'Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book Revived and Illustrated,' Discussed By Author Weslie Janeway

Sat, 02/18/2006 - 12:25pm

When: November 8, 2009 at the Pittsfield Branch

While husband Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species changed the way we viewed evolution, there was another book, written by a different Darwin, that shed light on Victorian style, taste, and family life. Unknown to the general public until now, Mrs. Charles Darwin compiled a cookery notebook filled with culinary instruction and personal anecdotes about everyday life in the Darwin household. The book features facsimile representations of the original recipes, each one tested by authors Weslie Janeway and Dusha Bateson. The event is cosponsored by the Culinary Historians Of Ann Arbor. Books will be on sale and a booksigning will follow the event. The Culinary Historians will prepare several tasty samples for the audience, based on Mrs. Darwin's recipes.

Transcript

• [00:00:22.12] DEBBIE GALLAGHER: Good afternoon and welcome to the Ann Arbor District Library. On behalf of the Library and the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor, we welcome you to this wonderful, wonderful program on Mrs. Darwin's Cookbook. Before we get started with the introductions, I just wanted to show you, for anyone who isn't yet, of the Ann Arbor cook site. What we've done is we've digitized a lot of local, historic cookbooks from the Ann Arbor area. We're up to around 30. We're going to add a couple more next week. And we do hope you visit the site. You can search by squirrel, rabbit, anything that you want to put into your next recipe. And find out how they did it a 100 years ago, things like that. This site, and I'd like to get to one particular thing, and that is that we're very, very lucky that the historians have allowed us to digitize. We're passed going back to the beginning. And we add as it allows that Randy brings them to us.
• [00:01:32.68] This website, Ann Arbor Cooks, would not have happened, would not be this good, without all of the input from the Culinary Historians, and especially from Jan Langone. Who mentored me on how to do this. Has shared her resources and her knowledge, just to an amazing degree to help us get this up. And to try and spread the idea of local cooking to local residents. Amazingly though, the majority of the hits on Ann Arbor Cooks come from all over the country. Part of that is of course we're at the beginning of the alphabet. So that helps us a lot with Google. But it's amazing given how many cookbooks are probably sitting around in libraries and repositories, how few people have thought to tap into the local cookbooks. And considering the local warm movement, and how well known Jan is and how she is spread the word about local cooking, I'm surprised that more haven't done it. But after ALA and our presentation, we hope that there would be more.
• [00:02:46.23] I'm not used to holding a microphone, so if I mess this up. Plus I explained to Jan that I would rather clean your sinks, than get in front of people and do this kind of stuff. But here goes, I'm going to probably do a terrible job of introducing Jan. But, for those of you who are not aware. let me go ahead. Jan Langone is Curator of American Culinary History at the University of Michigan's Clements Library, which is absolutely gorgeous. She is proprietor of the Wine and Food Library. The oldest antiquarian culinary book shop in America. Jan is founder an Honary Chair of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor. For many years, she conducted a weekly radio program in ventures in gastronomy on [? W-1 ?], which is another thing we want to talk to her about, streaming it on the website.
• [00:03:40.62] In 2000, she received the Food Arts Silver Spoon Award for her scholarly determination to preserve an honor American culinary literature, and her many other contributions to culinary history. And in September 2009 -- I hope some of you were able to come to her award ceremony at Kerrytown, during the Book Fest. What a fantastic time that was. Jan received the Book Person of the Year Award at the Kerrytown Book Festival. Extremely well deserved. Without further adieu, here is Jan.
• [00:04:13.48] JAN LANGONE: First, I want to thank Debbie Gallagher and the Ann Arbor District Library. They have been very helpful to us always, and very supportive. And we are delighted to have the newsletter on their site. But she thanked me for it, but what we really have to do is thank Randy, who wanted to do this. And I was a little skeptical about it, and Randy was absolutely right. And we're so thrilled to have that done.
• [00:04:40.56] Also, I wan to thank Laura, who as I said, have worked very hard to put this program together, and all of the other programs. We want to thank the publishers of her book at Literati. One of whom is a Michigan graduate, and that's one of the reasons we're lucky to have Mrs. Janeway here for pursuing the program. We thank Nicholas Book Shop for making books available for purchase, which our speaker will be happy to autograph. I'd like to thank everybody. Thank Carl and John Thompson for helping with refreshments. Carol is here. Carol is the Chairman of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor. And if any of you here are not members, and would like to become members, she can tell you about it and give you a form to sign. What we'll do is have Mrs. Janeway speak, and then she will take questions. Then she will autograph books. And you're invited to have some of the refreshments. If you have questions, please ask them succinctly. And since we are recording this for the Library's website, we will have to bring this mic to you to speak into. So you'll have to wait for me or someone else to run around, and get this mic to you to ask the question.
