Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
Guests include: Stephen Fry, Miriam Margolyes, Armando Iannucci, Alice Loxton, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Lucinda Hawksley, John Mullan, Pen Vogler, Andrew Davies, Rosie Holt, Bernard Cornwell .... and many more academics, writers, actors, directors and descendants of the great man himself!
Along side these interviews there are special Dickens readings from across his works ...
Thank you for listening 🔥
Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥
A Dickensian Christmas Dinner: with Pen Vogler
Dominic is joined by the wonderful award winning food historian Pen Vogler who returns to the podcast to talk about Dickensian Christmas Dinners ...
Focusing on Dickens' five Christmas books - A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man - Pen explores what the characters eat and why.
From the Cratchit children 'basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion'; Trotty and Meg sharing a dish of a tripe outside on the steps; Edward and May’s wedding; Dr. Jeddler’s breakfast out in the orchard; and the Tetterby family’s knucklebone of pork and pease pudding.
Pen's books - such as Dinner With Dickens and Stuffed are available to buy here: https://thesohoagency.co.uk/authors/pen-vogler
If you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrard
Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard
Thank you for listening!
Hi everyone. I've been in the kitchen again, this time to prepare a large Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, which I've not actually tasted yet, but it looks really good, and I've also baked a tray of mince pies filled with apples and chestnuts. Both these recipes can be found in dinner with Dickens written, or should I say penned Come on, it's Christmas, the season of bad puns. By today's guest, the wonderful, award-winning food historian, penn Vogler, who I'm thrilled to welcome back to the podcast. Today we're on a special mission where we focus on Dickens' five Christmas books, from A Christmas Carol to the Haunted man, to see what the characters are eating and drinking in these stories and perhaps more significantly, why. From the cratchet children basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, trotty and Meg sharing a dish of tripe outside on the steps, edward and May's wedding, dr Jedler's breakfast out in the orchard and the Teterby family's knuckle bone of pork and peas pudding. Penn, happy Christmas and welcome back to Charles Dickens' A Brain on Fire. It's so great to have you here again.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. I feel so Christmasy just being here.
Speaker 1:Me too, me too. So Victorians and Christmas what are the first things that spring to mind for you when you think about that?
Speaker 2:Oh, my goodness, such a massive question, because my mind is full of images, rather like the big picture of the ghost in the Christmas Carol, but for so many people, dickens is the first thing that springs to mind. In a way, isn't it Because we feel that Dickens somehow created this idea of Christmas? And then a lot of that is true, and it's not obviously not just Dickens, it's obviously this Victorian creation of Christmas, the Christmas tree and Christmas cards and all the rest of it. But the thing about Dickens and food at Christmas is that he takes dishes that were generally sort of celebratory or generally kind of Christmasy New Year's Eve, whatever it is, and he really anchors them to Christmas Day in a Christmas Carol, and it's an extraordinary unintended achievement.
Speaker 2:And so for me, what springs to mind when you say you know Victoria and Christmas? It really is that date when Christmas starts to become or Christmas dinner rather, or lunch, whatever you call. It starts to become not the goose, because that's what you have if you're poor, the turkey that's what the reform scrooge brings to the Cratchit family. And the Christmas pudding. Before Christmas Carol, the Christmas pudding is just called plum pudding and that's what Dickens calls it, but afterwards it starts to become Christmas pudding and it gets anchored to that one particular day.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that's so interesting. And you mentioning the goose and the turkey straight away. That's absolutely right, because scrooge and the ghost of Christmas present, they watch the Cratchits have a Christmas dinner, don't they? Of a tiny goose. A tiny goose, A small atom of bone upon a dish.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes exactly.
Speaker 1:And then the turkey is. I mean, it's a little bit unsettling, but it's described as being so large that it could never walk in its life. Yes, so it's obviously been horribly overfed, and is it right that then the turkey then, as you said, replaces?
