Food History with food historian Annie Gray

From conger soup to pigeon pie, and everything in between.  Mel and Perry are joined by food historian, Dr Annie Gray.  Taking a tour through food from preparation to digestion, the pod takes you back through the history of food, how recipes have developed throughout the years with the introduction of new ingredients and how we eat food now.  This is a mouth watering episode of The Small Island, Big Story Sessions. 

Annie works across TV and radio, and has been the resident food historian on BBC Radio 4’s award-winning culinary panel show, The Kitchen Cabinet since its inception in 2012.

If this pod inspires you to find out more about Jersey's food history, come to Jersey Museum and visit our Bouan Appétit! exhibition. 

You can support our charity by becoming a Jersey Heritage Member. 

Transcript

Perry (00:00:02):

Welcome to the Jersey Heritage Podcast,

Mel (00:00:05):

The Small Island Big Story sessions.

Perry (00:00:08):

You are listening to Mel and Perry. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about food history with food historian, author, and broadcaster Annie Gray.

Mel (00:00:18):

Annie is known for her regular appearances on the BBC radio fours, the kitchen cabinets, and the great British bakeoff. Make sure you stick around for this mouth-watering episode. So I thought it would just be really nice to start with a little bit of an introduction as to who you are and what you do and how you've come to be Annie Gray, the food historian.

Annie  (00:00:38):

Wow. I think where I stand now, it's quite a sort of fortuitous set of things coming together. So I moved to France when I was 16 and that's where I had a sort of food epiphany. My father worked for Nestle and they closed the factory he was working in. So he got shifted over to France to a town called Bovet, which is not a particularly nice town in northern France. And I went with him and I lived with a French family just outside Paris. And that's where I sort of discovered eating, I suppose up to that point I'd lived on microwave meals. My parents were going through quite a messy divorce and I got to France and suddenly I had this sort of omelet that was, I mean, my god, you know, my parents' omelets were like this sort of rubber disc you could bounce off the wall <laugh>.

Annie  (00:01:18):

And this was eggy and creamy and I mean it had, I do not know how much butter in and I just, I fell in love with food. So then when I came back to university, I was already in the kind of food zone. I did modern history as an undergraduate and didn't particularly enjoy it because it was very political. It was very much about great white men striding the earth. And I was quite turned off by it. So after a few years in the wilderness, which I don't talk about because I basically got sacked from every job I had, I came back to university and did a master's in historical archeology, which is very much about the modern world. It's sort of post 1600. It's tangible things. It's country houses, but it's also slums. It's groups that aren't that much studied within a lot of mainstream history.

Annie  (00:01:57):

That's changed now. This was 20 years ago. And I loved it. I loved the tangibility of it and I knew I wanted to work with the public. I knew I wanted to work in public history as it were. So as part of that, we studied food, we studied chocolate, and I suddenly thought, gosh, I can bring my two loves together, <laugh>, my absolute adoration of cooking and eating and history, but also in a way that's very accessible because everybody eats. So the one thing I knew I could do is I could take food history and I could take it out and I could engage people. So even if you think your you year history is really boring, I didn't like it at school. It's all about, you know, just politics and stuff and facts and figures. And you go, yeah, but what about this biscuit? Yeah. Or you, you are in costume and you put a dead hair on the table, skinned ears, perky, roasted, you know, legs on it looks really gory. And people come in and they go, oh my God, what is that? But that reaction means they've immediately engaged. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So at that point you can say, well, why are you reacting like that? Why do you think it's disgusting to have the ears on this roast hair? What's wrong with the idea of hooking the brains out through the eye sockets and spreading them with toast? <Laugh>,

Perry (00:03:03):

My,

Annie  (00:03:04):

But why are you reacting like that when a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, this would've been normal. And through that you can explore things like differences and similarities in the past. You can explore things like how we're, we have our sort of culturally conceived notions of what's edible. And then from food you can move on. So at that point, even from the hair you go on to looking at the country house as a managed estate, you go on to looking at food groups and the differences between rich and poor and accessibility. You go on to talk about early vegetarianism, you know, so many places you can take that conversation.

Perry (00:03:34):

It's so varied. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting you're talking about like the hair and people finding it gross, seeing it on the table. 'cause I was reading your your How to Cook the Victorian Way book and I saw the pigeon pie <laugh> and I was like, it looks, it looks so lovely in the pictures, but I was like, why don't we eat stuff like pigeon anymore? 'cause If I said, oh, do you guys wanna come round? I'm gonna make a pigeon pie. Everyone be like what? So what, what turned us off of stuff like that?

Annie  (00:03:58):

I think a lot of people do still eat pigeon and it's certainly served in restaurants, but it's, it's this kind of weird dichotomy between people not wanting to eat pigeon because they dunno what to do with it. They dunno what the taste is. They're a bit scared of food. And a lot of the time, and I think it's particularly so in this country and to some extent America as well, we are very used to buying things in the supermarket. We're very used to sanitized meat to a very small range of fruit and vegetables. And we are, we're scared to eat outside that we are not particularly adventurous eaters. So that's part of it. If you haven't been brought up with pigeon, you, you think, oh, I might not like it so I don't want to embarrass myself. Then there's the fact that obviously it's game.

Annie  (00:04:36):

So in some cases you have to buy it whole, so you need to know what to do with it. And we've lost a lot of that knowledge as well. It's not taught in schools if, I mean game preparation never was. And I think also it is a strong flavor for some people. They don't really like it. And then you get, you add onto that the kind of gore factor. Yeah. and you don't see it anymore. But the other thing that comes into that is this idea as well, that game is for the rich. And that's historical because historically game was for the rich. There were really restrictive acts in terms of who could shoot and trap game. So the thing that the poor would eat would be rabbits because they weren't particularly restricted. But venison or pheasant or partridge, those kind of things.

Annie  (00:05:13):

There were acts that forbade you, poaching them, shooting them and all the rest of it. So where you see pigeon now is you either see it really cheaply on the back of market stalls or butchers that are in fairly rural areas that are selling them 'cause they've been shot. Or you see it on the menu of very highend restaurants. And we have lost that knowledge. And I think it's a real shame because especially things like pigeon and rabbit and venison in particular, certainly not so much here in Jersey, but on, on the mainland, venison's a massive issue. Nothing was cold for two years during covid. Yeah. So there's so many deer. So if we're gonna eat sustainably, and of course that really is the key thing at the moment within food, then those things, wild meats that need to be cold, need to be kept under control and therefore you've got the meat there. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Those are the things we should be eating. So I'd like to see more of us eating pigeon andia. Absolutely. And rabbit, all the things that eat my garden.