• [00:05:52.73] Now I would like to introduce Mrs. Janeway. Weslie Janeway is co-author of Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book. She studied history and politics at Barnard College and Brown University. She has work as a Political Analyst in banking, investment banking, and continued to work in investment at Sontag Advisory, a boutique investment firm until 2006, when she and her semi-retired hsuband moved to Cambridge, England. She lives with her husband and son variously between Cambridge, England, New York City, and the coast of Maine. And my parenthesis say I am envious. Her co-author Dusha Bateson studied history at England's Cambridge University. In 1998, her husband, Sir Patrick Bateson became Provost of Kings College, where the Batesons entertained many gues from Queen Elizabeth II to the Dalai Lama.
• [00:06:55.92] I hope that Weslie Will tell us the story of how she and Dusha came to discover and then to write this fascinating book. This is the first time The Darwin Recipes have been presented to the general public. To learn how culinary life was lived in any upper class Victorian household would be interesting enough. But to learn about the household of Charles Darwin is exceptional. Weslie, we welcome you, and thank you for being here today.
• [00:07:29.30] WESLIE JANEWAY: Isaac Newton said that if we appear to see further into the future, or [? if we ?] appear to see further, is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. No, I'm not going to talk about physics. But before I go any further, I do want to talk about some giants. And it actually happens to be three women without their work, the book couldn't have been written. The first is someone named Janet Brown, who I think is a historian of science. Now at Harvard, who is probably the biographer of Charles Darwin. She did a massive two volume life, and has been extraordinarily generous to me and to Dusha. And when in doubt, when there was an issue of whether something was correct, we always deferred to Janet Brown's version of The Life. The second person I'd like to talk about is Barbara Ketcham Wheaton. Barbara Wheaton load the social history trend. And I think she was the one who really made the study of culinary history a valid, viable legitimate way to study an era. She built the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, built the collection. And I think it was because of her work that we realize that what we were writing was a history book with recipes. Rather than a cookbook.
• [00:09:06.11] And finally I'd like to mention Janet Theophano who is at the University of Pennsylvania. She wrote a book called Eat My Words. And I read this book just before I heard about the recipe book, which is the next topic. And in this book, she pointed out that ever since women have been literate, they have had kitchen notebooks. They've written down recipes, they've written down tips, they've written down things that were important to them. In her book, she analyzes three or four of them. And one I believe goes back to the early 17th century. And talks about what we learned other than cookery issues from these books. So having read that book, and then learning about the availability of Emma's recipe book, made me feel that we could do something with it that could be interesting.
• [00:10:10.61] How I heard about this book, and how it all happened, was as it was mentioned, we live in Cambridge, England. And 2009 is the Darwin bicentennial. And as early as 2005, 2006, people who were interested in this were planning all kinds of projects: museum shows, full weeks symposium, you know things like that. So my mind was prepared. And I happened in fact to be in New York City at a meeting at the New York Botanical Garden. And they were holding a meeting to raise some money to support their Darwin project. And the person who was going to be curating their show said, the archives at Cambridge, the Darwiniana, are absolutely astonishing. Why they even have Emma's recipe book.
• [00:11:07.13] And as you can all imagine that was irresistable. Luckily for me, Dusha Bateson is extremely interested in Darwin. Her husband Sir Patrick Bateson is a very well known animal ethologist, and he really created the wonderful Darwin Festival that we all enjoyed in the spring. And she happens, in my opinion, to the best home cook in Britain. So of course I telephoned her, and I said if we can get a publisher do you want to do this. And luckily she said yes before too much time elapsed. So that was how it all happened, and we were off.
• [00:11:47.25] The book itself is a perfectly ordinary notebook. The sort of notebook a child of the time would have had. And it has a label on it, it's leather binding, very ordinary. And it clearly was written exactly as Janet Theophano described in bits and pieces. There are a number of different handwriting. Some recipes appear twice. They were clearly written down, copied in, and then maybe copied in, in a slightly different way. There sort of in order, but there's some violation when they're dates. But it's an orderly enough that we could we could learn from that.
• [00:12:27.30] And I have to say we were really privileged to be the first people to look at this, as cooks and as historians. And I don't care how good of a historian, how good of a scholar you are, it's easier when you're first. It really is, and we were so lucky. And I have to also thank at this point the Darwin family, that is in general extraordinarily generous with the papers. But particularly William Huxley Darwin, who actually owns this book. Who said, of course you can use it, you know, feel free in any way, take pictures. He said just I hope you're going to be respectful. I don't know quite how we weren't going to be. And that was the only stipulation. And the family really was to us in general, but in particular a bit to everyone in general, very, very generous.
• [00:13:22.82] So we sat down with the book, and we started to transcribe the recipes. And they were all in this very, very difficult to read Victorian script, what they used to call copperplate. And again, probably several different handwritings. We didn't get into deciding who's was who's. Although there is one recipe in Darwin's own hand. And there is at least one of the recipe that is in the hand of Annie, who was their daughter who died at about the age of eight. And at her death it was supposed to be the definitive reason that Darwin lost what little faith he had. And there was a book written about Annie and her role in the family, called Annie's Box, that some of you may have heard of.