Speaker 2:Essentially replaces the goose. In many ways it does, and it's not just through Dickens, it's also to do with, you know, agriculture and farming and the way that kind of birds were more intensively farmed or otherwise, because geese don't lend themselves to intensive farming in quite the same way that, to some degree, turkeys and chickens do. I don't mean that the birds you know want to be intensively farmed, because obviously that's ridiculous, but geese had a very, very kind of strong sort of presence in poorer Christmases for centuries. You know, geese were birds of the common, they lived on commons, people could own one or two, they didn't need anywhere to keep them, and then that idea that you have a goose at Christmas stays with you even when people start moving to the cities and you have what's called a goose club and local people would pay into a goose club, probably kept by a publican, and at the end it's like a Christmas club and at the end they get their goose and so they know they're going to get some Christmas meat for themselves and their families.
Speaker 2:But what you can see in a Christmas cowl is that a turkey is becoming the thing to have for Christmas. It's much bigger, it's much easier, it's much more expensive. If you look at Mrs Beaton, who gives you prices for everything that she puts in the turkey ends up being possibly almost twice as much for Eater as a goose is, and it's much more lavish, it's much more middle class and it becomes the sort of starts to become the icon of Christmas for sort of everybody dating from so I'm not saying Dickens, it's just Dickens doing it, but definitely it's dating from that decade.
Speaker 1:Wow, and that's obviously contrasted by earlier. If we look at a Christmas cowl early in a Christmas cowl, Scrooge has a cold in his head and he sits down by the fire before Marley appears stirring some gruel.
Speaker 2:Oh, gruel, yes.
Speaker 1:I mean, what are your personal feelings about gruel? I've not tried it, I don't think. I mean, what actually is it? What is it?
Speaker 2:It's just well. It's a very interesting question because there are so many different recipes for gruel. They're all slightly different. It's possibly one of two things Very, very thin porridge. So if you make porridge with I think I've saw one recipe that said porridge is five ounces of oatmeal and a pint of water. Gruel is two ounces of oatmeal and a pint of water. But it might also be the sort of you might actually also strain it to get the goodness out and that's essentially oat milk. So we still like gruel. Yes, I like oat milk. We just call it oat milk. We want the goodness of oats. We call it a different thing. So gruel can be a few different things. And some early recipes for gruel, before it starts to get this terrible association of the workhouse and kind of the abused, underfed child. Some recipes for gruel were quite nice sounding, you know. They had wine and they had sugar and they had butter and they might have some herbs or some spices in them. But the workhouse is not good for the image of gruel.
Speaker 1:Maybe I don't mind gruel after all.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a Benz video, like Oak.
Speaker 1:Milk or not?
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:I mean I always have. I tend to have porridge for breakfast Most days. Yeah, you're probably it's gruel adjacent.
Speaker 2:you know it's pretty close, isn't it?
Speaker 1:It's pretty close, but it's just understanding what the hell Scrooge is doing, because he's had his melancholy dinner already in a melancholy tavern and he goes home to bed and as he's getting ready for bed he's stirring some gruel and he has a cold. So is there any sense that? That's kind of like having a hot milky drink before bed.
Speaker 2:Yes, definitely for kind of. If you look at Mr Woodhouse in Emma, for example, in Emma by Jane Austen, mr Woodhouse is a real valetudinarian. He's always got something wrong with him. You know he can't eat this and he can't eat that and it's a little bit too cold and you know, sit next closer to the fire and blah, blah, blah and his favorite dish to be settled is a basin of gruel, and so you can see that feet going right up to Scrooge as well. Obviously, who probably shares some of those kind of much earlier kind of Georgian ideas of, you know, a kind of nice, plain, unswetting, non-stimulating dish.
Speaker 1:Ghaul is all those things. Gosh, and you saying this for the first time makes me connect with Marley. When he sees Marley for the first time, as you may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. So there's a sense perhaps that the food he's been having isn't agree with him, his general distemper body and spirit.
Speaker 2:Exactly this idea. You shouldn't eat cheese at night because it gives you nightmares. So it's this idea that everything that's happening to him spiritually he's trying to locate in the physical body. He's trying to kind of rationalize it all.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. And at one point he says if I swallow this toothpick, are you saying I'm going to be haunted by goblins for eternity? Yes, if he chokes on a toothpick, yeah, that's so clever. Just to be able to extract these details is so fun, it's so fascinating. And of course, and at the end of the story, when Scrooge is feeling charitable and loving Christmas and he says to Bob Cratchit about making some smoking, bishop, which I'm holding in my hand here because I followed your recipe from Dinner with Dickens and made some which I've never had before.