Perry (00:05:59):

<Laugh>. Yeah. Joel, I have had venison. I was like, this is actually really nice. Nice. I was doing like an experimental archeology thing out in Germany and we had like a big venison stew and I was like,

Annie  (00:06:08):

Venison's lovely. It is lovely. Never

Mel (00:06:10):

Tried venison, but I used to eat a lot of rabbit when I was a kid. 'cause My dad used to hunt rabbits and I was young. Yeah. I used

Annie  (00:06:15):

To, all of them are very lean. I think that's part of the problem because we are used to things. It's like

Mel (00:06:18):

A brown chicken, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Annie  (00:06:20):

It's like a mean rabbit. Farmed rabbit basically is just chicken. Yeah. It doesn't have much flavor. Wild rabbit's, slightly gamier. I mean venison, I tend to treat a lot like beef, but with some added fat into it. And venison's gorgeous, really gorgeous. And I'm for as well, so Venice and heart, I'm very fond of. Oh.

Mel (00:06:38):

So you've got quite an adventurous palette

Annie  (00:06:39):

Then. But I had to work on it. I was brought up with very conservative parents. You know, we never ate off all it was very much fish fingers chicken. It was the eighties. Yeah. My grandmother liked a lot of it. She was a Welsh girl from the valleys. But when she'd married into the middle class, because my grandfather was evacuated during the war, so she met him and married sort of up as it were. She gave up a lot of those things because there, there was all this sort of class anxiety. So when I started working as a food historian, I had to teach myself. I, I didn't set out to teach myself to like them. I just knew I had to try them and have a view on things. So I used Victorian recipe books and I learn to prepare awful and I learn to chop up rabbits and I learn to skinny eels and Wow. All those things. Yeah. Because I thought I can't do this if I'm not prepared to at least have a view on, on what's happening here.

Perry (00:07:29):

Yeah. I, again, speaking of kind of like things that we now find gross, but even in my, my grands kind of era, they would have like conga Conga soup, it's conga head soup. They'd like leave the head in it or something. But like for, you know, my people like my age, broadly speaking would probably look at that and go, I'm not gonna eat that. You know? But like, have you tried it? I haven't, no. And I actually would like to, but I think it, it might even be similar to what you were saying about your grand in that like, if I said grand, can you make me some conga? So you'd be like, you don't wanna eat that. Yeah. I wonder if that's just because the, the technological advancements and the kind of like food coming in means that she's not going out fishing to get,

Annie  (00:08:11):

I think there are several things at work. One is the impact of the war. Yeah. So here in particular, because you were occupied, there is a, a real, there's a tension around what people had to eat during the war and an idea of desperation and wanting to really repudiate those things. With my grandmother, she always ate the fat off steak, for example, because during the war they couldn't get hold of meat. So, you know, of course she was gonna eat the fat and we as fussy children would be leaving the fat 'cause we were being brought up in the era where fat was bad. Yeah. so she would always eat all of our fat and we always thought that was disgusting. But that sort came outta this idea that she had to eat that because that was what she was brought up with.

Annie  (00:08:46):

Conversely, when I lived in France, no one ate parsnips and they never, never even heard of them. And I love a parsnip and we explored this once and it turned out that the chap who was my sort of hosting me he said, well, we used to eat them during the war, but we had to, and then they became animal feed because nobody wanted to eat them because it was so associated with being occupied. So I think some of it is about, well, if this is the food of desperation and this is the food of poverty or the food of a previous era, actually we've moved on from that. So that's part of it. And I think some of it is about the fact that these things are often fiddly to prepare. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So I mean I'm used to the, there's an English dish, cods head and shoulders, which is I suspect the equivalent of conga head soup.

Annie  (00:09:28):

Yeah. Where you take a cods head and shoulders and you roast them or you boil them. And then you, you, you put it on the table and it's a head, but there's loads of really good eating on it. The cheeks are good, the tongue's good. There's a sort of fishy goo around the face. You can spread on taste. Yeah. And you get a little bit of meat from the shoulders as well. So with a conga head soup, it's a way of using up something where the rest of the eel's going to be used for a more conventional fish dish. And that head is, this is about eking things out. But they're difficult to prepare. You need to know what you're doing. You need to be not scared of fishbone, which a lot of people are today. And then there's the other factor on top of that, which is simply that we have become very used to very industrialized food systems. Absolutely. Where we go to the supermarket, we do our shop, we buy what's there, we come back, we cook it, we all think we don't have enough time to prepare anything because a soup like that will take several hours. Now it actually takes 20 minutes perhaps of preparation, but we think we can't do it. Yeah.

Mel (00:10:21):

'Cause it seems complex. 'cause There's such a disconnect between how we would've grown food or how we would've, you know, had our cattle and our livestock, we would've killed it. And there's a whole process to that. Yeah. Which we don't, we're not really skilled to do anymore.

Annie  (00:10:34):

Yeah. And it's terrifying. I once had a child, I was plucking a pheasant and a child came in and said, what's, what's that? I was just pheasant. What's that? Oh, it's, it's a bird. It's a bit bit like a chicken. I said, thinking how, how do you describe a pheasant? Yeah, yeah. You'll have seen them running around. And he said, yeah, but what? And I said, well this is just like a chicken, but it's wild. And look, I'm taking the feathers off it so that I can eat it. And he just looked at me an old be stupid. Oh god. Yeah. Chickens don't have feathers.

Mel (00:11:01):

Oh. Because he, 'cause he sees them

Annie  (00:11:03):

Supermarket. All he's ever seen is as

Mel (00:11:04):

A breast or

Annie  (00:11:05):

A thigh on a, on a little nappy, a drummed arm. And I thought, this is really sad because the more we get disconnected from our food, the less we appreciate what we're eating and the more we are likely to make poor choices, both in terms of our health and also in terms of sustainability, in terms of food. You know, if we don't think of what we are eating as an animal, then it's much, much easier for us to say, oh, well we don't mind if it's being farmed in a really

Mel (00:11:27):

Awful way. Yeah. We'd associate it. Yeah.