• [00:14:12.13] So we transcribed the recipes, and our initial reaction, when we saw the book, had been I hope we can get a book out of this. And by the time we finished transcribing them, just based on our conversations with each other, we realized how much we'd learned. Not just about food itself, but also about where the Darwins were placed in this period of phenomenal change. And also what specifically we could learn about that period from the book.
• [00:14:45.51] Queen Victoria came to the thrown in 1837, and the Darwins married in 1839. And as everyone knows, Victoria reigned for awfully long time. And a lot of what all of us think of as Victorian is really late Victorian. And in fact Darwin's own granddaughter, Gwenn Raverat, wrote about this very specifically when she talked about Down House where they lived. Where she said the rooms were spare, and while the furniture was big, it was comfortable. And there was not a lot of clutter. There was a lot of air. There's was as much light as you could have at that time.
• [00:15:27.91] So in this book, we really see, as we see Emma's recipes evolve, we see some of the changes that the whole country experienced. As transportation improved. And as there was far more commerce. One example of this is in the very earliest recipes, food is thickened by using a calf's foot, which of course is an actual form of gelatin. Then we hear about isinglas and finally gelatin leave. And to this day in Britain cooks used gelatin leaves rather preferential rather than gelatin powder, which tends to be what we use here.
• [00:16:14.89] Another example of this sort of evolution is rice. Really not that many recipes. There are six rice recipes. So that tells us one of two things, either it was very common or it was very interesting. And what we decided was it was probably, after doing research, it was probably interesting. When you think about it, their marriage, say first 20 years of their marriage, which is about the period of the book, were years when the availability of rice to upper, middle class people expanded exponentially. The fields in the Carolinas were producing. Boats were going back and forth the Atlantic very quickly. Commerce was increasing. And rice had the benefit of being digestible. And let's remember Darwin's digestion problems are famous. It kept well. It was versatile. And it was new.
• [00:17:18.85] And so when you think about it, it's not surprising there are six recipes. And they're six very different recipes. Darwin's recipe is plain boiled rice in his own hand. Very, very specific. Very much a man of science. Seven minutes this way, four minutes that way. There are pudding rices, you know there's a wonderful rice pudding with a sort of creme brulee top, which we call rice putting with attitude. And there's a recipe that we liked very much and we've made, which is chicken and rice cooked together. and there's all so of course a leftover recipe. There are two. It was rice patties, and then there's another rice recipe where you're using leftovers. So it was clear that it was something they had a fair amount of. It was integrated into their cuisine.
• [00:18:11.02] Another thing that's very interesting is the very, very first page in the book. It's a sketched in layout of what was called service a la francais, which the closest thing we might have today would be family style. But when we used to go back and look at the menus, the time we say how could anyone have eaten that much. And the fact is they really didn't. They would be perhaps a dozen dishes on the table. But it was considered to be extremely bad for them to ask to pass the dishes. The rule was that the gentleman served the ladies on either side of him, but only of the dishes in the vacinity. So if you didn't like what was in the vicinity, you were really out of luck, or if you had a greedy gentleman, and so forth. And even in perhaps not banquets, but more elaborate family meal, at one of the table there would be a terrine containing a soup. At the other end, they would be a roast or meat dish. And in between, there would be these various side dishes or composed dishes, made dishes they were called.
• [00:19:20.06] Service a la Russe, which is much talked about, probably never actually occurred in the Darwin household. I mean again if you look at the timing of it, it was really more in the late Victorian period that it became common. Probably they had their big meal midday, and probably it was served something between a la francais and family style. Let's see what else did we learn. One of my favorite things is that the very last recipe in the book is the one and only chocolate recipe. And we really puzzled about this. Because we couldn't figured out what kind of chocolate it was. It referred to something called Spanish chocolate. And I have a whole book about chocolate, and it really wasn't helpful. What they said asn't inappropriate. You know, we looked it up everywhere, and finally Lady Bateson was at a banquet, and she realized she was sitting next to Sir Adrian Cadbury. And as we all know when we get obsessed with something, we're obsessed. And she said, I have a question for you. And he said you know I don't know the answer. But we have a chocolate historian. And put her in touch with him, and we got an answer that we could live with.
• [00:20:41.28] And that actually brings up another point, which is while there were grocery stores, while there were even branded foods, there wasn't the same uniformity of product as we have today. So you used what you had. You bought what there was. And, you know, you had to be a little resourceful. And some of the reason that many of us complain, oh the recipe isn't exact, it says until right or to taste. You used what you had. And if you didn't have quite enough sugar, you figured it out. You made it anyway. And we see that in some of the recipes, in others, particularly the puddings. You know that involved things like gelatin and such. They are a little more specific.
• [00:21:31.60] Let's see if there's anything else. I always like to open it up to questions, because it's so much more interesting. There's two other things I want to say. One is I think Emma Darwin has been miscast as a sort of a mousey person in the background. And that's really not true. Everyone who knew her said she was very lively. She was very, very well educated, not only by the standards of the day but by present day. Although she did not actually go to school. And that was not atypical. She spoke several languages. She played the piano well. She had traveled extensively. And she ran a hugh, huge household. She had eight children that lived, and there were other pregnancies and children who died. There were twelve servants. nd was really a mini farm. And they had an astonishing stream of visitors. A when people came in those days, they didn't come for lunch. They would come for two weeks, with their families, with their servants.
• [00:22:35.16] And in those days, science was very much home based. They were very few scientific institutions. They were began to be built in Darwin's lifetime. But if Darwin wanted to confer with someone or vice versa, they came, and they stayed for two weeks. And Emma's diaries which were, I have to say painfully boring, are full of things like five Huxleys arrived, and then two weeks later, five Huxleys leave. It was a mini hotel. Where we are fortunate and we can get to know Emma -- this is an age before telephones and emails and texting -- she wrote letters. And the Darwin family are all literate, and they saved everything. And her letters really are her diary, and they are charming and beautifully written, and generous, and just so full of life.
• [00:23:32.79] Edna Healey wrote a biography of Emma, which is really essentially a compendium of her letters strung together with some text. And it is through that book -- I have to confess that I've never been in the archives -- but it is through that book that you really get a feel for her. And also one has to say she and m although they lived in the same house and spent virtually all their time together, rarely we're separated, when something was really important to them, they wrote each other letters. And so we know a great deal about their marriage, about how they felt about each other, and what was important to them. And it was also obviously something they thought about. So again, as a scholar as biographer, we're very, very blessed.
• [00:24:21.56] The other thing that Emma left us is Charles kept, Charles himself kept meticulous records of the expenses of the larger household. But Emma kept the domestic records. And as far as I know, no economist has actually looked at them. But I expect that it's probably as good a record as any. Not only of how the family spent its money, but of price changes, of product availability, of budgeting that exists. I mean she kept these records for about 60 years. And they are extraordinarily detailed, that literally down to the part penny. And I think there's, you know, obviously a great deal more to be learned both about them and just about life in general from the legacy that they left.
• [00:25:12.28] So I now open it to questions.
• [00:25:14.07] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:25:26.10] WESLIE JANEWAY: Spanish chocolate. And we know that's a drink. But and we also often think of chocolate with cinnamon a Spanish chocolate. But again neither was relevant, and it was a form of unsweetened chocolate. We think.
• [00:25:53.76] AUDIENCE: You mentioned rice coming from the United States, and I know that it was produced there. But in Great Britain that's where they got their rice? Not India or China or any other places?
• [00:26:03.20] WESLIE JANEWAY: They always got it from India. But suddenly it went from being an extreme luxury product to being available. In other words it came from both directions. And interestingly, the earliest mention of rice in English is about in the year 1200, and it's in a royal inventory. And it was very, very valuable and it was right up there with the saffron and the gold leaf. But and then indeed when it was coming from India, there was less of it. But, you know, as is true with any product when it starts to be cultivated more widely, more people can afford it.
• [00:26:46.81] JAN LANGONE: Just a word about the rice. Carolina rice was very, very important in England and all of Europe. And Jefferson in fact pushed it all the time when he was in Europe. And it was called Carolina gold. And if you look at the early English, and French and Spanish, et cetera, cookbooks of the great chefs, the great big compendiums, they all mention the best rice in the world is Carolina Gold. And Zingerman as you all know has that Carolina Gold preserved, because the fields all disappeared here because of hurricanes bringing saltwater into the fields. But after the Civil War some South Carolinians moved down to the Amazon Basin and took the rice with them. And it's been preserved there. So it's kind of an interesting culinary history story. Excuse I didn't mean to.
• [00:27:43.09] WESLIE JANEWAY: I was just thinking. This is why I love speaking to culinary historians, because I learn. You know everything I say, I get a counter story.
• [00:27:58.08] AUDIENCE: What would have been her motivation for doing this book? Would she have given these recipies to a cook to do?
• [00:28:08.43] WESLIE JANEWAY: That's a that's a good question. She always had a cook. It was the first hire they made as a young, married couple. However, we think she had a pretty good working knowledge of cooking. She had run her father's house. Her mother died when she was young, and she and her sister ran the house and such. Probably she did give some of them to her cook. Also it was customary, I mean as it is today, when you went to visit someone and you were serve something good, you'd say however did you make this. And you wrote it down. And that's why as we mentioned, you know, we know that the recipes were often re-copied. And many of the recipes have a name.
• [00:28:52.46] For example there's one recipe which might not appeal to you until you try it, called turnip [? scracelli. ?] And it is absolutely wonderful. It's essentially turnips and cream. And it's just terrific. The texture changes, the flavor changes. And [? Craselli ?] is the home of her Allen cousins, and the family still lives there today. There's another recipe that's comes to mind blanc mange which is not a very interesting British pudding. Moor Park and Moor Park was one of the health spas that Darwin frequented. So that was part of it.
• [00:29:32.76] There weren't so many, they probably did make most of these. But that was pretty much what it was. And interestingly even in Eat My Words again going back -- and they did a lot of visiting then -- but going back to the 1600s, 1700s, even then it was something that women did. It's part of the social contract if you will.
• [00:30:02.84] AUDIENCE: What kind of proportions did they use in the book? Was it for a smaller group or did they just make a big batch.
• [00:30:11.38] WESLIE JANEWAY: Both. And that was actually one of the things we found truly bizarre. For example, there's a recipe for ginger bread that involves -- I don't know if it's the one you use today -- but it involved pounds of flour. I mean it was enough for the village for Christmas. And then there are other recipes, the cheese straws, are a good example, where there is barely enough to get people through drinks. I mean you get these three straws, I mean not quite, but it's bizarre. And there were other things we just couldn't do because they involved things like take a calf's head. Either you couldn't get the stuff, or there was things like preserving sides of beef.
• [00:30:52.37] And that also suggested to us that she got the recipes from lots of different places. Because if for example she'd gotten them from Mrs. Beeton or Mrs. Beeton's predecessor, I mean if she'd done this directly, they were intended to be more family size. As far as we know there were no cookbooks at Down. If she had a cookbook it probably would have been Eliza Action from a sort of point of view of social class. Mrs. Beeton was oriented to a more of a lower, middle class, middle, middle class, aspirant market. And the Darwins, while they were adamant that they weren't aristocracy, were very, very upper, middle class.
• [00:31:44.70] AUDIENCE: Actually, the question before about did she cooked. She was actually in charge of giving recipes to people, and just say make this.
• [00:32:00.32] WESLIE JANEWAY: Exactly.
• [00:32:01.06] AUDIENCE: And, you know, we don't actually think about it like that. Because we always choose our recipes and then do our recipes. And I think that's really very big cultural difference, because people will look at her at the table and say, mama or Mrs. Darwin, this taste terrible. And she would be, you know, she was on the frontline. So she had to know her recipes.
• [00:32:26.82] WESLIE JANEWAY: That's true, and I think every female head of house did it differently. I mean there were women who pretty much abdicated. And when you read about domestic arrangements, there were people who basically said these are the numbers of people, and here's some money, and you're in charge. I think Emma was very hands on. Partly of course living in the country, they grew a lot of food. They produced a lot of food. I think she probably sourced a lot of food. She supervised making it, I mean we know that. And probably worked very closely. There was one cook they had for a gazillion years, Mrs. Evans. Probably worked very closely with her on a daily basis to come up with appropriate menus for the wide variety of people that were being fed. In both in terms of costs, in terms of what was available, what was in the larder, and so forth. Yeah. And then you're next.
• [00:33:30.45] AUDIENCE: I haven't seen the book. So I don't know how many recipes are in the book. Did you use all of the recipes that were in the original journal? And did you test them and substitute ingredients? You mentioned the calf's head and the sides of beef. How much of that did you do for the book itself.
• [00:33:53.77] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well, we didn't use all the recipe. Some of them like calf's head we just skipped. I mean we mentioned them because it's interesting. And we talked a little bit about preserving, but we didn't actually do that. We tried to be true to Emma. One of the only disagreements I had with my co-author was I started off wanting to be creative, and she said no, no. This isn't about us, this is about Emma. And she was right. It was absolutely correct. So to the extent it was possible, we were as true to her as we could be. We did put everything in terms of measurements. And we did both British and American, both systems. And we did as little as possible of 'til it looks right. We really tried to help people out on that. And the same with oven temperatures.
• [00:34:48.56] The recipes that we didn't use we didn't use because they were either much of a muchness. Like one recipe with three different flavorings. Or they were inappropriate. We used everything else. And not only did we test every recipe, we each tested just about every recipe. So we divided them up. I did half, she did half. We wrote them up, each wrote them up. And then we switched off to make sure that we weren't writing for ourselves. And then Dusha Bateson put them all into one consistent format.
• [00:35:27.85] AUDIENCE: Since rice from India was mentioned, I was curious to what extent foods or at least food ingredients from the colonies found their way into the [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
• [00:35:38.66] WESLIE JANEWAY: That's a good question. And we talked earlier about oranges, and that's a good example of what used to be called empire food. There were certainly foods that were imported from the empire, and there were some other foods. For example, parmesan cheese is mentioned a couple of times. The cheese sticks and other times. So we know that although Italy wasn't part of the empire, they were certainly trade. And of course parmesans dry and keeps well. Macaroni, which depending on which food historian you talk to, either came from Asia or from Italy. Macaroni is mentioned a couple of times. And by the time, certainly by the 18402, was manufactured in Britain. I mean even before that, there were macaroni factories. And that was a generic term for all pasta.
• [00:36:32.24] Interestingly, this idea of colonial foods or empire foods persist more or less to this day. I have an aga range, and when I moved to Britain and I was confronted with this, had to get a cookbook. And the first aga cookbook talks about, they divide food into always available, seasonally available, and empire foods. And it was a very, you know, it's how it was. They had an empire. We have two questions in the front row Laura.
• [00:37:06.67] AUDIENCE: Do you have a favorite recipe?
• [00:37:10.71] WESLIE JANEWAY: My husband likes the fish cakes, and I like them too. Because I'm a very frugal cook. And they're very much a use what you have recipe. And they're light, and you can make them big for dinner, or you can make them very small for hors d'oeuvres. So I think that's a favorite. And I really like the cheese straws. Because they're something which seems very modern, and yet of course, they were, you know, being made 200 years ago more or less. Yes these two.
• [00:37:45.33] AUDIENCE: Of the recipes in the book, which one had the most surprising outcome based on the ingredients and the direction.
• [00:37:57.07] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well the politic answer would be we're both really good cooks. So I wouldn't say we had any surprises. But there were two things, a sort of a surprise ingredients, that where we did learn something. There's a recipe that calls for pickled walnut. And you can buy pickled walnuts, you could buy them then. You could make them yourself. You were beginning by the 1840s to be able to buy things like Worcestershire sauce and pickled walnuts. And it's what the food experts now call umami, which is this fullness of all flavors at once. And that makes something indescribable. So what we discovered was, Emma suggested putting it into a, like, a beef stew. And what we realized is it still fills the same role. Sometimes they'll say mash some anchovies and so forth. So that was interesting
• [00:38:57.54] And this other one, which I'm not a particularly jam maker jelly maker, but apparently in the jam recipe, the raspberry jam recipe, or currant jam, it calls for raspberries. It's one or the other, I can't remember. That was unexpected and it really is quite good. It really gives it something different. And the other thing was the cold cream. The very last recipe, you know, now for something completely different in the book, we talk about cold cream. We were transcribing along, and we got to cold cream. And we thought it might be something like a gelatin dessert. And we started looking at the ingredients, we realized it was face cream. I believe that there is also in the university library a book of Emma's sort of household medical things. And no I'm not going to make a book out of that. So it may have ended up in the wrong book. But we thought it would be fun to make it.
• [00:40:00.06] And it really is, in a sense, the fun of historical or cookery sleuthing. Because the first thing it called for was ambergris, which comes from whales. Or spermaceti, excuse me. So I looked that up, and it turned out it's mostly something, a chemical called [? cetyl paraban. ?] And I began to realize that if you look at the jars of commercial products that it's mentioned. Then I found out that you had to buy it in 50 gallon drums. So that wasn't going to work. But I thought well, you know, you can get anything in London. And indeed I started calling compounding chemists, and you can buy a version of it. Pretty much pure [? cetyl paraban ?] that people used for homeopathic remedies and such. And then it also called for a wax, beeswax and rose water, and such. And we made it up. I wouldn't put it on my face, but it's a great hand cream. I mean it's really a great hand cream, because the wax forms a wonderful barrier, and it really is terrific.
• [00:41:12.45] And the other thing, someone mentioned the four countries that make up Great Britain. Well when I was talking to my publisher about this and the process I said, and you know of course it comes from whales so we couldn't get it. And she said I don't understand, isn't Wales part of Great Britain. And I said, w-h-a-l-e. So we had a little misunderstanding. So that, I guess is the most unusual.
• [00:41:47.48] AUDIENCE: What was Charles Darwin's problem with eating or digestion or what?
• [00:41:55.90] WESLIE JANEWAY: All of the above. Quite a number of books and articles have been written about it. And I would not presume to add. All I can say is report what people have said. My suspicion is that it was probably a combination of things. There was definitely a psychological component. I mean you could really see, you know, see it very carefully. And also for example, there's one letter that he wrote where he talks about how he loves to go to parties. But he has wine and such and then he gets ill. You know. There was a psychological component. I think he was someone who had, you know as they say, a delicate stomach.
• [00:42:40.81] That said, I expect that when he was on the Beagle, there were a lot of periods where they were eating food that may well have been spoiled, they well may have been parasites. There were number of times during that voyage, where he left the boat and really camped and lived rough. And it's very, very probable that he got a parasite. And some of these parasites take longer to manifest themselves. Now in addition we know Charles was a very smart guy. And he thought he was like many people smarter than his doctors. And we also know that some of the things that doctors did in those days seem to us appalling. And you sometimes wonder how the patients survived. And I believe at one time he had five doctors, and he wasn't being entirely honest with each of them. So it's probable that they contributed to making it worse. Anyone else? OK.
• [00:43:54.57] AUDIENCE: Weslie I have a question. Can you talk a little bit more about the evolution of the recipes? You mentioned the acquisition of rice. How else did the cookbook change over the 20 year period from start to end?
• [00:44:07.33] WESLIE JANEWAY: I think that was really the ingredients that changed. And, to an extent, you know, which they did something visiting and so forth. I think that really is the main change. You don't see anything that we could detect in, you know, more details. And one question that we're often asked is what kind of a cooker, as they say, did they have. And the answer is it's not known. It probably will become known, because again the records are so details. But we know that in the very early time, it was extremely primitive. Probably by the end they had whatever the current technology was. And that was period where there was tremendous change. And that did able a greater regulation of temperature. But that's an example of something. We so no change on it. You know, we really don't know. My favorite one was put it by the fire to do.
• [00:45:12.06] AUDIENCE: How many meals a day would they eat. And did they high tea as well three meals?
• [00:45:20.79] WESLIE JANEWAY: First of all high tea is a working man's meal. Tea is a meal that's served between four and six. And high tea is a working man's meal, and it's really substantial. And there even call a meat tea or an egg tea, where they'll be whatever little bit of meat the family had. Children also. There was something called nursery tea. And then there was afternoon tea, which is the Masterpiece Theatre kind. Probably they had breakfast. It was probably pretty substantial. Probably with parridge. Maybe some meant, bread and butter, maybe cheese. The big meal was made was midday probably around one or so, one, one thirty. And then the children had nursery tea. There was an evening meal -- again this was very I think very much preferences, and the Darwins were quiet people. But they probably ate something at eight at night. Something light with tea or chocolate. And Emma used to read to the family out loud, because that was what they did. And play for them. So they probably had that meal, and then went into the parlor, into the drawing room, and were together as a family. But the big meal would very definitely have been perhaps one in the afternoon.
• [00:47:00.32] The Darwins were unusual, because everyone, not the servants, but everyone in the household who could sit up a table did. And there are letters from famous people who say, you know, this is so amazing, I was with the Darwins and their grandchildren were at the table. It really wasn't done at that time.
• [00:47:20.30] AUDIENCE: I got a question. You mentioned the French style and Russian style --
• [00:47:23.84] WESLIE JANEWAY: Right.
• [00:47:26.70] AUDIENCE: -- for those of us who just plunk down the silverware and the pizza, what's the difference?
• [00:47:30.13] WESLIE JANEWAY: Russian style is a la russe would be what we think up today as very fancy service. People would be seated, they would be plates, and then waiters would come around and offer you platters, and you'd serve yourself from those platters. Before that, they had these very full tables. And there were all these rules about at the corner of each table was supposed to be a sweet, and that the center was these very elaborate China or silver things called epergenes: e-p-e-r-g-e-n-e. And they could have even, you know, 12 shelves on them. And one might have nuts, and one might have candies, and one might have fruits, and such. And then around it would be all kinds of other dishes -- roasts and so forth, and so on. And often at a party, they would, sort of halfway through, clear all of that except for the epergene and replace them with other foods. And that was a la francaise. And of course it's just not what we think of these days as French or fancy.
• [00:48:45.08] And it did reflect the abundance of a household of a larder. And in a lot of ways it's somewhat similar to family style, you know, where the food is maybe, one person, the mother or father might serve, and then the serving dishes are on the table, and people help themselves to seconds.
• [00:49:06.71] AUDIENCE: The mix between wild game and domestic foods did that change over the period, or was it constant?
• [00:49:20.01] WESLIE JANEWAY: I think that the answer would obviously depend on the family. The Darwins spent a surprising amount of money on butchered meant. We know that. And it was 70% of the money that they spent on purchased food. Now some of that was of course they grew a lot of the other things. They did have chickens. In fact one of the things I really liked was they kept a kind of chicken, they kept what was called a Polish fowl. And we wanted to find a picture of it, and it became known as the chicken with the hairdo. That's what we began to call it. The Darwins also kept ducks. And while there was no duck recipe in Emma's diary. There's mention of various times when they got ducks. Darwin certainly, when he was a young man, shot game, birds in particular. And probably they also got gifts of game. I don't think that they went sport fishing, you know, for amusement. But it certainly was true that during the years of their marriage as the railroad came in, it became much easier to get fish. And there are a number of fish recipes. And fish was clearly pretty precious, because they really talked about using every bit of it.
• [00:50:54.59] AUDIENCE: I was just going to ask about preservation. I assume they had a root cellar and --
• [00:50:58.51] WESLIE JANEWAY: They did.
• [00:50:58.95] AUDIENCE: -- but were they drying food? Were they canning?
• [00:51:01.74] WESLIE JANEWAY: All of the above.
• [00:51:02.63] AUDIENCE: All of the above. Were they giving recipes for chutneys and things like that?
• [00:51:05.79] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well, interestingly, there's a whole section in the book on preserving. But this business about the calf's head involved preserving. There were recipes which we didn't do. There was one that involved preserving eggs, that strucked me, strucked us as poison. So we let that pass. But there's a recipe or a technique mentioned where they greased the egg. They would wash the shell and grease it. And that kept it fresh longer. Cheese making of course. They made almost certainly made simple cheeses, and that was a form of preserving cider. Again I think that was so routine, it wasn't even mentioned. There are recipes for jams and jellies. And the beef recipe, the side of beef was preserving beef, spiced beef.
• [00:51:57.37] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:52:02.38] WESLIE JANEWAY: No. These were a few things. And again if Emma had an experienced cook, which she did that was something the cook knew how to do. It was very much part of the job. I mean just as there's no mention of it, they probably made some of their own soap from reserving fats, and straining it, mixing it with lye.
• [00:52:26.00] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
• [00:52:39.50] WESLIE JANEWAY: Right.