Speaker 2:Pretty nice, I'll take a sip and then ask you to explain what the hell I just drank. Take a sip, tell me if you like it, and then I'll tell you what to do.
Speaker 1:Oh, you know what I do, like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really good, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is actually really. Yeah, it doesn't sound great.
Speaker 2:No, it's essentially. People get confused with stinking bishop the cheese.
Speaker 2:But it is smoking bishop and it's essentially it's mold port, so it's all the things that we love about mold wine or glue wine or whatever you want to call it, but it's with port and so you get that kind of extra layer of kind of richness and body. You know that you get with port rather than wine. It's already quite sort of lush really and it's sort of simmered very gently with the same things you know, with orange lemon, spices, cinnamon, sugar, all the rest of it, and I make it actually, and I sort of water it down a bit with blackcurrant juice, because it's quite strong hot blackcurrant, and sometimes I make it into jellies for Christmas. Oh, really.
Speaker 2:So it's like the taste of Christmas there in a jelly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you just put. You know, just set it with a little bit of gelatin. It's really beautiful.
Speaker 1:Oh great, and following your recipe, I took a decision to not do, I think, the two tablespoons of sugar. I went for just one and I quite like that it's not too, and I put lemon juice. So you had a choice of lemon juice or orange juice, and I went for the lemon juice.
Speaker 2:Yes, port and lemon. An old, very old Victorian kind of cocktail, really, isn't it?
Speaker 1:So yeah, I'm going to say that's gone straight to my head and the future, for Bob is looking really bright, I probably shouldn't have drunk it, so early in the episode. Yes, wonderful.
Speaker 2:So the fascinating thing about smoking bishop is that it's a status drink. So Scrooge, who's been trying to keep Bob poor and kind of under his heel when he's reformed, he invites him to come around for smoking bishop. And it's port, not just wine or ale, or you know, your working class man would have ale or possibly cider, but he's giving him something that a gentleman would give to another gentleman and that's quite a statement about his new image of his relationship with Bob Cratchit.
Speaker 1:And his intention. That's amazing. And his intention, yeah, yeah, gosh. So that was in 1843, the year Christmas began.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is.
Speaker 1:And then in 1844, the following year, we have the chimes and one of the first moments when we're introduced to that central character of Trotty is the clock strikes midday and Trotty says dinner time. So straight away that throws up something interesting about what we think dinner is. What's happened to dinner over the years?
Speaker 2:It's really interesting that Trotty says dinner time because probably 10 or 20 or 30 years later he wouldn't. He would probably. If he's in London he would probably say lunchtime, but he's there at that kind of moment when dinner is still the thing that most people eat in the middle of the day. And this if you go back to Peeps Peeps has dinner at 12 o'clock. If you go back earlier, if you go back to Henry the God one of those Shakespeare plays can't remember- which it could be four, fifth, sixth or eighth, couldn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, somebody has dinner at around 10 o'clock in the morning. You know, you get up early, you have your breakfast, you have your dinner and then you have supper. And then what happens over those centuries you know the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries that dinner gets later and later and later. And the Victorians, who were obsessive about kind of status and kind of society and having an elite, the elite wanted to show that they were different from the rest of society by having dinner later, and so it gets driven into the kind of evening by the end of the Victorian period, people having dinner at about eight o'clock. And then of course people get hungry and so this thing called lunch gets invented, more or less.
Speaker 2:Samuel Johnson mentions it but doesn't really know where the word comes from. He puts in this dictionary. Jane Austen mentions it kind of once in her whole output, but by the chimes lunch is starting to become a thing that sort of the middle classes and the kind of elite have. And then of course, if lunch is sort of middle of the day and then dinner is eight o'clock, you have to have this other thing called afternoon tea or tea or something you know, to kind of plug all those gaps. I shouldn't think they can sit down and says to himself shall I call this lunch or dinner or something you know? I'm sure it's completely unconscious. He's just putting his characters in that social situation at a time and the words they use totally reflect everybody's assumptions about what you're going to eat, when you're going to eat it and what you're going to call it.
Speaker 1:Just picking up on what you're saying, because his daughter, meg, refers to it as dinner as well. But I wonder whether it's a class thing as well, because they're both very, very poor and sometimes they get one meal a day and maybe if you're of that working class background or below the poverty line, you're one meal you would just call dinner.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly right. And we still have this thing in Britain where there's not just a class thing but there's a regional thing. I grew up in Yorkshire and we had school dinners. That's just what you had and that's what we called it.
Speaker 2:If you're from Scotland, if you're from Wales, I think probably and I think some places in the Midlands still just say dinner in the middle of the day, and that probably does go back to the kind of class thing, the way you'd have your main meal in the middle of the day because you've been up early working and you weren't expecting a kind of big, fancy meal in the evening. What you'd have in the evening would be your tea, and that would be called tea because literally it would be bread, cheese, maybe bacon or something and a nice hot cup of tea, and the tea turns this kind of cold meal into a hot one, kind of conceptually, you know, or kind of in your experience of it. So yes, those words are very class related, they're very regional and they're very tight, you know, and they change through time as well. It's quite difficult to explain to non-Britz what is dinner, what is lunch and what is tea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then moments later and it's a real treat, it's a real occasion his daughter Meg arrives and she has a basket and in the basket is tripe and hot potato.
Speaker 2:Yes, and he guesses. She makes him guess, doesn't she, what it is because it smells so delicious he can't believe how it is luck.
Speaker 1:And it's utterly stomach-churning, possibly to most of us. But what is? I know what a hot potato is, but what is tripe Tripe?
Speaker 2:is the lining of the stomach of a cow, okay, and people used to love it and actually it didn't have necessarily the same kind of low status connotations that we think of it today. You know, again, it's a slightly regional thing. It was a big Lancashire dish. People kind of laugh at tripe and say, oh, you know all tripe and onions, that's what you eat on Yorkshire, or actually Lancashire, not Yorkshire. I came across this very fascinating detail about fish and chip shops when some fish and chip shops were advised to sell tripe because ladies sort of lower, you know, lower middle-class ladies would be embarrassed to go to the fish and chip shop because that was kind of low status, but they wouldn't be embarrassed to be going to the tripe shop because that has higher status. Wow, it's just mind-blowing, isn't it, how things kind of change. You know fish and chips have gone up and tripe right down over those kind of 200 years in terms of our kind of ideas of status and food.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting. That is really interesting and of course so tripe has that status. But tripe funnily in the story becomes one of the potential causes of trotties. Then visitation by the goblins because when he comes to at the end of the story his daughter says Megan, whatever you do, father, don't eat tripe again.
Speaker 2:That's probably good advice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the idea is essentially it's kind of half jokingly, but the idea is he's had this whole series of kind of life-threatening, terrifying dreams and illusions from eating tripe. I thought hot potatoes interesting, the resonance of the word potato in the year 1845 when we're moving into. You know that's so interesting as well. I mean, how aware would Dickens have been by that point? Would you maybe not Dickens specifically, but Victorian society, london Victorian society aware of the situation in Ireland?
Speaker 2:Everybody knew about it and it appears to me that nobody stopped eating potatoes. Nobody says actually, maybe we shouldn't be importing food from Ireland, maybe we should be sending food to Ireland, or I mean that's not quite true, but nobody thinks that you should stop eating potatoes. Queen Victoria said that to help the poor, starving people of Ireland that we should have a days fast. I think she said, and Dickens thought that was complete rot. He said that's complete nonsense. You know, people need don't just need a fast, they need some rather more pragmatic and material help. And there were people who helped pragmatically, materially. There was a really wonderful French chef who was the fresh chef for the reform club in London. He took himself to. He's called Alexis Soyer. He took himself to Ireland. He opened a kind of famine kitchen and tried to in Dublin, tried to demonstrate how to feed a huge amount of people with kind of cheap soups and cheap sort of rice and lentils and that kind of thing. But it was an extraordinary time because the forties were known as the hungry forties anyway.