Annie  (00:11:28):

Yeah. Yeah. And also we then just think of the meat in particular because that's one of the most problematic areas now in terms of sustainability. We just think of the meat as fuel or as a thing that we don't even think of. It's prestigious anymore. You know, back in the past, you know, really up until the end of the 19th century, the vast majority of people couldn't afford to eat meat. Certainly not every day. Yeah. So they would be vegetarian because they had no choice. So the idea that you would then choose to be vegetarian would be anathema. But meat was prestigious, it was expensive. And to go back to your eel heads, congre head example, yeah. You use every single part of it because you respected that product. And now you know, we don't care. So there is this real disjunct and it's, it's gonna come back to bite us very, very soon.

Perry (00:12:11):

Taking it back into, into history a little bit you are kind of a, if I, if I'm correct, you're a food specialist in kind of like 1650 to sort of 1950, that kind of Yeah. Early modern to modern kind of,

Annie  (00:12:21):

It's kind of fuzzy bit, yeah. Fuzzy, yeah.

Perry (00:12:23):

<Laugh>. And I was wondering like what's the, what's the kind of the main thing separating food? I know it's like an arbitrary number, 1650, but what's kind of the, in the early modern period, what separates the food then from what was before? Like is there a line of going like, this is very modern food.

Annie  (00:12:40):

So for me, the reason I picked 1750, apart from it being a round number, is basically because prior to that point, you got very few women in a professional kitchen. So you had women working in farmer's kitchens, you had women working as Cook Ma. But in aristocratic kitchens and in any kitchen that was sort of employing cooks as it were, you didn't really get women. Also, that's the point where you start to get a lot of the new world fruit and veg come in. And also chocolate and tea and coffee. And I used to work a lot in costume and I made the decision fairly early on that I wanted to be able to drink tea while I was working in costume. Yeah. <Laugh>, I love that. Yes. So 1650 was the data I picked because after that I could legitimately be drinking tea. Nice.

Annie  (00:13:19):

Even as a servant made, because I could be drinking, you know, the leaves that had already been used five times. Yeah. Because sometimes I'd be working in very cold country houses and I would need a hot cup of tea. So, and I didn't really want to be drinking beer all day. So it was a bit arbitrary. But the main difference is about the level of ingredients. So you see a real change in British food in the 17th century. It's not just new world ingredients, but obviously they've been coming in very gradually over the previous a hundred years at that point. So if you take the Turkey for example it's discovered by the Spaniard, they bring it back to Spain and then you see turkeys gradually creep up through Spain, through France by the 1530s and then gradually into Britain. The pineapple also sort of comes in very, very slowly as to the chocolate and things.

Annie  (00:14:05):

But you also get other things coming in. So you've got your tea, obviously that's coming in from China. You've got coffee coming in from Turkey. You've also got a lot of Italian things coming in around that time. So things like cauliflower and broccoli and asparagus, they all seem to hit Britain around the end of the 16th century into the 17th century. I'm also very interested in the Civil War. Yeah. I think it's a real, again, it's a sea change in Britain because you get an attitudinal change once you've cut the head off God's appointed monarch, you know, God's representative on Earth. And we just cut his head off. Anything goes. And I do think you get an acceptance of new foods at that point in time, which is linked to this kind of absolute like, wait, what have we just done? <Laugh>. So when the dust settles, that's the point where you do see a change in food. You also see more French flavors coming in. Sauces butter based sauces a bit more lemon juice rather than vinegar. There's a sort of change at that point. An ice cream comes in all

Perry (00:15:01):

The lovely delicious things. It almost seems like there's, I saw an interesting map the other day and it was and I dunno how true it is, but it said that people in Northern Europe, on average, all the restaurants in their countries are serving foreign cuisine. But in southern Europe it tends to be the restaurants serve their own cuisine. And do you think, I don't know if that's literally true, it was just a, a thing I read, but do you think that at that time people sort of went, oh, I don't really like this British food anymore. I know we still eat a lot of British food, but it does seem to be a sort of like, I dunno, like people laugh about British food now.

Annie  (00:15:37):

They do. And it's not fair. Yeah. <Laugh>. so British food's a real amalgam of different other cuisines. Ev everybody's is actually Yeah. But I think we feel it even more here because we've got this sea around us. You know, we are an island and therefore those things are a little bit more stark when they happen. You have a lot of medi in the medieval period. You've got a lot of Persian influences. So Middle Eastern, European middle Eastern influences, which are coming across a lot of the time with the crusaders, but also just through trade routes. There's this idea that we didn't trade with anyone. Well yeah, of course we did. Where else are we getting our sugar from? Yeah. So you've got a lot of medieval Persian influences. Then there's the medieval period shade into the Tudor period. Italy becomes very important and you get a lot of Italian cuisine.

Annie  (00:16:19):

And then French cuisine comes in really quite aggressively in the 17th century. Partly Louis the 14th in France is mounting this kind of soft power grab Yeah. Through really sort of cultural influences. So French furniture becomes important. French fashion becomes important. French food really does take over at the highest level. So if you're an aristocrat in the 18th century, then you want a French cook. And that's when you see a lot of French influence. But below that aristocratic level things are carrying on as normal. And what you have is you have influences coming in, new foods coming in, and they get adapted into the English repertoire. And then of course Scotland's developing a slightly different way because you have the Scottish repertoire, but you have a a, a pan British aristocracy. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So the aristocracy in both countries and in Ireland are all eating broadly similar French style foods.

Annie  (00:17:08):

So what you tend to find is every time something comes in it very quickly gets adopted and adapted. Yeah. So you look at Curry Curry's coming in during the early to mid 18th century with people who have served in India who've come back and liked the flavors. You can get curry powder, you can buy readymade curry powder by the end of the 18th century. The first curry house is in 1810. It doesn't last, but it's there. And Curry ends up being, I mean, curry isn't even Indian. Curry is a, is a vaguely Indian word that the British adopted to cover everything brown and spicy. Yeah. <Laugh> everything gets called curry. It's, it doesn't exist. Yeah. and we do have other things. You know, we do have kdry from kit tree, we have chutney, you know, we, we do use other things, but curry is this catchall term.

