Afternoon tea with Mrs Lance Rawson

Image from State Library of NSW

 

In The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion (2^nd ed., 1897) Mrs Rawson suggests serving 'rolled bread and butter sandwiches made of ham paste, potted ham, tongue or chicken' for afternoon tea. She stipulates that 'the crusts of the bread should be cut off, and the sandwiches cut into three-corner shapes or fingers'. She also notes that salads 'are allowable nowadays' and that 'cakes for the purpose should be very small'. Moreover she gives specific instructions as to the serving of afternoon tea

'For a fashionable afternoon tea the table should be set in the rear of the drawing-room or, if there are two rooms, in the smaller of them. Coloured cloths are usually used, and the table can be decorated with baskets of flowers and fruit. Do not set the plates, etc., round, but let them be placed in piles of threes and fours here and there, with knives, forks and spoons where they can be quickly found when required. A few table-napkins beside them (the smaller the napkins the better.)'
And of course 'the tea equipage should be on a separate table'.

What then are we to make of Mrs. Lance Rawson? She sounds for all the world like a society hostess, very right and proper; and whilst her tone is suggestive of someone who knows how things should be done it gives little clue as to how much she knows about the actual doing. In the preface to her book however she addresses her 'sister housewives' and claims her book has been 'adapted and written expressly to meet the wants and circumstances of those living in the far Bush, as well as those who dwell within reach of the amenities of civilised existence'. And as it happens Mrs Rawson knew a good deal about the wants and circumstances of women living far from the amenities of civilised existence.

In fact Wilhelmina (Mina) Frances Rawson was an extraordinary woman. She was born in Sydney in 1851, her father James Cahill (a solicitor, born in Ireland), her mother Elizabeth (nee Richardson, born in England). In 1857 James Cahill died and her mother remarried in 1863. Mina's step-father was a Scotsman, Dr James John Cadell, who had a medical practise in Raymond Terrace. Mina and her mother moved to Cadell's property near Tamworth where they joined his eleven children by his first wife. As Mina describes it

'When I was barely twelve years of age, my mother took it into her head to marry a man with eleven children. I, being an only and much adored child up to that time, found her ideas of pioneering more tragical than comforting, and as she added four more to the family it is hardly to be wondered that I am somewhat resourceful.' (Queenslander 10 April 1920)

She became a great believer in self reliance adhering to her step father's motto “When you can't do it yourself ask for help, never before!” (Queenslander 12 June 1920)

However 'pioneering' life might have been with the Cadells there was much more in store for Mina. Not yet quite twenty one she married Lancelot Bernard Rawson on 26 June 1872. Lance was probably thought to be a good catch. He was the youngest son of Charles Stansfield Rawson who had been a member of the East India Company and whose ancestral home was Wasdale Hall in the Lake District. It is unclear when Lance came to Australia but around 1867 his two older brothers Charles Collinson Rawson and Edmund Stansfield Rawson, had taken up a property on the Pioneer River near Mackay in Queensland and it was The Hollow that Lance and Mina made their home after their marriage.

 

The Hollow, 1874

(John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

 



Mackay is described as 'an aristocratic corner of Queensland' at the time. The climate was 'congenial' and the Pioneer River provided the settlers there with good transport and shipping connections. At The Hollow Mina joined Winifred and Decima the wives of Lance's brothers who were themselves sisters, the daughters of an English clergyman whom Charles and Edmund had travelled back to England to marry. How Mina fitted in to this arrangement we do not know but life at The Hollow may well have been more sedate than she had been used to. The house was large with a fourteen foot wide verandah all the way around reportedly covered with masses of every sort of creeper. The garden was lush boasting poinciana trees, custard apples,lemons, limes, guavas, grapes, mangoes and oranges, with a fernery off one side of the verandah. The photographs suggest life was comfortable and civilised.

Drawing room at The Hollow

 (photograph by Edmund Rawson ca. 1875, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

 

Verandah at The Hollow ca. 1875

(photograph by Edmund Rawson, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

 

The Rawson sister strolling along the garden path at The Hollow in the 1870s

(photograph by Edmund Rawson, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

 

However in 1877 Lance decided to branch out on his own and take up a partnership in a sugar plantation, Kircubbin, near Maryborough. This was the first of his not so bright ideas. The plantation was not a success and in 1878 Mina published her first recipe book The Queensland Cookery and Poultry Book as a way of bringing in some income. By 1880 the plantation was bankrupt and the Rawsons moved on to Boonooroo in the Wide Bay region, where they were the first European settlers. Their plan was to set up a fishery but this was another disaster.

