What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ John Wordsworth, was about to start his first job in the church: he was going to be the curate in a poor Leicestershire village called Whitwick. William couldn’t hear the name without a groan—“There are not many places with fewer attractions or recommendations than Whitwick”—but Dorothy was elated. She would spend the winter there, a “fireside companion” to brighten his home and make the evenings less lonely. It would be Dove Cottage all over again. She wouldn’t have William across from her at the table, but she would have his eldest son, a perfectly good surrogate. John even had trouble with his eyes, as William did, and couldn’t read very long by candlelight. He needed help, he needed conversation, he needed support in his new endeavor. Dorothy would be indispensable.

      According to an early nineteenth-century description of Whitwick, the village was set “in a sharp and cold situation” and had no pleasant features worth noting apart from nearby Charnwood Forest and a trout stream. The main source of employment among the villagers was framework knitting, an industry that produced stockings and was so notorious for low wages that the expression “poor as a stockinger” had been a familiar one for decades. The work was done on huge knitting machines, which families kept in their cottages, running them all day and, if they could afford the candles, into the night. John’s parish also included the neighboring village of Swanington, which had been given over to coal mining for the last two hundred years. Poverty and a grim physical landscape were the most prominent features of Dorothy’s new surroundings.

      A handful of Dorothy’s letters survive from the winter of 1828–1829; but more important, she was also keeping a diary. She had started it four years earlier, an irregular record of her walks, travels, visitors, and household activities, quite different from the expansive, emotional conversation with herself she had carried on in the pages of the Grasmere Journal. This time it was as if she simply wanted to gather up whatever scraps of the day had fallen like dry leaves across her memory. So she remarked on an encounter with a villager, an arresting view, a round of laundry, a visit to a neighbor. Her style was nondescript, the content was irrelevant to William’s poetry, and to a modern eye her speedy scrawls are barely legible. Hence these later journals have attracted far less attention than her other writing and have never been transcribed or published in full. But thanks to a few scholars, in particular Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who scrutinized these jottings in the course of preparing their biography of Dorothy, we can start to guess what it was like for Dorothy to live in Whitwick. The version in her diary didn’t always match what she was telling friends in her letters.

      Take the weather. “Five weeks have I been here, and not a single rainy day,” she announced to her close friend Jane Marshall right after Christmas. Yet the diary for her second week at Whitwick tells a different story: “A gloomy morning. Slight rain …” “Blustering dark morning—Light Rain …” “Dreary and damp …” “Very slight rain before church—gloomy only …” Or take the habit of vigorous walking that was still important to her. In Whitwick she headed out onto a bare, pitted terrain or followed a road busy with cartloads of coal. “It may be called a good country for walkers,” she told Jane brightly. In the letters she says little about her day-to-day activities; her diary, by contrast, tells us that much of her time went to housework. Cleaning went on constantly, for instance, because of the soot and coal dust in the area. Laundry, too, was more onerous. In the evenings she helped John with his sermons—apparently they were not very stirring—and rarely entertained visitors. But her letters say nothing of drudgery or tedium. Over and over she indicated that she had found the best possible place to be, and that was at John’s side. “I am more useful than I could be anywhere else.”

      The blissful certainty that John needed her was the sun that greeted her each morning in Whitwick, no matter the weather. Dorothy’s rose-colored letters from Whitwick were not efforts to hide or disguise reality; on the contrary, they offered a picture closer to her emotional experience than the plain facts in the diary. Jotting down what she did each day reminded her of how she really lived. Then she closed the notebook and surrendered for a while to her heart, which was trying to reassemble Dove Cottage from the unpromising materials around her. But unlike the Grasmere Journal, her Whitwick diary says almost nothing about food, and the absence is noteworthy. No sacred moments over a basin of broth, no tears over a bitten apple. Only on a couple of occasions did something about a meal prompt Dorothy to jot down what they had eaten—and to do so in the diary, her outlet for truth telling.

      John’s cook was a woman named Mary Dawson, who had worked for the Wordsworths back at Rydal Mount. Dorothy called her “an honest good creature, much attached to her Family,” but missing from this testimonial was any praise for Mary Dawson’s skill in the kitchen. In fact, she had worked chiefly as a maid until the Wordsworths, eager to replace a terrible Rydal Mount cook, moved Mary Dawson into the position. The family needed a talented cook just then, because Mary Wordsworth was recovering from an illness and could not be persuaded to eat. In order to tempt the invalid, Dorothy had asked Mary Dawson to prepare “all sorts of nice things”—a challenge evidently beyond her, because she, too, was soon replaced. But for John’s purposes, Mary Dawson appeared to be the perfect choice. He was living on a very small salary, and there would be no call for “nice things.” The virtue of Whitwick cuisine would be its economy. As Dorothy put it, “She will be a right frugal housekeeper.”

      And so she was, which explains one of the most startling notes on food in any of Dorothy’s journals. She jotted it down on a frosty January day in Whitwick: “Dined on black puddings.”

      That’s all she wrote, and it’s possible, of course, that I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps black pudding was a perfectly ordinary dinner for the Wordsworths, one that William, Mary, Dorothy, and the children had eaten happily for years; and on this particular January day Mary Dawson simply continued the tradition. But I don’t think so. Nothing about the nature of black pudding—and nothing about the Wordsworths—suggests that this was the case. I believe Dorothy found it extraordinary to dine on black pudding and that the few words she said about it said everything.

      Dorothy made only two remarks about food in the Whitwick diary: this note about black pudding and an earlier note in which she mentioned Christmas dinner. Her birthday was December 25, so Christmas dinner was always doubly festive, and the family typically put her favorite dishes on the menu. This year the celebratory meal was simple but just right, and she scribbled it down: “Rabbit pie & plumb pudding.” She and William had dined constantly on savory meat pies when they were living together, and plum pudding was a holiday icon she had long relished. The Christmas menu, in other words, was a taste of her beloved past. Black pudding was the opposite: it was a taste of Whitwick.

      Pretty much everything about black pudding signals that this menu originated not with Dorothy but with Mary Dawson—“our homely Westmoreland housemaid,” as Dorothy called her. It’s true that the Wordsworths ate plenty of pork in all forms, and for a time they even owned pigs. Yet black pudding never appeared anywhere else in Dorothy’s journals; it never showed up in her letters, and there’s no mention of it in the family’s recipe collections. A look at how the dish was made, and the class connotations that were packed into the casings along with the blood and oatmeal, may help to explain why.

      Here’s a typical recipe, from Hannah Glasse’s authoritative kitchen bible, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747. Before killing your hog, she instructs, СКАЧАТЬ