Annie  (00:17:51):

Yeah. And by the 19th century, curry is about as English as it gets <laugh>. Yeah, yeah. Because you are using it and it, it is a leftover dish. Curry is what you do when you've got leftover roast meat and you mix it with a bit of curry powder very mildly. Yeah. And you, you serve it with a bit of rice. And that is so English that it's ridiculous. And Anglo Indian cuisine in Britain is bonkers. And yet it, and it's almost a subset all of itself, because you can't get mangoes. So you're gonna use apple. You can't get tamarind. So you're gonna use sultanas, you know, and hence you end, end up with the classic kind of awful 1960s curry, which is yellow <laugh> and has fruited. Yeah. And yet it's actually a subset of cuisine. So I would argue that this, it is British cuisine.

Annie  (00:18:33):

Mm. We are very good in Britain at going, well that's not very British. We almost want to repudiate our own cuisine. We want to deny its Britishness. I read an article the other day that was just going, well, fish and chips isn't British, is it because it's Jewish? Well, okay. Fried fish has Jewish roots. Yes. Yeah. Chipped potatoes come in probably from Belgium. But they're put together in either Manchester or London in the 1860s. And you cannot deny that fish and chips now is probably the most emblematic. Yeah. Absolute dish in Britain when you have a British restaurant abroad and there are British restaurants abroad, they're fish and chip shops, you know, what else do you call 'em when they're in Marbella? Yeah. <Laugh> it it. But that is a British dish we do. And roast meat is the other really quintessentially British thing, which no other country has. Along with puddings in the, in the kind of way of state and kidney puddings and Christmas puddings and those heavy seit beautiful things. And rich fruitcakes, the only other countries that have, those are ex British colonies. So New Zealand has rich fruit cake at Christmas. America has it as a joke. <Laugh>, so to say we don't have a British cuisine. Is, is is to fundamentally misunderstand what a cuisine is. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. what makes it up and how

Perry (00:19:36):

It's been influenced throughout the ages

Annie  (00:19:38):

Actually. And to embrace those influences completely. You know, you can say, oh, don't the Italians have a really developed cuisine of their own. Well, tomatoes aren't Italian. Yeah. and, and pasta didn't come in until quite late on and polenta, you know, it's based on maize. Mm. So all of those really fundamental Italian ingredients Yeah. Again, came over in the 17th century. And you can look at any cuisine like Indian cuisine or tomatoes and potatoes. Well again, they're new world ingredients. A chili, you know, something that's fundamental to most East Asian cuisine is a new world ingredient. So all cuisines borrow from other cuisines. They all take on other ingredients. They all adopt and adapt. And what's important is to look at it from the outside and go, yes. But what they've made it into is discernible of that culture or country.

Perry (00:20:22):

It's quite interesting as well, if you think about like Jersey as its own separate thing, which it was that we got most of that, I, I presume we got most of that English food in that kind of Victorian kind of slow anglicization that happened, which is why we're all speaking English now. And I suppose before that it was a lot more northern French. Yeah. And Breon food wise here,

Annie  (00:20:43):

I think it was a mixture of, of both Breon because you had a lot of French, French refugees from the Revolution and then from the, well from the revolutions. 'cause The French just sort of just kept going 'cause they enjoyed them so much. But also you had your own culture because I think it's quite easy now to go, oh, well, Jersey, it's very well connected. You know, you can fly from London in half an hour, you can get across from France in a, in a whisker. But of course at that point you couldn't, it was always a long sea voyage. And Jersey was much better connected to France than it was to England. Yeah. Just as Cornwall was better connected to France than it was to most of the rest of England. So those pockets which are very rural like Cornwall, like Wales, like Ireland, like bits of Scotland, like Jersey Guernsey and the rest of the channel islands there, you have a cuisine, a rural cuisine and a local based cuisine, which is thriving for much longer than the rest of of Britain because you don't end up with the dispersal, dispersal of the population in the way that we do because we've got the railways.

Annie  (00:21:39):

So in England, you get the railways from the 1840s and you get a mass migration of people, you know, England or Britain rather is the first urban nation in the world in 1851, the first time that more people live in towns than in the countryside. It's a huge population movement. And that really breaks up a lot of the rural cuisine. And then you get a lot of reinvention of it later on. Like Cornish past is, which seemed to have been invented in London, and then sort of projected out to Cornwall. 'cause Nobody in Cornwall would've been eating beef in the T period. Let's just Yeah. <Laugh>. But here, looking at some of the dishes that are sort of really beloved, they've all got French names. Yeah. Or French ish. I mean they're, they're jerseyan names, but you can see the French roots of them.

Annie  (00:22:19):

And you can see the way that they relate both to French food, but also often to what's being eaten in Britain because the British reading French food too. So, but it is a distinctive, there's a distinctive set of dishes here. And I think a lot of them only really stopped being used relatively recently. Again, like the Conga Head Sea or Vel or things like that where people have got them in their cultural memory perhaps 'cause grandma made them or they've eaten them at a festival. Mm-Hmm. What we tend to find in England is a lot of the dishes were reinvented and then written down and codified. So people say things like, oh, a Wilford tart. Yes. We know exactly what that is and it's made like this. And when you actually look at the books, there was possibly a thing called a Wilford Tart at one point, but then it sort of went out of use, then it got reinvented in the 19th century. 'cause Somebody wanted a pro a procession and then it stopped being used again. And then in the 1950s someone went, we need something to publicize our town. This is the recipe. Yeah. And of course it's over history. They've all changed. And like with any of your traditional foods, every house would've had its own recipe. There isn't a recipe. Absolutely. That that's, that's what it was. It's a concept more than anything else.

Mel (00:23:24):

We see that in things like cider making and black butter making, they would've been community things to do, but each parish probably would've had a very different flavor of their, of their batch.

Annie  (00:23:35):

Well, your bean crocs. Exactly. Well, you chuck in the beans, but Oh, I've got a trotter left. I've got a tail. Oh, I've got a few LG on. Yeah.

Mel (00:23:40):

It's gonna transform the flavor.

Annie  (00:23:41):

Exactly. And every, it's, it's like the generic brown stew. Yeah. So everywhere in the village, I love a brown stew has got a brown stew. Yeah. You've got Monmouth steer, you've got lobster scouts, you've got core, you've got, I mean, you know, they've all, there's hundreds of them and they're all brown. Yeah. And they're all basically the same <laugh>. And whether they involve mu or they, now people put in lamb, whether it's beef, whether it's pork, whatever it is. Yeah. It's in the pot. Usually with a bit of cardboard, starch potatoes once they get introduced before then beans or barley or whatever. You chuck all that. Maybe you've got some wine or beer or maybe you don't, you've got some spice or maybe you don't. Yeah. You chuck it all in and sometimes it's baked and sometimes it's boiled <laugh>. And what comes out the other end is brown. Yeah. <Laugh>. And it's really tasty because it's been cooking for like five hours. Yeah. <Laugh>. But to try and make those things into something regionally distinct. Well, vaguely. Because in a sheet rearing area you'll probably use Martin. But the idea that there's a recipe, I mean literally every house would've had its own way of making just eyeball.

Perry (00:24:41):

Yeah.

Annie  (00:24:41):

Yeah. And, and it would've changed from time to time. Like with the black butter, sometimes you've got that mean that depends on the apple year, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Has it been a good year? Has it been a bad year? Are the apples acidic? Are they not acidic? Yeah. You know, have I got any licorice? Have I not got any licorice? Have I got some all spice or I haven't got any of that. I'll stick this in. So year on year, these things change and we become quite obsessed now I think with the idea of authenticity. Yeah. And I think it's a really dangerous concept in films. It's a dangerous concept in any sphere of life, frankly. Yeah. Yeah. But you, you can see in Italy where they've taken it almost to extreme where in the sort of 1970s and France does this too, 1970s and eighties, you get all these brotherhoods and the French love a con <laugh>.

Annie  (00:25:22):

Yeah. And they're usually founded in about 1972 with 12 men who want to wear robes. Yeah. And they still got them. And sometimes there's a woman, but it's rare. Yeah. so you'll have the con whatever obscure vegetable it is. Like in Italy you've got, you know, the brotherhood of an Napoli pizza and they have written down and registered a recipe. Well that means it just can't evolve. Yeah. And the point about food, the point about history life is it evolves. So actually, and also when you dig down into the myths, it's all rubbish. You know, pizza margarita being invented for this thing. Just no. And you can explode these myths really easily, just with a bit of logic most of the time. But we love a story and we love the idea that we are cooking something that's authentic. Yeah. And, and it's a really awful concept because it means that then people can argue over foods and they take ownership of them and they shouldn't be owned. They belong to a community, they belong to a culture and they have to change because culture changes. Do

Perry (00:26:14):

You say that's kind of around the same time that these nationalistic ideas, you get the same thing in France of like the language where they go, this is real French, this isn't French, you can't use these words, you can't use English. Lone words. Yeah. Well, <laugh> all that kind of stuff

Annie  (00:26:27):

As well. Well done. They're really winning that battle, aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. Long weekend. Yeah. <laugh>.

Perry (00:26:31):

And it's like by writing, by writing it down and, and codifying, like you said, you almost, you kill like the actual tradition

Annie  (00:26:37):

You do, the timings don't quite work because you get a lot of nationalistic movements that come out of war. So in France you get the sort of code Napoleon, and this, this desire, I mean, you get a massive desire to codify throughout the Victorian era. So the Victorians are quite fond of codifying things. They don't tend to codify food that much actually. Okay. Escoffier does, but he's writing down cuisine classique and he's codifying stuff that he's making up in a lot of cases. But esco, when you go back to what Esco is actually saying, and of course Agu sier is the kind of grandfather of French cuisine. If you cook in a French classical manner, you regard him as God. And his recipes are the recipes that you follow. And they are amazing if you cook in that manner. Esco genuinely the way he explains recipes, the recipes he uses, they're absolutely great.

Annie  (00:27:22):

But even he says, this is a work in progress. I've written this book, but I fully expect all of the recipes to change in line with, with culture changing. And he updated his main book, the Aire, every sort of 10 years or so in line with what was changing. So after the first World War, a lot of those recipes became much simpler. So if even the person regarded as, you know, the grand master of cookery can say recipes should change, then we, who are we to say they absolutely shouldn't? A lot of the codification came about just as we were losing things. So in, in most of Western Europe post the second World War, that's when you start to get a lot more industrialized foods coming in. And you start to see our shopping habits change, especially in this country. The fifties is when you start to see the first supermarkets.

Annie  (00:28:06):

And by the seventies you've got outta town supermarkets. And so you start to see the decline of traditional markets. You see women going out to work having less time, quite aggressive marketing to women saying, it's all right if you wanna go out to work. We know your husband's still not doing anything, even though you are going out to work as well. Have aders crispy pancake. Yeah. And you're left going. This is, well now you got this incredibly sexist, appetizing. Yeah. But of course it's, it's marketing, all those things. So we, that's when we start to see the disjunct. And I think at that point you get things like sort of folk movements to try and save recipes. So a lot of the time that's when things are being written down. It's at the point where people feel they're going to be lost. And I can applaud the motivation behind that while still saying yes, but it's fine. Wouldn't it have been better to go, this is our guideline recipe if you wanna make it, this is vaguely what you should do. Please riff around it as much as you want to. We would love you to start adding other things rather than this is the recipe and you can't change it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:29:04):

It's not real. If you, if you use this ingredient,

Annie  (00:29:07):

It's so,

Mel (00:29:07):

Like a carbonara is not a carbonara if it's got cream in it. Yeah.

Annie  (00:29:10):

<Laugh>. Well, let tea on. I I love a creamy <laugh>. Oh yeah. I'm sticking in like frozen peas to my carbonara every time. Sacrilege. I wanna make it to a meal. You know? And and I'll swear in whatever I've got. I, when you look at the origins of carbonara, which are quite disputed Yeah. And may or may not be in fact American you know, it, it wasn't everything you've got. The reason there's G Charlie in there is because that's what you had. The reason you've got cheese in there largely Parmesan, not always is 'cause that's what you've got. Mm. You've got eggs, you can make pasta. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> most people didn't make their own pasta. No. Yeah. Gonna say, so as soon as you get industrialized pasta, it's like, bring it on. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea that, that everybody has time to do all of these things people were eating ready meals in the Roman period. They were buying their lamb bones off the street. And the i, this, this kind hallowed idea of, of grandmothers or Ns or gome, whatever it is, every culture Hallows the gome. Yeah. And actually, no, I mean my grandmother never met a processed food she didn't love Yeah. <Laugh>. Anyway, bring on them. Micro. We had crisps made in the microwave. <Laugh>. Yeah.

Perry (00:30:13):

It just tastes, it tastes so good and it's so easy. That's the Well that's the

Annie  (00:30:16):

Thing. And now we're realizing a lot of these things are not that good for us. And you know, cooking from scratch is a really good idea. But we have to be realistic about what that can and should mean. Yeah. I mean I, you know, make my own yogurt, but I'm, this is literally what I do for a living. Yeah. So I wouldn't suggest that everybody does it

Mel (00:30:33):

And we shouldn't discredit like, you know, that cold, convenient type of cooking. 'cause That in itself is like their family's traditional way of doing things. Yeah. So it's like we can't discredit

Annie  (00:30:43):

It. No, no, no. I mean, I think we can say there are better foods for us. Absolutely. For us. We can understand the health implications and we can understand the implications going back to what we've been talking about earlier for the environment and those kind of things. Mm. But that's not to say that everybody should be cooking a meal from scratch all the time. And people in the past didn't. When you look at the 19th century working class, when you look at the working, the rural working class here in Jersey, people didn't have ovens. So they had to either go to the baker or they cooked on top of a stove. A lot of the time it was one pot cookery with a fire going and a caldron and you put everything in nets on it. The cooking was often terrible. You know, I wouldn't say anybody should return to the cuisine of the past because especially if you were poor, it was dire and lacked an awful lot of nutrients.

Annie  (00:31:24):

So you know, there are convenient ways to make food more convenient without necessarily going down the sort of heavily processed route. But we don't always see those. And I think sometimes we are in danger of kind of putting full home cooking from scratch on a pedestal and it becomes then very middle class because those are the only people who've got time to do it. Yeah. And because it can be quite expensive and look at the sort of sourdough thing that sprung up during lockdowns. Everyone's making sourdough sourdough bread made badly tastes horrible. <Laugh>. There's a reason we never made sourdough in this country and it's 'cause we had a beer tradition so we could get hold of yeast. Sourdough was something that the Scottish ate outta desperation who would make sourdough. And yet you get people crying 'cause their sourdough starter hasn't worked. <Laugh> you think can be safe, just put some yeast in it. Yeah. Or buy a really nice loaf of bread. I mean, fine. Don't buy white sliced charlie wood bread if you're trying to kind of eat more healthily and you wanna eat sort of nice bread. But I'm sure the bakery does a good loaf, so please don't cry over your sourdough. Yeah.

Perry (00:32:24):

I love a cabbage loaf. Have you had a Cabbage Lo? Oh, I have. Oh, that's my favorite.

Mel (00:32:28):

Yes. We do that very well.

Perry (00:32:29):

How different is, because again, we're talking about a lot of foods that we go, oh, that's a jersey food. Right. Really? It's, it's a loaf of bread. And is it different than,

Annie  (00:32:36):

I haven't come across Cabbage Loaf before, actually. I suspect it must have been a technique to some extent used elsewhere, but I've never seen it. And it is genius because you get, not only do you get the pleasing smell from the burnt cabbage, but also the moisture from it goes into the loaf. So you get a much, much better crumb. I wonder whether to some extent it's because here you were cooking in communal ovens and, and using baking ovens like that for a lot longer than a lot of the rest of the mainland. I mean in England in the south, people had stopped making bread at home really by the 1830s because you could buy it from a, a baker. And you started to get cast iron coal fired ovens quite early on. Whereas here you're still using a mixture of dried seaweeds and woods. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> cabbage stalks, whatever's to hand for a lot longer. But I think it's a technique that is pretty fantastic.

Perry (00:33:26):

I was talking to one of the, and I can't remember her name unfortunately, one of the living history ladies up at Hampton. Is it

Mel (00:33:32):

Joe Thorpe?

Perry (00:33:33):

Quite possibly. Yeah.

Mel (00:33:35):

Joe's knows how to make a lot of traditional Jersey recipes.

Annie  (00:33:38):

I spent some time with her yesterday. Did she have to say Oh really

Mel (00:33:40):

To say. Okay, great. She's brilliant, isn't she? Oh,

Annie  (00:33:42):

And e the Vel in particular. Oh good. Those are most of the day

Perry (00:33:46):

<Laugh>. Yeah. They're so nice. But, but she was saying about the ca because I was asking about the cabbage leaf, like is it just for the flavor? She was saying maybe it's because, you know, you can, you can rest it on the cabbage leaf and not get it dirty or something when you are can or

Annie  (00:34:00):

Possibly, I mean, my experience of wood-fired cooking is that actually the kind of ash adds to it. I've got pizza oven at home and I've also cooked in Tudor ovens. Yeah. And you do have a, that normally the oven floor is quite smooth and you rake out the ashes so you wouldn't normally get ash on the floor. Yeah. That said, if you're a busy baker and you're constantly going, the cabbage leaf probably does help. But on the other hand, you can't peel it off the bottom of the bread. So you're still gonna get the stuff stuck to it. And it, I mean, it looks good as well. Of course. I also wonder whether, especially if you are baking in a very communal way, the shape of the leaf is a way of marking the loaf up. So, you know. Yeah.

Mel (00:34:34):

Yeah. That's interesting.

Annie  (00:34:35):

You get the pat cake, pat cake rhyme and the sort of market with bee and, and that supposedly relates to the fact that if you went to the butcher baker, sorry, with your whatever it was, bread loaf, joint of meat, whatever's going in the oven, you need a way to tell which one's yours. So I do wonder whether tearing the cabbage leaf in a way is a way to do it to

Mel (00:34:53):

Identify

Perry (00:34:53):

If I misquoted you, Joe. I, I'm sorry. That's just a

Mel (00:34:57):

No, it definitely sounds like a Joe thought type thing to,

Annie  (00:35:01):

I mean, it certainly would work. But I just think the, the burnt nature of that ca I'm not a particular fan of cabbage as our, I mean, a lot of people got put off it by school dinners, but I have an allotment and at certain times of the year when you walk into the allotment site, the stench of brassicas is just, yeah.

Mel (00:35:17):

It's very strong, isn't it really? We get that here. 'cause Some of our fields, some of our country fields, they do grow a lot of cabbage and you can really smell it

Annie  (00:35:25):

That waft,

Mel (00:35:26):

It's really intense. It's

Annie  (00:35:27):

Cabbage season.

Perry (00:35:29):

There are a couple places that still do the, the jersey cabbage, the traditional jersey cabbage. Yeah. Probably. There's only a couple. 

Annie  (00:35:36):

Is that the walking stick one? Yes, the walking stick where? Oh, I grew that one. Yeah. It's amazing.