As Mina describes it Wide Bay was 25 miles by road from Maryborough but in 1881 the only road was a cattle track which was impassable so the only means of transport to Maryborough was the Brisbane steamer which passed once a week, or their own boat, a trip of 80 miles by water. Looking at the map today it is easy to imagine how isolated they were. What's more Mina arrived there in March 1880 with three young children and gave birth to her fourth child that May.

Mina wrote up her memories of her time at Boonooroo in a series of articles which were published in The Queenslander between December 1919 and July 1920. She describes a hard and lonely life – they made everything from soap, salt, candles and bacon made from dugong to beds and mattresses and hammocks which they sold to bring in some money. She fashioned her own furniture, entertained the odd visitor, had some hair raising encounters with the local aborigines, grew what vegetables she could, experimented with cooking bandicoot, flying fox, ibis (fresh meat only came every 12 weeks) and one way or another learnt to make the best of her circumstances. In her spare time she wrote fairy stories which were published in one of the local papers.

They were not without help from friends (who contributed a number of gadgets including sewing machines, washing machines, an American stove, a mincing machine, a churn and not least a patent nutmeg grater) and they were at least in contact with Lance's family who sent them boxes occasionally but life must have been pretty grim. Most of her female visitors fled quite unable to tolerate the conditions and Lance was often away from home. Although she was obviously quite capable of packing up her children and taking herself off on the steamer to either Maryborough or Brisbane Mina stuck it out but nonetheless she hated Lance being away. She claims she came to understand that for her husband 'it was an impossibility for him to stay away from the companionship of other men'.

This is the same Mina Rawson who writes in The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion,

'Man must be cooked for. He'll do without shirt buttons, and he'll do without his slippers, but he will not do without his dinner, nor is he inclined to accept excuses as regards under- or over-done meals after the first week or so of the honeymoon'.

She goes on to warn those contemplating marriage that 'only by feeding him well will you succeed in gaining your husband's respect and keeping his affection'. It would seem however that Mr Rawson had more to admire in his wife than merely her cooking skills.

I could find no photographs of either Mina or Lance. I imagine that Lance was probably rather dashing, a bit of a romantic hero, handsome and charming and able to sweep Mina along with his confidence in his plans. She does let on that he had a bit of a reputation for pranks and 'lighthearted frolics' and that her mother thought 'he must be a great trial to his nice quiet brother'. She certainly has nothing to say against him. Writing in 1920 of her time at Boonooroo she says

'I began to feel that I could not go on living at Boonooroo. But unhappily our circumstance would not permit of our leaving, it being the only home we had, and as a matter of fact I was the only one earning...When I look back at that time I could almost cry at our childish want of practical knowledge. If we had not been young our hearts would have been broken with the repeated disappointments of the place. The only reason we remained was because we were almost self-supporting, and I was able to earn enough to keep us in the necessities we did not produce. It was simply our sense of humour which kept us from dying too.'

Just how long they spent at Boonooroo and how their situation was resolved is unclear but Lance was eventually appointed as a Crown Lands Ranger and sometime around 1886 they moved to 'Rocklands' in Rockhampton. It was here that Mina published her other recipe books, The Australian Enquiry Book in 1894 and The Antipodean Cookery Book and Kitchen Companion in 1895, and became a swimming instructor, reputedly the first swimming teacher in central Queensland.

Lance died in 1899. He was 56 and both of his brothers had returned to England by then, Charles in 1886 and Edmund in 1894. Mina took on the role of social editor of the Rockhampton People's Newspaper for the years 1901-02. In 1903 her circumstances took another turn when she made her way to London to marry Francis Richard Ravenhill. Apparently Ravenhill had been Lance's business partner in the Boonooroo venture (although I couldn't find a reference to him in her newspaper articles) but, if his gift to the bride of of various bits of pearl, emerald and diamond jewellery are anything to go by, he hadn't suffered any great financial hardship as a result.. Mina wore a wedding gown of fawn silk voile, with a toque of brown chiffon and deep crimson roses and carried a bouquet of red rosebuds and lilies of the valley. She had come a long way from the lonely nights writing fairy stories in the bush. And the guests showered them with all sorts of fancy silver gifts, including a silver crumb scoop which was presumably of some use to them in London.

Mina remained in London until 1905 when the Ravenhills decided to travel to Australia. Whether this was planned as a permanent move or not is unclear but they travelled home with Mina's daughter Minnie who had been visiting them. I think they returned for Minnie's wedding which was scheduled for early 1906. In the event Francis Ravenhill died at Galston (outside Sydney) in February 1906.

What Mina did after that I don't know other than that her memoirs were published in the Queenslander as noted above and she died in Sydney in 1933.

On the one hand Mina knew all about polite society. Her brothers in law were well know and well respected gentlemen (Edmund Stansfield was briefly mayor of Mackay); one daughter, Una Belle (Muffet) married Lionel Ottley Wilkinson, nephew of Sir John Ottley*; the other, Minnie, married Ronald Swanwick from a notable Queensland legal family and at the time of her engagement (1906) it was expressly pointed out that Miss Rawson was the second cousin of Sir Harry Rawson the then Governor of NSW. On the other she certainly had her own experience of reduced means and isolation. The fact that she may have had the right sort of connections doesn't detract from the fact she had seen first hand the 'wants and circumstances of those living in the far Bush'. Her books and other writings suggest that she was not afraid of getting her hands dirty, that she was both practical and imaginative and curious enough to learn from those around her (she freely acknowledged that she had learnt all she knew of indigenous foods from the Aboriginal people she had encountered) and adapt her own ideas and standards to fit her situation.
Most historians credit Mina for her use of local ingredients, for example her recipes for stewed ibis, stewed wallaby and instructions on how to prepare pig weed and bandicoot, but I wonder whether these recipes were put to much use by her readers. In dire circumstances curried bandicoot might have to suffice or might serve as a novelty but I suspect it was her knowledge of local conditions rather than her knowledge of local ingredients which was of most use to her audience. Mrs Beeton for example would not have provided information on how to deal with banana stains or how to get rid of ant's nests. The use of whatever was to hand had more to do with ideas of practicality and frugality than any desire to foster thoughts of an Australian cuisine.
And implicit in all Mina's writing is the idea of bringing civilisation to the Bush and the important role that women had to play in this civilising process.  Did Mina have her 'tea equipage' on a separate table when she entertained visitors at Wide Bay? Did she even have a separate table? Whether she did or not she obviously thought it most important that her sister housewives should know the right way to do things and should aspire to maintain their standards regardless of their circumstances.

* It was Mrs E. R. Ottley, Sir John's mother, described as an early settler of Rockhampton, who owned Rocklands Estate. Lionel and Una Belle were married at Rocklands in 1899 but I haven't been able to work out how Mina and Lance came to be living at Rocklands. The Wilkinson family were also associated with Rocklands station, Camooweal.

For more information on the Rawson family and The Hollow see here.
Details of Mina's life were gleaned from the Australian Dictionary of Biography here and from newspaper searches via the Trove web site here. To the best of my knowledge there is no other published biographical information about Mina and Lance. A search of Trove will also yield a number of photographs, paintings and drawings of the Rawson family and life at The Hollow.

Trifling Matters, or when is a trifle not a trifle?

 

Is this a Trifle?

Cassata Trifle from www.taste.com.au

Photography Petrina Tinslay. Recipe published in delicious,  May 2006, p. 136. 

 

Christmas morning, that is the morning of 25 December, always sees me putting the finishing touches to a trifle, which involves simply putting the various pre-prepared components together in the right order. And as I do this I think about my mother because I always make a trifle the way she did and I wonder where the whole trifle thing came from.

The historical background has been traced in some depth by Helen Saberi and Alan Davidson ('Whims and Fancies of a Trifle-Lover' by Helen Saberi in The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy, Ten Speed Press, Berkeley 2002 and Trifle by Saberi and Davidson, Prospect Books, 2009). In its present form the trifle has come down to us via the 'fool' which is essentially flavoured cream and the syllabub which is basically cream flavoured with wine and whipped to a froth. The biscuity or cakey base and custard come in to the picture from the mid-eighteenth century.

According to The Oxford Companion to Food the trifle is a 'traditional English sweet or dessert. The essential ingredients are sponge cake soaked in sherry or white wine, rich custard, fruit or jam, and whipped cream, layered in a glass dish in that order.' Jane Grigson in English Food confirms the details of what seems to be the 'traditional' English trifle. Her recipe for 'a pudding worth eating', calls for macaroons, soaked in a mixture of 'Frontignan, Malaga or madeira wine' and brandy, covered with a custard made with cream and eggs and thickened with rice flour. Once the custard is cool and firm it is spread with a layer of raspberry jam. The finishing touch is a layer of syllabub, cream flavoured with, in this case, white wine or sherry, brandy and lemon, whipped up into a froth.

The authors of the OCF go on to say that trifle 'is essentially a popular dish, i.e. a dish of the people, more apt to be present at family celebrations and children's parties than in cookery books or on restaurant menus.'

A search through my cook books certainly confirms that recipes for trifle are likely to be few and far between. It also confirmed that there is some consensus as to what constitutes a traditional trifle.

Both Mrs Beeton and Eliza Acton require a base of sponge cake or sponge biscuits, ratafias and macaroons soaked in sherry or wine and brandy, a rich custard, syllabub and cream. Nothing much has changed by the time we get to my mother's first cookery books, the first edition of Good Housekeeping 's Cookery Book (1948) and Cooking with Elizabeth Craig (1947). Both of these publications call for sponge cake spread with jam soaked with sherry and/or brandy, custard and whipped cream. Elizabeth Craig calls for macaroons and ratafias in the cake layer, Good Housekeeping uses macaroons in the trifle and ratafias for decoration, similarly shredded almonds are a component of both, and the Elizabeth Craig version is decorated with glacé cherries and angelica. Good Housekeeping also has recipes for a Banana Trifle (containing bananas of course and decorated with cherries, angelica and chopped pistachios), Cherry Trifle (with both cherry jam and stewed cherries and made with either sponge cake or cake crumbs) and Pineapple and Ginger Trifle (using tinned pineapple and preserved ginger and custard made from custard powder).

The Good Housekeeping Cookery Book of 1985 uses a Victoria sponge, raspberry jam and macaroons, sherry, custard, cream and flaked almonds and glacé cherries for decoration. The Silver Palate Good Times Cook Book (1985) includes a recipe for 'Old English Trifle' which requires Sara Lee pound cake and raspberry jam, amaretti crumbs, marsala, custard, almond flavoured cream and almonds for decoration.

That there is some discrepancy between what the recipe books would have us believe is 'traditional' and what cooks actually produce in their own kitchens is demonstrated by comments such as Jane Grigson's when she compares her recipe to 'the mean travesty made with yellow, packaged sponge cakes, poor sherry and powdered custards' and derides 'the brassy effect of angelica and glacé cherries'. Similarly Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham in The Prawn Cocktail Years insist on 'decent' sherry and preferably amaretti or macaroons/ratafias but definitely not 'shop bought' sponge cake. For them 'jelly is an abomination' and fresh fruit too tart and 'somehow alien to the confection'. And that there is on-going debate about what constitutes a real trifle is born out every year by articles such as this one or this one which claim to set down the rules for trifle making.

I don't know where or when my mother learnt to make trifle. She came to Australia from England in her early thirties – did she make trifle before she came here? Surely she must have done. Did her mother use ratafias? Did my mother remove any trace of almonds from her trifle because she didn't like the flavour, because my father didn't or because I didn't? Certainly a trifle was part of most celebrations. I can't remember a time when it was not an integral part of Christmas. I also can't remember a trifle that didn't involve shop bought jam sponge roll – preferably the little rollettes. The cake layer was flavoured with sweet sherry in the early days but became more sophisticated when Mum started using Marsala – did she learn this from Robert Carrier and his Great Dishes of the World? (Somewhere along the way we also discovered that Marsala was terrific poured over vanilla ice cream).

In our trifle the next layer is always canned fruit, two fruits to be exact. Did my mother discover two fruits (that is a mix of diced peaches and pears) before she came to Australia? Was this considered some sort of delicacy in post war Sunderland? I doubt that she would have encountered two fruits in her mother's kitchen in Little Eaton.

On top of the two fruits, abomination of abominations, comes a layer of Port Wine jelly. The jelly is set separately and then broken up with a fork and spread over the fruit so that it forms a discreet layer and doesn't soak in to the cake – now that would be an abomination! Other flavours of jelly are acceptable but not quite right. I don't remember that she made packet jelly at any other time or for any other purpose. I do remember that my mother was quite capable of making her own aspic and jellied beetroot so using a commercial packet jelly was a conscious decision. Was it too hard to get the right flavour starting from scratch?

Then comes the custard. My mother always made the custard using custard powder. Again it wasn't that she didn't know how to do it any other way. She made sensational egg custard tarts and custardy puddings but runny custard was always made with custard powder. Trifle custard was always made with custard powder, slightly more than recommended on the packet so that it was very thick. Once set the custard was broken up with a fork before spreading over the jelly and for special occasions whipped cream was mixed through. I always make custard for trifle with custard powder.

The final layer is whipped cream. In the past my mother decorated her trifle with 'brassy' cherries and angelica. We thought it was ambrosia. The only real variation I have made is to eliminate both the cherries (because not everyone likes them) and the angelica (because it has become increasingly hard to buy, and anyway angelica on its own would be a bit silly).

How my mother came to this final pinnacle of perfection I will never know but I make trifle the way she did. That is the way my family like it, that is the way our extended family like it. I am the reigning family Trifle Queen and this is the trifle I make every Christmas. I make no excuses for its rather plebeian ingredients. A trifle is not to be trifled with – other layered desserts are trifles in name only. I think a trifle should, as the name suggests, be something light or trivial, it shouldn't take hours to prepare and cost a fortune to make. But made with care the end result is so much more than the sum of the individual components. A mere trifle becomes something special to share to celebrate the moment and commemorate the past.

 

Note: Cassata Trifle is not a trifle if only because it is made with savoiardi not sponge cake, and contains fresh raspberries and ricotta. Anything with chocolate, even if only grated over for decoration, is not a trifle. 'Cassata' and 'trifle' are two words which do not belong in the same sentence let alone the same title.

Christmas Wish List

Some things are always on the wish list. For example a housekeeper. That is someone who will do all the cleaning but will achieve this magically so that I will wake up in the morning and it will all be done.  This genie would also be able to do all the shopping leaving me free to browse the markets without having to make any serious decisions. He or she would prepare all our meals with the proviso that they would cook just the way I  do  - so I could enjoy my own cooking without having to do it myself. Given such a gift is unlikely I wouldn't mind someone giving me a Thermomix and/or a Kitchen Aid mixer, or something similar, and/or an ice cream maker. I don't need any of these gadgets but I would love to have one or other of them to play with, and especially without the guilt of having spent a small fortune on something I know I can live without. Should anyone seriously contemplate any of these gifts they should also consider donating an extra room to the house so that there would be somewhere to put the thing.

There are however one or two more realistic suggestions on my Christmas list.
Yottam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have written another book, Jerusalem: A Cookbook which I have salivated over (although that does sound slightly revolting doesn't it) in the book shop. As usual it is full of strong flavours and interesting combinations. There has been no shortage of publicity for Jerusalem. There is an article with recipes in the latest edition (December 2012/January 2013) of Delicious magazine and a long and very interesting article about the whole Ottolenghi phenomenon in the December 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine if you can lay your hands on a copy.There is another interview with the authors here at Serious Eats and you can whet your appetite with recipes from the book for roasted butternut squash with tahini and za'atar here, Na'ama's fattoush here, mejadra (which is delicious) here, stuffed eggplant with lamb and pine nuts here and hummus kawarma here. When I first made the mejadra (which has all sorts of other spellings - mujaddara for instance) I used this version of the recipe which skips the step of mixing the onions with flour. I found the flour only made things gluggy and messy and the onions tended to clump together - so this step seemed quite unnecessary. However you make it mejadra is terrific with yoghurt, with feta cheese or with a fried egg on top (or indeed with all three together).

On the non-fiction book list is Consider the Fork: A history of how we cook and eat by Bee Wilson (which you can read about here). There are so many everyday objects that we take for granted, many of which have a fascinating story to tell. This book sounds like a good companion to Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner: The origins, evolution, eccentricities and meaning of table manners. Another food book which caught my attention at The New Yorker is Jon Kramper's Creamy and Crunchy  which is a history of peanut butter, reviewed here. Having worked at a plant which made peanut butter I am very familiar with the benefits of hydrogenation but can only tolerate  peanut butter in small doses.

Another book which isn't actually on the wish list but one which I think I should get around to reading sometime is You Aren't What You Eat. Fed up With Gastroculture by Stephen Poole. Depending on where you sit on the foodie spectrum you might see  Mr. Poole's effort as 'a bloody brutal and necessary sacred cow hunt' (as here) or you may find that you 'strenuously disagreed with every single conclusion' (as here). Perhaps you could give copies to everyone to read before Christmas to ensure lively discussion during lunch on the 25th.

There is also a new Mark Kurlansky book which was published this year Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man (reviewed here) which would appear to throw a whole new light on frozen peas.

And there is one last book on the list. I recently heard Lawrence Norfolk interviewed about his latest book John Saturnall's Feast (reviewed here, the download for the interview is here) which sounds like a good yarn and historically interesting as well. A book about medieval feasting should make perfect reading for the beach this summer.

Food in the city. Month in Review - October 2012

This is a photograph I took earlier this year of a delightful piece of street sculpture in New York which I encountered on my way to Zabar's on Broadway at 80th Street .

 

A crow about to start pecking holes in a big apple seemed an appropriate illustration for this month because New York has been so much in the news thanks to the coverage of Sandy the Superstorm. What struck me as most interesting was the amount of publicity an event like this receives simply because it occurs in New York - third world disaster hits first world city is somehow so much more news worthy than third world disaster hits third world country. From the food perspective it should also give us pause to reflect on how cut off we city dwellers are from our source of food and how reliant we are on electricity and road, rail and air transportation to provide adequate supplies of fresh food. Not surprisingly this is an issue which Edible Geography saw fit to cover - Nicola's post is here. Who would have thought that the best way to survive the storm was to sit at home eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking beer?

While we are thinking about where our food might come from.... Many moons ago I worked in the food industry so I have spent my fair share of hours in factories processing food stuffs of one sort or another. Nonetheless I rarely bother to contemplate where or how convenience products are made - this is partly self-protection of course since the reality is often too gruesome to confront. However if you have ever wondered how hummus and babba ganoush get made on an industrial scale you should read David Lebovitz account from his travels to Israel. He doesn't mention the amount of hummus the factory produces on a daily basis but judging by the size of the bulk containers for the chick peas it must be quite a lot! And somehow its very reassuring to know that the gloved hand is still the best machine for removing charred skin from an eggplant.

Living in New York or Sydney for that matter you see very little food being grown. I know it is the latest thing to have a bee hive on the roof and for restaurants to have a kitchen garden but surely we aren't expected to believe that these beautifully manicured and very small kitchen gardens provide more than a fraction of the vegetables and herbs that the restaurant actually uses? I can't even supply a family of four with sufficient variety of fresh vegetables from my back garden. I do however support the idea that there might be more interest in where our food comes from if people were to see more of it growing. In many Mediterranean countries the streets are lined with citrus trees and the parks have pomegranates and olives and figs and hedges of rosemary. The best I have seen in Sydney are some borders of parsley in city flower boxes. One of the reasons, so I am told, for not encouraging the use of fruit tress in local streets is because they are messy - what if someone slipped on the dropped fruit and sued the council? But surely all the fruit would have been picked long before that could happen? Unfortunately removing dirt and messiness and smell from our neat and ordered urban environment has become a serious preoccupation, although of course there are other, complicated reasons for the disappearance of fresh food from our streetscapes. Earlier this year the BBC ran a series of documentaries on London markets which address some of the issues - you can read about the series here. There is a precise by Edible Geography here and a glimpse of Billingsgate fish market here.

Finally, if you haven't already seen these pictures you might take a deep breath before you look here at photographs from an exhibition of cakes held recently at the Pathology Museum, St Bart's Hospital in London. And on the subject of cake you may remember that back in June I mentioned the Endangered Cake Museum - well I am very pleased to report that it will have a new home, which you can read about here.

Month in Review - September 2012

Celebrating Spring

 

Donald Rumsfeld managed to get himself into trouble over the question of what we know, what we know we don't know and and what we don't know we don't know. The things we know we don't know much or anything about are those which, in my case at least, I have studiously avoided attempting to learn - quantum physics, rocket science, brain surgery all come to mind. The things I don't know I don't know are legion. So much of what goes on around us we just take for granted until someone asks a question or you come across a snippet of information which challenges your previous assumptions. All of a sudden you realise there a vast holes in your knowledge of the world that, now you've identified the void, you must work to fill. And then of course there is the gaping chasm where lie all the things you once knew but now struggle to remember.
 

As a child I had a passing acquaintance with Pontefract cakes. My parents I think considered these hard discs of liquorice an important part of my English heritage. If you had asked me a few weeks ago why these sweets were called Pontefract cakes I would have told you that they were named after the town where they were manufactured and, if I had thought long enough and hard enough I might even have remembered they were made by Bassetts and that they had a castle image stamped on them. What I didn't know then, and would never have guessed, was that the liquorice used in their manufacture was actually grown in Pontefract. Who would ever have imagined that something as exotic as liquorice would, or indeed could, grow in Yorkshire?

