Honeyed Words: Food from Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

Food from Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor · 9 January 2007

Food from Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

On trial for the death of the late Earl, Isoble is asked to present testimony on what he ate the night of the ball. She lists the celebratory fare as: roast beef, a variety of vegetables, roast goose, pudding, pasties, oysters, mulled punch, and claret; a very English menu.

Traditional English food takes a lot of flak in the culinary world. The lack of spices, the heavy inclusion of fatty substances, the general boiling of ingredients past any semblance of freshness all contribute. We’re spoiled these days by the relative economy of flavoring agents, modern shipping, and agriculture technology, which allows us fresh food year-round and most people opt to take advantage of this by demanding food that has taste. Yet despite all odds, English food has its champions, and indeed even its fans.

I once attended a traditional English birthday dinner for an ex-boyfriend of my sister. I can’t rightly tell you where it was, but I do remember we drove for hours to get to this English pub. The pub itself was great, a legitimate transplant from Europe, timbers and all. The dinner . . . well, when I said there were fans of English food, I wasn’t claiming to be one of them, but the erstwhile boyfriend and his family were ecstatic about Toad in the Hole and other such traditional English “delicacies” so I know there are fans out there. I found the menu full of things too bland to bear describing.

If the taste isn’t enough to turn you off of English food, there’s the fact that practically everything is rolled, battered, or fried in butter. I don’t pretend to be a health scientist, but I have heard enough times, from enough credible sources, that “fat is bad” to believe it’s true; however like most things in life, opinions differ. While researching recipes for recreating some of the likely dishes from the ball, I saw ‘fat is good’ for the first time. This dietary philosophy tries to address the concern born out of the Atkins diet craze, that the high protein/low carb diets did indeed help people lose weight, but at the expense of their heart health, and the site advocates that the fat heavy traditional English diet is actually good for you. I suppose it really is true there’s a diet for everything. I personally subscribe to the ideology that anything is fine in moderation, eating a variety of different foods is preferable, and that the less processing your food has undergone the better. I’m also of the school of thought that someone will find a way to prove that everything is bad for you anyway, and that the health trends of today will be the health taboos of twenty years from now so while a high fat meal didn’t necessarily appeal to me, it didn’t scare me off either.

Once I committed to taking on English food for the sake of furthering my experience of the book, I decided to recreate Isobel’s celebratory feast on a small scale to the best of my ability to eat it. On the agenda were the mysterious “pasties” and a variety of traditional vegetables. With the holiday gorging still fresh in my mind and dozens of cookies and candy still stalking me at home and work, I had to skip the pudding. Since I couldn’t rustle up enough people on short notice for yet another huge meal, the roast beef and goose were out of the question as well.

Cornish Pasties – Fresh From the Oven

Since there was a lot of food to be tackled, I broke the meal into two days worth of cooking. Pasties were scheduled for Day 1 and the vegetables were scheduled for Day 2. The first question to be answered in preparing the meal was, “What in the world are pasties?” Visions of body painting and desert worshiping were quickly summoned and then banished, as I dismissed the idea that Jane was a founding member of the Burning Man project. A quick search proved that pasties are indeed a colloquial term for a filled pastry dish, not body ornamentation, where the pastry is filled with raw ingredients and both shell and filling bake together. The traditional Cornish pasty, filled with beef, onions, and turnips is what I tackled. Jane dined in Hertfordshire, roughly north-east of Cornwall, and the cook may have added local favorite ingredients, but despite a hasty search, I was unable to find a traditional Hertfordshire adaptation to the pasty.

What I did find, is a wonderful piece on household management from 1750 which mentions Hertfordshire pork pasties, among many other things. This article makes me realize just how glad I am to have been born well after the Industrial Revolution, and not be upbraided for buying my pork and beer instead of raising my own pig and brewing the beer myself. The site is a little daunting, with dozens of articles on proper household practices and money saving techniques but the introductory articles provide a great overview of the concerns of the working class and are worth a casual read. If nothing else, they put me in the mood for some laborious and traditional cooking.

I found my Cornish pasty recipe at The Green Chronicle and made it with zero modifications. I wanted traditional, and this site claims it’s about as traditional as you can get. The only suggestion I would make in using this recipe is that I found the quantity of filling far exceeded what was necessary for filling the pasty dough. I used a rather large Russet potato and a normal sized Swede (yellow turnip). If I were making this again, I’d either increase the amount of dough or decrease the amounts of ingredients to make it all come out even in the end. You can see how much leftover filling material I had after baking 2 out of the 4 pasties in the background of the above picture.
While the pasty was unfortunately everything I’d come to expect from English cooking, it was a fun and worthwhile exercise into the world that Jane Austen inhabited during the period of Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor.