consequently white. It looked very nasty...” Something of a contrast to the Babylonian food which is to come.
Have shuddered at the thought of cold mutton ever since reading Nesbit as a child (Lewis Carroll offers being formally introduced to a leg of mutton as an alternative to having to carve and eat it, so there is that). The aversion was deepened by the poor Indian/rich uncle's impish offer of mutton and rice pudding in The Story of the Treasure Seekers. I had spent enough 1970s school lunchtimes retching on ricey white slop that no food could have survived association with it.
ReplyDeleteThe children's "play dinner" into which the uncle throws himself with such gusto is much more appealing, and always comes pleasingly to my mind whenever anyone stabs a haggis.