Speaker 2:You know, it wasn't just. Obviously the Irish famine was terrible, of a magnitude hugely greater than anything that we saw in other industrial cities in Britain. But the government would have had a sense it's difficult when you have people who are hungry in Manchester or Liverpool or whatever. There's a sense that for the government it's hard to send food to Ireland. And the government kept on saying, right, it's an Irish problem, you've got to sort it out yourself. And there was also this very nasty sort of subcurrent in government that it's sort of well, this is God's way of solving a problem. There's too many people in Ireland, there's overpopulated. God is just getting rid of the kind of weak ones. And with that idea at the heart of some kind of fairly kind of event, not everybody in government, some sort of evangelical Christian people in government it was. You know. It's just not a very it's not a very kind of sound basis on which to base a policy to try and save people. Really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:We talk a lot about how and Dickens talks a lot about how food brings people together and that's a lot often the purpose of food in Dickens and in our lives. And famine for Dickens was a very isolating, very individual experience. You know, not famine but hunger. For him as a child, it made him feel very, it made him feel like he was not part of a family, he was not being looked after, he was not loved.
Speaker 2:But there is also this sense of not starving but of fasting, where Actually it can unite people. So this idea of lent or you give something up, and it says something about what you as a community are prepared to give up to represent, whatever you believe in. I think there is something to fasting that we have lost. We've kept all the hot cuspuns and the turkey and the great food, but in Britain particularly and not every community, because I think a lot often you get Jewish and Hindu and Sikh and other kind of religious communities still have fasting as part of their daily lives and we do seem to have lost some of that. So I think there's something to be said for fasting but, like you say, it also needs systemic change.
Speaker 1:Yes, so further on into the story, trotty meets a man, wilfern, and a little girl and they've got nowhere to stay and he brings them in and he spends his last. Oh, I can't remember the exact amount he spends. He spends his last money to get some bacon. He brings them to his house, gets some bacon for them, he cooks, he sizzles the bacon and he makes lots of cups of tea. On the opposite side you have the MP, sir Jacob Riesemont sorry, sir Joseph Bowie who the Snobby MP toasting the poor every New Year's Eve?
Speaker 1:I am the poor man's friend every year. Yeah, he's awful who believes he's very virtuous and is a friend of the poor. I am the poor man's friend because he toasts them every New Year's Eve. That's it. That's all you need to do. There's the gesturing again isn't there. You can hug yourself with really cozy kind of notions, but then without actually going out and doing anything to beyond that. So that's the challenge. If we move on to the quick and on the half, it's absolutely dominated by this bloody kettle that won't go for ages and ages taking to the cess with the racing kettle and it eventually boils itself over. And I think the characters drink a lot of tea. So the idea of tea drinking, for some reason I always my mind I associated it as more recent than Dickens, I don't know why, more kind of Edwardian, you know Jeeves, that kind of period, but obviously tea drinking goes way back.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's tea throughout Dickens. I had a theory. Let's not call it a theory, let's call it an observation. The bad characters in Dickens drink coffee. You know, I think Uri Heap drinks coffee and Quilp drinks scalding hot coffee, I think, and the good characters drink tea.
Speaker 2:Anyway, small observation, there are probably lots and lots of counter examples. So there's tea throughout Dickens and his characters love a good cup of tea and I think, again, it situates it very much in that sort of lower middle class place where inviting somebody over for tea which might be a bacon sandwich, it might be a tea and a piece of cake, it often has ham, bread and butter, some eggs or something that's a very safe, very nice way of entertaining people. And that happens quite a lot through Dickens, because those kind of middle class characters they on the whole can't put on big posh dinners because they don't have the resources to do it, but to entertain each other, tea is often the way they do it. And also, tea is safe. You know there's no alcohol. It means that you know, men and women can all kind of sit around and children can all drink, sit around and drink together and there isn't a kind of a division between sort of who's drinking and who's eating what?
Speaker 1:And that's interesting. And then further into the story we have, we've got a leg of mutton which I think you said in the previous episode is a favorite of Dickens.
Speaker 2:They don't mention oysters stuff. Oh well, Anyway, they're missing out.
Speaker 1:Mutton is quite I can't think of when I've ever had mutton, actually, which seems a bit odd, doesn't it? You probably?
Speaker 2:haven't. So mutton was the meat of the 18th and 19th century. So, going back to Jane Austen, she one of her characters in Emma says to another you must come round and eat your mutton with us, and it basically just means you're coming for dinner. Of course you're going to have mutton, because that's what everybody has, and mutton is technically a sheep that's older than two years of age, and around two years of age it's called a hogget and around one year of age it's called a lamb. And these days we really just have lamb, mostly because sheep farming has changed. Sheep get bigger and fatter much earlier and so by the time they're, whatever age it is, one year or 18 months they're fat enough to be killed for meat and so you can get mutton, but it tends to be in.
Speaker 2:It tends to not be called mutton. So sometimes you get it in Indian restaurants and they call it lamb roganjosh or something that might be mutton. I last had it, I think, in a Hungarian restaurant mutton and something or other, but it was very much the meat of the time and everybody ate it. It was more or less available. I mean, bacon and pig meats were the friend of the really cheap meats that were much more available to everybody. But the things that you might see, the expression butchers meat in novels, victorian novels, and that's what they mean. They mean red meat that comes from a butcher and that meat mutton occasionally beef and a veal and ham pie.
Speaker 1:Is that a familiar Victorian staple?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's also a familiar Victorian staple, because veal is the meat of a calf, not something we're very keen on now, fortunately, I would say. It could be quite dry, not much fat to it, and so you'd pack it in a pie with ham which has got a lot of fat in it, and so the ham would sort of the fat of the ham and the salt of the ham would kind of give it the taste. But a veal and ham pie is a very classic kind of Georgian and Victorian and even Edwardian thing. Have you had it yourself? I've made veal and ham pie. Yes, yes, yes, you get it up north, you get it in the miners' garlands and there's a thing called a gala pie which can also be a veal and ham pie and it might have a boiled egg like running through it.
Speaker 1:That sounds really nice. I'm a big fan of pies, yeah, no, good, good, good. And then rolling on to the Battle of Life. It opens with two sisters dancing in an orchard and there's a lot of talk about that, and they're picking apples and everything. And it made me think and I'm sure I read this somewhere that the species of apples have really declined in number since that time. So we don't have as many types of apple in the UK that we would have done maybe 150 odd years ago.
Speaker 2:I think that's true and I think apples were much more regional in those days, because there are some apples that will grow in different conditions. They were much more local and apples have been bred extraordinarily successfully to be quite homogenous. You know they might be called Pink Lady or Jazz or something and you probably can't tell the difference between them because they're crisp and they're white flesh and they're sweet and they're juicy and you know they're delicious. But we've lost some of the and those varieties. Most of them haven't disappeared. They are kind of kept in sort of horticultural sort of museums.
Speaker 2:Well, they're not museums, but you know kind of the seeds and the plants are kept, but we don't tend to see them in supermarkets anymore.
Speaker 1:And then they all sit down to have breakfast outside it sounds lovely until they decide to have a carved round of beef and ham for breakfast. Totally normal, totally normal.
Speaker 2:What year are we looking?
Speaker 1:at this is 1846.
Speaker 2:Mm, yeah, I'd say that's probably still quite normal. I mean, breakfast wasn't the kind of the country house breakfast that we think of now until probably much, much later. Late Victorian, early Edwardian. This idea that you'd have, you know, eggs and bacon and you know and a round of ham and kippers and porridge and cream and 10 different types of breads and all that sort of thing. That was much later, that was kind of invented much later. But this idea that you'd have breakfast tended to be just what you had around, you know, and if you had a round of beef and a round of ham, that's what you'd have Cold meats then essentially that you would Cold meats is very, yeah, very normal.
Speaker 2:But you might have radishes. You know Peeps has radishes for breakfast on. You know he records one of his diaries and Henry VIII. There's a kind of little kind of household book that in kept by Henry VIII's household and it records Catherine Parr's Waiting Ladies being given a China beef and beer for breakfast. That was their kind of Russians, you know. So beef and beer breakfast, totally normal.
Speaker 1:And in continental Europe, actually, you have meats served out, don't you? For breakfast you have hams and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you're in the breakfast bar, isn't it yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay. And then moving into the final, that final story, that very, very bleak, dark haunted man story. What's actually being served is fowl and mashed potato with a butt of Boat of gravy A butt of side dish of gravy. In terms of status and in terms of quality, what would this be like? Do you think it's really?