• [00:52:39.86] AUDIENCE: That was what I wanted to comment on is that I can remember my parents doing that. This would be in the early 50s that eggs became extremely expensive after Christmas. And we used to preserve eggs regularly with isinglass. And my mother always spoke about doing them with butter on the outside. But we didn't ever do that, but we certainly used to use the isinglass method.
• [00:53:02.06] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well she does not mention the in isinglass method. Isinglass is only used as a thickener. But the eggs are mentioned at one point in passing. And they said there was this other thing about involved [? alum ?]. And, you know, we decided that was a scary place to go. It's also important to remember, and while it wasn't great for the people experiencing it, it has preserved a lot of the folkways, there was food rationing in Britain until I believe '54. And many households really had no refrigeration until even well beyond that. So people bought food frequently. When there was something available, they preserved it. And many of these ways were preserved further on. Dusha Bateson grew up in the country. Although her father worked in town. But they had access to a lot of country ways. And she remembers, you know, all through the 50s, doing all these things.
• [00:54:12.73] JAN LANGONE: Let's take two more questions. Here's one.
• [00:54:16.47] AUDIENCE: You mentioned chickens. I wonder did they keep cow?
• [00:54:20.99] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well cow is beef. And yes there are beef recipes.
• [00:54:24.05] AUDIENCE: Yes. But did the Darwins own a cow?
• [00:54:26.60] WESLIE JANEWAY: Oh did they own a cow. Yes. And they produced their own dairy.
• [00:54:40.77] AUDIENCE: Just to mention that there are three of us in this room that all grew up with eggs preserved in isinglass. And it was my job as a child in the early '50s to retrieve those eggs from the stone crock, and it's a horrible slimy mixture, and I still have memories of it. And I have the crock. Or I now have actually given it to my daugher. And you cannot get those stains of isinglass off it.
• [00:55:08.17] WESLIE JANEWAY: I'm going to actually send Dusha an email tonight, and tell her this. Because she will be most amused here [UNINTELLIGIBLE] a number of things. You know having lived through the war there and grown up in the country a somewhat more traditional childhood. And I periodically call her and say did you turn sheets to the middle. And she said well no we didn't do, but we did such and such. And I grew up in of course in America and New England but my grandmother made soap with leftover fat, long, long after anyone would use it. When she died, at a certain point she stopped. But I do remember helping her. When she died, in her basement storeroom, in addition to all kinds of crocks of things that we now would find very wonderful and precious. She used to pickle green tomatoes, and so forth. And because no one wanted them, were these bars of the homemade soap. Which was quite disgusting as I remember. Maybe for the floor.
• [00:56:08.67] JAN LANGONE: If there is one more question we're going to take it. If not. Oh yes. Go on.
• [00:56:23.90] AUDIENCE: Did you research shed much light on how the working of the household work. For instance, I'm interested if there were any information implicit on how Darwin was working. How the science was going on.
• [00:56:42.70] WESLIE JANEWAY: That's a very good point. And again because everyone wrote letters in those days, we know a lot. And one of the things that was quite interesting is the house did revolve around Darwin. And the so called butler, Parslow, you know, who helped around the house, one of his jobs was when Darwin was feeling -- in many ways he helped nursed Darwin . But when Darwin was feeling he'd been thinking too much, Parslow would come in and they played billiards. And the billiard room was adjacent to Darwin's study. And Parslow in fact is buried next to Emma in the church yard. He was very, very much a part of the family.
• [00:57:21.93] And the Darwins were unusual, I should say digression, in their regardard that they had for their servants. The servants were very loyal, and they were very enlightened employers. There's a letter that Darwin wrote to Emma, I believe one of them were traveling, where he commented that he hopes the people at Shrewsbury, where they're from, don't get wind of how much their renovation cost. But they decided to spend a fair amount renovating some of the servants houses in the kitchen, and such. They just said it isn't right for us to have everything, and for them to have nothing. Which was very, very innovative.
• [00:57:56.95] But the other thing to your point is many people who visited the house, many scientists, commented on how well it was run, and how much easier it was for Darwin to do science than for other people. And there's one letter which is really poignant from a scientist, and I have to say his name escapes me but he went on to do quite well. But he was middle class. He didn't have a private fortune. And he survived by lecturing, by collecting specimens for people, the occasional appointment. And wrote to someone that he just spent a week or so at the Darwins. And he said, you know, Darwin is just so lucky he has this wonderful house, and this incoming, and this fabulous wife, who makes everything kick. And he can really just get so much done.
• [00:58:46.74] And that really is a contribution that Emma made. And I also should say that she copy edited "The Origin of Species" of how to get out quickly. And she did it. And she and one of their daughters between them spoke quite a few languages, Darwin only spoke English, so they handled all of his foreign correspondence as well.
• [00:59:07.98] JAN LANGONE: All right. Thank you. Let me just say that in the back you can by books if you're interested. And our speaker will sit here, and will happy to autograph the books. And we can't thank you enough. We're so glad you came and we enjoyed it very much. [APPLAUSE]
• [00:59:25.53] WESLIE JANEWAY: Well I really loved being here.
• [00:59:32.06] JAN LANGONE: Do taste the fruits of the labor.