We all have our poor-pitiful-me, I-wanna-feel-better-now foods. Comfort foods. A lot of those involve gravy, or at least a rich steaming sauce of some kind, smothering potatoes or noodles or dumplings or biscuits. This is akin to pulling a blanket over your head, I suppose. As much as I would love to write about all my favorite comfort foods here and now, I don’t have all day. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my favorite comfort book.
I keep it on my nightstand, and if I have a bad day, after I get in bed at night I eschew whatever else I’m engrossed in at the moment and reach for my Comfort Book. Not surprisingly, it actually is about food. Food in England by Dorothy Hartley is one of my favorite books of all time, and I have it here with me now. It was first published in 1954; my copy is from 1975. A hardback, 676 pages, with a rough brown cover, gold-leaf lettering on the spine, and a missing dustjacket, it’s physically a feel-good book as well. (I frequently remove dustjackets off new books anyway. I find them slippery and bothersome. Doesn’t everyone?) My copy was used when I bought it for $2, and with my added abuse, it’s quite worn. It has grease fingerprints on it because, like a companion, it has spent many an afternoon in the kitchen with me.
Enough about the exterior. You can’t judge a book . . .
I was surprised when I saw the publication date, because the contents and Ms. Hartley’s writing style suggest a much earlier time–perhaps turn-of-the-century-ish. And I confess, I’m a sucker for style. If I fall in love with an author or book, 98% of the time it’s due to the writing style. Food in England isn’t a cookbook. It’s history and processes and tools and regions and ovens and cheeses and milkmaids and songs and nursery rhymes, in no particular order, all written with abandon in a deliciously un-British way. I would like to praise the editor, because he or she did a fantastic job of letting Ms. Hartley run amok through England, delighting in whatever year or village she landed in as she wrote. For example, in a section on cheeses, she describes various regional cheeses with lengthy paragraphs about their origin, basic ingredients and unique methods, and how or why it became popular. But stuck there in the middle of this section of full paragraphs is just one line, all by itself, surrounded with blank space:
Dunlop and cheddar cheeses were very rich in butter.
That’s it. She actually does have a full paragraph on cheddar cheese, but none on dunlop. It’s just this kind of thing that I find fascinating. Was this an afterthought? Or did she just not have any information on dunlop cheese?
She’s fond of old English writers, like Piers Plowman and Chaucer, as she frequently quotes them–often causing a reader, I think, to scratch his head for a moment while pondering the connection between the quote and the subject matter.
So what is it that I love about this book, specifically, other than the style of writing? The first thing that comes to mind is that, in spite of a lack of main characters, it takes me away, Calgon-style, in the same manner as a good work of fiction. Sketches of food, utensils, and cooking devices used through the centuries are scattered throughout. Cheese presses; a picture of a cockatrice; the diagram plan of a “high table,” which shows where the salt was placed (where you sat at the table in relation to the salt indicated your position in life). My favorite is a page of bread shapes. Who knew that England offers (-ed?) bread baked in more than 25 shapes, all with names?
Anyone who reads this book will quickly banish the stereotype of English food being bland and boring with limited selections. I could spend the rest of my years experimenting with the historical dishes, preparations, herbs, cheeses, etc. included between the covers of Ms. Hartley’s labor of love and barely make a dent in it. I say “experimenting” because she offers no modern-day recipes. Food in England is truly written the old-fashioned way, with “two thimblefuls” of salt or a “double handful” of peas as examples of how to measure ingredients.
If you call yourself a serious cook, you should not be without this book. It’s Julia Child, Mary Poppins, Jeffrey Steingarten, and David McCullough all in one. Get on Abebooks or Amazon and track down a copy. You can thank me later, after you’ve devoured it some rainy day instead of a batch of warm, comforting chocolate chip cookies.
Excelsior.