Speaker 2:interesting. It comes up so often in Dickens. A roast fowl is his sort of image of little posh comfort food In a funny sort of way. So many of his you know, so many of his characters make it. You have lovely Bella Wilfer and she's trying to roast a fowl for Chorabic Pa and she twirls it so quickly it's raw in the middle. And she says to him, is it the breed Pa? And he says no, I think we need to kind of cook it because it's kind of pink in the middle. But yes, and of course, and the great expectations, pipps sisters' Christmas dinner, they have a nice pair of roast fowls. We would just call it roast chicken, but so for some reason that phrase has changed since Dickens times.
Speaker 1:Dickens always calls it roast fowl and the mashed potato. Anything specific from that time In 1848, would you do mashed potato any differently to now?
Speaker 2:Well, it's so interesting In Dickens' wife's recipe book or menu book, what should we have for dinner? So many of her menus include what she calls mashed and browned potatoes and I was really fascinated by this. I wondered what it meant. And essentially what it is is. You mash your potato and then you sort of round, you cover it with you could cover it with egg or butter or a bit of both and then you brown it in front of a hot fire and my goodness, the result is extraordinary. It's like sort of a roast potato on steroids. It's so hot and crispy on the outside and fluffy in the middle and totally delicious. And we seem to have lost the kind of roasted, mashed and browned potatoes and it sounds so grim, mashed and browned potatoes. It sounds really kind of sort of workhouse food and actually it turns out to be incredibly delicious.
Speaker 1:Gosh, that's so interesting because I love mashed potato, but I feel like we've been getting it wrong my whole life, missing out on the 1840s way of preparing it.
Speaker 2:So what I do when I make it is I kind of get an ice cream, I make my mashed potato, I get an ice cream scoop and I get kind of little rounds of mashed potato and then you paint them with roast sorry, with egg or butter, put them in a hot oven and you get this lovely kind of brown outside and a hot, fluffy middle. It's great.
Speaker 1:I mean, the bleakness of the scene in this book made me assume that this wasn't a very enjoyable meal to eat, but it turns out that that's actually probably the opposite, that actually the foul and mashed potato served there is actually really quite delicious.
Speaker 2:I'd have it. Yeah, I think.
Speaker 1:I might have it.
Speaker 2:I'd be pretty happy to tuck into it now.
Speaker 1:So, moving on through the story, another point then is when we get to the tetebi family and the tetebis are kind of like the cratchets, and certainly in terms of poverty, and there's a fascinating thing where they've brought a knuckle bone of pork Was that a standard phrase to describe a meal that you would have got?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's not an entire meal, because the knuckle bone I mean this is. They talk about it. Dickens kind of describes the knuckle bone in the book, doesn't he? As not having that much meat left upon it.
Speaker 2:And it's quite a big, bony, slightly fatty joint. But bones, you know, the bone in a joint is really essential to give the rest of the joint all its flavor. So there will be some kind of nice delicious bits in there. And often you'd cook knuckle bones with something like peas to make peas pudding, and I think that's another dish that he has, doesn't it? The tetebis. They have kind of knuckle bone of pork with not that much meat on it and peas pudding which should have been cooked with the pork, although there seems to be a question mark over this one about whether it has or not.
Speaker 1:Yes, and there's no stint of seasoning, which I find interesting because you know if you're trying meat alternatives. For example, I had some faken yesterday which I liked very much because the flavor is so good and you think, oh well, I've got it, oh interesting. Yeah, but actually you can get round. So when he says here Dickens says about, but there was no stint of seasoning. So however spare it was in terms of meat, the taste and the flavor was still there.
Speaker 2:Well, that's probably because it might be fresh pork, but it also might be pickled or salted pork. So again, if you go back to the great expectations at Christmas feast, he has a leg of pickled pork. And pickled it sounds as though you mean vinegar, but actually in that respect it means salted, and you could pickle pork, you could salt pork either with sort of dry salt or with a kind of a wet salt, a wet brine, and you put all your flavors into it and that's probably what the gargies had, but it does mean it's quite salty. And so one of the things, one of the reasons that you have peas pudding with pork all the time, is that both can take quite a lot of boiling and the peas, the dried peas, absorb all the flavor and the salt from the pork. And so if you have too much salt in the pork, the peas help to sort of absorb it and you get the flavor of the pork and the salt into the peas pudding.