Another question which arose this month was why are hazelnuts called filberts? I still don't feel confident about the answer to this one. According to the Oxford Companion to Food 'filbert' is the name of a type of cultivated hazelnut, as distinct from a cob hazelnut. All wild hazelnuts are just hazelnuts in Britain but in America both wild and cultivated hazelnuts are called filberts. The name filbert is thought to come from St. Philibert, whose saint's day, 22 August, falls at around the time hazelnuts ripen. So hazel nuts are one of those things that I can no longer claim to know nothing about but I still feel they have only moved from the unknown unknowns to the known unknowns.

A while ago I drew your attention to  this post on Edible Geography about lunch.
Lunch is a very serious business for some as this piece 'A day in the life of a Mumbai sandwichwallah' makes clear. Armed with this knowledge a sandwich will never be the same again.

Monthly Catch Up

 

The Restaurant Reviewer at Work?

 



You may well be wondering what happened to July and August - let's just say they came and then they went. So before the end of September rolls around I thought to follow up on the last post about restaurant reviews.
Before there were Internet sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon there were restaurant guide books and of course there still are - the Sydney Morning Herald Guide, Michelin and Zagat for example. One of the criticisms of these guides is that they tend to grade restaurants by arbitrary and mysterious criteria and concentrate too much on high end dining so that they don't really reflect where real people do actually eat. Two articles from the Guardian (here and here) discuss the latest Zagat Guide to London which rates places like the Ledbury, Dinner by Heston and two of Gordon Ramsay's restaurants in their top ten. Do restaurant guides promote intelligent appreciation of food and informed criticism of eating establishments? Do they help to set standards on which that criticism can be based? What criteria do they use to judge the cooking? How do they choose which restaurants will be included? The Michelin guide in particular is notoriously secretive about their methods yet three stars is still regarded as the mark of excellence never mind what it may really represent.
There can be no doubt that the anonymous voices who rate restaurants on the Internet are both more opinionated and more egalitarian than the majority of 'official' guides. So whilst sites like Yelp may give you a better idea of what to expect from your local Italian or Thai they would appear to contribute little to an intellectual gastronomic dialogue. Research has however led to the conclusion that social media sites do have an influence on 'how consumers judge the quality of goods and services' and they do influence a restaurant's takings. It's also worth remembering that not all social media sites are created equal, so, just as in the case of the more established printed restaurant guides, it is worth knowing what you are dealing with before you make any sort of decision based on their recommendations. Oliver Thring discusses Trip Advisor here and it is instructive to read some of the comments on his post eg.'I would much rather read a restaurant critic's review of a fine dining restaurant, but when it's a local chinese, indian or italian, and I care just as much about the service, cleanliness and atmosphere as I do about the food and price, tripadvisor works for me'.
And for the final word, this piece from Bruce Palling who calls homself 'Gastroenophile'. Mr. Palling has a foot in both camps - he is a journalist (he writes for The Wall Street Journal) and a blogger. He believes that 'we should all be grateful that there has never been such a profusion of fascinating accounts of fine dining so available - and provided free of charge'. Does he mean that we should be grateful that there is now so much information freely available or should we be grateful that there was a time when we were free of other people's gratuitous opinions no matter how fascinating?

More Blogs and Blogging

Le déjeuner des canotiers, Renoir.