Perry (00:35:39):

You gro it. Yeah, I would love to do that. I'd have a little gardener

Annie  (00:35:41):

Or anything but taller than me. I grew it in a raised bed so you can grow it in a very small space. Really.

Perry (00:35:45):

I've got a walking stick. You

Annie  (00:35:46):

Can grow it in a pot. Yeah. Can you, if you get a big enough pot, you'd be able to get one going. Okay.

Perry (00:35:51):

That's Philip Johnson. Who, who grows them here? I know he does.

Annie  (00:35:54):

I didn't get a great head on it, but I did. It was a walking stick. It was taller than me. There's a picture of me standing underneath my walking stick

Perry (00:36:02):

Going, oh my God. Send

Mel (00:36:03):

It to us. Have to send that through. We can see it. That'd be so cool.

Perry (00:36:06):

I don't think they ever get that big or heads

Annie  (00:36:08):

On the marine. No, but of course you can eat all of the leaves. We think of cabbages now as having big heads because they're grown in fields with lots of fertilizer by people who know what they're doing. But you can eat all the leaves and you can strip the stalk and you can eat that as well. And of course you can use the stalk for fuel if you need to. So they're quite useful.

Perry (00:36:24):

It's an interesting folk story about Jersey cabbages. And then we've got like our, our fairies, we call them the petty Fay show. It's a bit of a grizzly folk story. It's that, oh, I can't remember the exact story, but it was effectively like every now and again, you could see a hanging fairy <laugh> from one of the stalks

Mel (00:36:42):

Of the

Perry (00:36:42):

Cabbage of the cabbage, though I think that's written about in the Jersey folklore book we talked about in the other podcast. But yeah, I, I

Annie  (00:36:49):

Fairy lynch mobs. Yeah.

Perry (00:36:51):

I dunno. <Laugh>, there's some really interesting, like, I love folk weird folk stories around food and, and stuff like that.

Annie  (00:36:56):

Oh, do you know why I would be tempted to go out with some fairies, like models of fairies and start hanging them on people's cabbages? I

Perry (00:37:02):

<Laugh> I'll have to find the source for that. Maybe we brutal stick

Mel (00:37:04):

On

Annie  (00:37:04):

The Instagram kind of cool. Yeah,

Perry (00:37:06):

It's kind of cool.

Annie  (00:37:07):

Not that I'm advocating the hanging of fairies or anything else, but I mean it would just be, yeah.

Perry (00:37:12):

What's the circumstances that that that came about? You know,

Annie  (00:37:15):

Who knows? It's

Perry (00:37:16):

Strange. Isn't Well

Annie  (00:37:17):

Presumably fairies have to have law as well. And if, you know, we were hanging people right up until the sort of 20th century. So presumably the fairies were too.

Perry (00:37:25):

Maybe that's it. Maybe.

Annie  (00:37:26):

Yeah. And then they became a less, less brutal nation and now they have fairy prisons or something, don't

Mel (00:37:31):

They? <Laugh> all guarded with like cabbage stone, cabbage sword. Yes.

Annie  (00:37:36):

What stops fairies? You know, you sort of

Perry (00:37:38):

An iron <laugh>.

Annie  (00:37:39):

Well there you are. You can just have a sort of iron. Maybe they're all imprisoned in the sewage systems and can't get out through the, the greats. If you look carefully after rain, you'll see a pair of fairy hands just

Perry (00:37:48):

<Laugh>. Oh my god.

Mel (00:37:49):

Grim. Wow. We've really gone on like a little tangent. <Laugh>

Speaker 5 (00:37:56):

Research your family history at the Jersey Archive. Dive into our vast online catalog or visit in person, our expert staff AWAI to guide you on your journey. We're open Monday to Thursday, nine to one, then two till five subscribe today.

Mel (00:38:18):

So let's talk a little bit about Victorian dining. Yeah. Because they are quite notorious for their like weird and wonderful recipes and they're crazy little gadgets they have on their tables that you'd think don't really make much sense. Well most of 'em don't. They're just like

Annie  (00:38:34):

Really flamboyant, aren't they? Yes. And also the Victorians are completely obsessed with class. So if you are old style aristocracy and you have owned land going back for centuries, then you fly in the face of all of these. So-Called new rules that are coming in and etiquette guides because if you need the etiquette book, quite frankly, you're not the right type of person to be eating it. Yeah. And it's always said that an etiquette book in the possession of a diner is basically a ion according to one man at the time. So I think one of the reasons we think of the Victorians as very sort of rigid is because we see pictures of them with, you know, hundreds of knives and forks and different tools for absolutely every type of food. And that certainly did exist, but that tended to be new money and it tended to be the upper middle class who were desperate to be able to tell if someone was just that tiny bit lower status than them.

Annie  (00:39:23):

Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> because it was very important not to marry their daughter to the wrong person unless that person had a lot of money. So that was fine. And likewise, they didn't want to marry their sons to the wrong woman in case she was gonna drag them down or something. Yeah. So you have all these kind of obsessions with the, the middle classes. And then if you are older style, you flagrantly ignore everything. You just have one knife, one for you're eating off your old Queen Anne China and you're using a teapot as a cigar holder, whatever <laugh>. 'cause You can get away with it because of course, you know, you don't need to prove anything. Yeah. But a lot of the gadgets, the table gadgets come outta that milia and then you get stuff invented for the kitchen, which is a varying quality. Mm-Hmm.

Annie  (00:39:58):

I mean one of the great things that comes outta the Victorian era is the wire egg whisk, which sounds like a really stupid thing, but you think, how did it take you so long to invent a wire? Whi Yeah, no, I didn't know that. Mm. 1840S that comes along and then you get the handle, the turned one, the Dover egg beater coming outta America in the 1860s. Once people realize that actually egg beaters are a thing, then you suddenly get loads of people trying to invent a, a better egg beater. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And then you get the fact that anyone can make meringue. Yeah. Which previously was very much a rich person's dish. So they are really obsessed with gadgets and things and the technology of course there's a lot of technological change. You can do things with copper and with tin that you couldn't do before.

Annie  (00:40:37):

It's a fantastic era from that point of view, but a lot of the things that get invented are really stupid. You get a variety of weird and wonderful teapots, which always survive in collections. And the reason they survive is because nobody used them. The the cadogan teapot, which is in every collection going 'cause it doesn't have a lid. I mean, how cool is that? Right? Oh my god. Yeah, because it's, you can't get into it. What is it? And you turn it, it's a sort of egg shaped thing with flowers all around. It's always painted with flowers and when you turn it upside down, you realize there's a, a long sort of funnel in the bottom. So the idea is you turn it upside down, you fill it presumably with hot water because tea, I mean you can, yes, you don't need to wash out a tea pot, but I would've thought hot water would be more practical.