Speaker 2:And that's why you have peen ham soup, that's why they were cooked together for so many centuries, because it's just a try and kind of you know when, when meat has been salted and it take and it you might be keeping it for weeks or months that's how you cook it to kind of get rid of some of that saltiness Wow, and there's one other clue, penn, which is that one of the children, one of the teteby children they receive it's Johnny, I think he receives his rations on bread, which gives us a clue as to if we're any doubt about how meager that portion of all of this is I guess he's probably getting the peas pudding on, you know, just spread on bed bread, a bit like Hummus, I suppose, chickpeas and hummus.
Speaker 2:Do you know what I mean? It's not that far apart we. So it's probably quite nutritious, but Not that much for a growing boy.
Speaker 1:No, I had last of all to show you Penn. I attempted the mince pie recipe that is in with your dinner with Dickens book. So if I just show you the mince pie, yes, my attempt.
Speaker 2:Oh, very good, it's got a little star on the top.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm a bit worried. I wonder whether I made the pastry bit too thick. So if I take a taste, I'll um, maybe you could talk us through this little recipe, is it? Yes, if you have issues. You're delicious mince pie.
Speaker 2:Yes, so mince pies were. They were called Christmas pies quite often. They have a very, very long history. In Britain there's a very famous kind of story with the kernel of truth to it that the, the puritans try to ban them and the pure sense definitely disapproved of them. The pure sense definitely thought that the mince pie was a waste of poor people's money and you know they should be spending their money not on these kind of delights for the belly but on sort of useful things and they wanted people to stop eating them. They didn't technically ban them but, um, they've always been associated with Christmas and it's and it's Early mince pies and they caught mince pies because they've had mince meat in and we don't have that any longer.
Speaker 2:That comes from a very early kind of medieval sense of how you prepare meat, because in medieval times Grand food was always made with spices, so you wouldn't have had anything that didn't have some kind of cinnamon or nutmeg or you know other kind of different kinds of spices and sugar Asset used in various tiny amounts of the spice and meat, and so those tastes Stay in some of our food. You know things like bread sauce, you know that's made with clothes and and all the rest of it. You know they they come from that period and so the mince pie Is this kind of spiced meat and the meat kind of goes, but we still sort of have it in soot. You know, you need some kind of fat to make it luscious, whether it's soot or Vegetarian soot.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've got vegetarian, so it's in this one, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it is actually probably nicer. But I totally get that.
Speaker 1:Not everybody wants to eat it, I really really like this, though it's so, it's so it. There's a likeness to it as well. It's got chestnut and apple. It's got chestnuts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that I think that recipe came from Scotland. Actually, I think I found that in the National Library of Scotland's archives, because you know there are loads of recipes for mince meat. You know Eliza Acton has them. They go back, they go way back and I was trying to find something. It was ever so slightly different, because you can get a recipe for Victorian mincemeat anywhere and I really like the chestnuts. I think it does make it a little bit lighter, yes, great.
Speaker 1:And actually the pastry wasn't too thick. I managed to. I got that right with the lid, because sometimes you don't have the lids on, do you just?
Speaker 2:have a little decoration. Paul Hollywood would be proud of you.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's been so great to have you back again, Penn. Thank you so much for this.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you so much. Anyway, I feel very hungry. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1:Yes, we're not in the same room, so I'm eating all the food and drinking all the smoking. Bishop, what are you going to have this Christmas to eat? Have you got in in mind what you think you'd like to?
Speaker 2:Oh goodness, I do like. I do like doing something slightly different. You know not, it definitely won't be a turkey, but it'll be a very small maybe some duck or something small amount of meat. That's a kind of special treat because, like, we're trying to eat a lot less meat. But yeah, all the stuff, I just love all the stuff. I love the Brussels sprouts, I love the, the bread sauce. You know, I love the kind of little bacon rolls and everything and the stuffing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the stuffing's great, isn't it? Yeah, the stuffing.
Speaker 2:all that love the Christmas pudding yes. Oh, definitely yes, so all of it, basically that's what I'm having.
Speaker 1:Wonderful Good, oh well, thank you so much, and people listening. If you want to buy dinner with Dickens, it's, it's in the link wherever you're listening, and, of course, stuffed which came out in November which I thoroughly recommend. It takes you all the way through food history in the United Kingdom. Thank you so much, penn, and and a very Merry Christmas to you. Thank you, dominic. Thank you and happy Christmas to you.