 The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

How many of these diners are going to write a review of their lunch on their blog when they get home?
At dinner a few weeks ago the conversation ran to restaurant reviews and to blogs, blogging and bloggers. And given my interest in the latter (that is blogs, blogging and bloggers and the hows and whys of the dissemination of information about restaurants and fine dining) it was suggested that I might furnish a list of blogs that were worth following.
Well I'm not going to do that per se but I am going to point any one who is interested in the direction of some further reading in this area.
Who you might like to 'follow' depends very much on what you want to know, what information you are hoping to gain from reading someone else's thoughts/ideas/opinions. I don't 'follow' blogs so much as watch them. In the interests of my research I track a group of individuals who post fairly regular and very detailed restaurant reviews. I'm not reading these reviews because I want to eat at the restaurants myself but I am interested in the what, when, where, how and why of these dining experiences. None of the bloggers I watch ( and yes it is all a bit voyeuristic) have any credentials as such - they are  not professional writers and they don't have any qualifications as chefs or restaurateurs - they are in the main young people with healthy appetites and plenty of disposable income.
One of the criticisms of the 'amateur' critic is that they have no knowledge of how to cook and because they only know how to eat aren't really in a position to judge whether what they are eating is any good or not and certainly have no way of telling good from better or best. Now that is a criticism that could be laid at the door of many a restaurant reviwer (see below for example) and might be true for those who write  the short reviews on sites such as 'Eatability' and 'Urbanspoon' but certainly isn't true of all bloggers. It probably is true that few food bloggers are professional journalists, although of course there are exceptions to that rule too. Nor is it fair to tar all food blogs with the same brush. For one thing not every food blog concentrates on restaurant reviews (yours truly for one) and not every blog is all about self-promotion.
So let's start with some local food people and their ideas on the restaurant reviewer.
Claire, who calls herself Melbourne Gastronome, recently posted this piece entitled 'Online reviews and the race to be first' which among other concerns raises the question of reviewing etiquette, an issue which is also considered here and here.
Phil Lees, whose blog is called The Last Appetite, has some interesting observations to make about the influence of bloggers. The audience for a particular blog is hard to determine but certainly Phil's statistics and my own analysis of  the blogs I have been studying suggest that the reach may be fairly limited. However the influence of on-line reviews on sites such as Urbanspoon for example is another matter altogether, as Phil discusses here and here.
What do we expect from a restaurant review? Does it really need to be a literary masterpiece? In a recent post of her blog Will Write for Food, Dianne Jacob discusses the James Beard Award nominees including Alan Richman. Richman is perhaps not well known in Australia but he is very much the master of  the long form, the review that tells a story, and his work is usually very funny. His book Fork it Over is a great read. So Richman is a good writer who happens to review restaurants and like many well regarded restaurant critics he is a journalist first. As he says of himself

I am a restaurant critic. I eat for a living.

Chefs complain about people like me. They argue that we are not qualified to do our jobs because we do not know how to cook. I tell them I'm not entirely pleased with the way they do their jobs either, because they do not know how to eat. I have visited most of the best restaurants of the world, and they have not. I believe I know how to eat as well as any man alive.

 

Not every reviewer can be as eloquent and entertaining as Alan Richman, nor do they need to be. The success of Yelp for example rests on the simple fact that most people, deciding where to go to a particular restaurant on Friday for dinner, simply want to know whether or not the people who ate there enjoyed themselves. The fact that you don't know any of these people is immaterial - you don't know Alan Richman or Terry Durack either - and whilst there might be some common ground when it comes to over priced or undercooked and what constitutes unacceptable service no one can tell you whether you will enjoy the taste of the food, that much you have to find out for yourself.

 

One of the things, to my mind one of the good things, that an on-line review can do that a newspaper piece can't is give you a proper look at the food and in some cases at the interior of the restaurant and of people actually eating the food. There are any number of videos on YouTube of people eating at El Bulli or The Fat Duck or Alinea for example which help to make sense of some of the more esoteric offerings which don't sound all that flash when reviewers try to put them into words. Of course it is also true that many on-line reviewers fall back on photographs rather than even attempt to describe what they are eating although in fairness some modernist cuisine creations do transcend the normal culinary vocabulary. The downside of course is that not all bloggers know the first thing about taking photographs and there has to be some limit to the number of pictures any one person can take while they are eating dinner. Would you trust the opinions of anyone who could post more than 200 photographs of any one meal?

 

Like it or not on-line reviews are here to stay and this may not be altogether a bad thing. We might hope for example that the demise of print media in general will mean that those magazines and newspapers which survive will offer a higher standard of journalism and perhaps a return to the long form assuming that there is still a readership for the likes of Alan Richman. Time will also, one hopes, weed out those who have something to say from those who only want to say something on-line. To cite Alan Richman again, his reviews read just as well on the computer screen as they do in GQ magazine.

 

And finally just to go back to what we want from restaurant review here's a comparison between three reviews of l'Enclume, Cumbria. Chris Pople calls his blog 'Cheese and Biscuits' and has earned quite a reputation for his reviews (you can read more about him here). His review of l'Enclume is here. John Lanchester, in his final column for the Guardian reviews l'Enclume here, and Jay Rayner's review is here. The latter may be more 'professional' but there is a lot to be said for Chris's pictures. Perhaps what we should really hope for is less emphasis on restaurants and reviews and more time and thought given to food writing which goes beyond talking about eating.