Annie  (00:41:16):

And then you put a bun in it and you quickly turn it back up right again. Oh god. Yeah. So that it looks like there's no way of getting in it. And you think Yeah, that's funny. Once Yeah. Yeah. And then after that you wanna be able to take the lid off and put some more hot water in it a bit more easily. Yeah. <Laugh> So they're overrepresented in collections because of course they didn't get broken because people used them once and put them on the shelf. Yeah, yeah. Which is the case with a lot of things in Victorian life. The things that survive are often the things that don't get used.

Perry (00:41:41):

I think even now we've got this kitchen gadgets that you buy and you go, oh, this

Annie  (00:41:45):

Will be good.

Mel (00:41:46):

The cupboard,

Annie  (00:41:47):

How many air fryers are gonna reach. Yeah. The charity shops or the back of the cupboard, people would be like, everyone had an air fryer in about 2024. Yeah. Because there's so many and you think Yeah, 'cause I got used for a year. Yeah, exactly. And then people went back to actually using their oven.

Mel (00:42:02):

So what kind of stuff would the Victorians been eating? What would they, what kind of recipes would they, what was like the most famous thing to eat that popped?

Annie  (00:42:10):

Well, it's very long period. So, and at the beginning of the Victorian era, you are looking back almost certainly here, where you've got a more rural population and a and a a sort of population that's not at the forefront of fashion. You're looking back to the 18th century. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So at that point, your service style would be what's, if you are very wealthy would be what's known as Hanes. So basically banqueting style, lots of dishes on the table at once, spread over two courses. So you'd have 6, 8, 12 dishes, whatever on the table at once, all cleared. Then another six, eight or 12 come in. Wow. They get cleared and it comes in dessert. Wow. For most people, they only have one course. So you might have six or seven dishes depending on how big your family is, all on the table at once. And you'd pick and choose.

Annie  (00:42:49):

So you'd have soup, you'd have fish. Both of those always served if you've got any pretension to social status. And especially here where it's very much a, a fishing community. Then you'll have meat to show your prestige farmed meat game if you can get it. Again, that's about prestige vegetables on the table as well. And you'll also have things like cakes or puddings in the broad sense, savory and sweet puddings on the table at once. And you pick and choose from what you want. And then when that's finished, in comes fruit, which would be dessert or very posh dinner. You might have ice cream. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And then that slowly changes over the course of the 19th century to allow roof service, which is sequential service. So that's the one where you have someone come in and offer from the side. A lot of people would've seen Downton Abbey.

Annie  (00:43:31):

So that's, that's the kind of service you get when you've got a waiter or a footman who's offering you what you are having. And you have that. And again, you pick and choose. 'cause There's usually a couple of different choices in each course. And then you might have six courses, or you might have 24 courses and it goes on and on forever. It's much easier for the kitchen to manage because they're only sending up one dish at a time rather than eight. And the food, again, it does change throughout the period, but there are certain things that I suppose are quite sort of big Victorian dishes. I would say co and shoulder is one of them, which we mentioned. I would say that ice cream, especially molded ice creams are very Victorian. Molded foods in general are very, very in, in the Victorian,

Mel (00:44:12):

'Cause they were decorative. Is

Annie  (00:44:13):

That 'cause they're decorative because it's one thing to serve for jelly, but you know, a jelly in a really cool mold is so much nicer. Yeah. And a cake, you can mold cakes as well. I mean, you people see those copper molds in kitchens and ceramic molds in kitchens, and they always think they're jelly because we only mold jelly now. But they weren't, you know, jelly was a tip of the iceberg. Yeah. If you could mold it, you could mold it <laugh>, because you can steam them, you can bake them, you can boil them, you know, you could freeze them if it could be molded. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, you molded it. Roast meat would always be on the table in a Victorian dinner. You got lots of sort of borders made out of pureed vegetables. They were called garnishes, but they are actually a, a vegetable dish and lots of things on skewers hate lit skewers, they were called.

Annie  (00:44:56):

And towards the end of the era, you get very big, rich sources as we move into the Edwardian period as well. So there's a real love of a kind of deep, dark flavor then. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. But you also get slightly further down the social scale or as nursery dishes, milk puddings, they're a really big feature of the Victorian era. So things like macaroni pudding, tapioca pudding rice pudding, all those things where you're boiling a starch for hours and hours and hours and then molding it. So things that today we associate with school dinners often very, very big in the Victorian era.

Mel (00:45:27):

Do you have like a favorite thing that you've, is there like a favorite dish that you like? Oh,

Annie  (00:45:31):

I'm very parcel to a tapio pudding. Actually. I prefer a macaroni pudding at the moment. <Laugh>, I, I wax and wane. I mean, I, I, one of my heroes is Eliza Action, who wrote a book called modern Cookery for Private Domestic Families, <laugh> in 1845. And it's one of the best books that I know of still today. It holds water. It's a brilliant book. She has a cucumber sop, which is to die for really, really good hot cucumber soup. Oh, it's a hot one. Yeah. Yeah. She uses from eight to 24 cucumbers. And you think what? Wow. And she says, well, I know there's a, there's a quite a difference here, but sometimes cucumbers are very expensive. But it's basically just cucumbers cream. There's a little bit of sweet onion in there, and then a tiny bit of cann at the end. And it's just the most creamy, beautiful soup. Agnes Marshall, who did a lot with ice cream has a cucumber ice cream. And again, it's really, really refreshing. Wow. It's kind of weighs with cucumbers, I say would, would be one of the things I would mark out as a quite Victorian Yeah.

Mel (00:46:27):

I'd never think of making a cucumber suitable.

Annie  (00:46:29):

Most people wouldn't think of cooking them cream. Yeah. So yeah, they're really, I mean, the Victorians are obsessed with cucumbers, cucumber straighteners to make sure that they were Why

Mel (00:46:37):

Is that? Why a cucumber that's so random?

Annie  (00:46:40):

I think anything you can do to show that you control nature, that's the key to it. So if you are wealthy, you would usually try any outta season fruit and veg. So strawberries in January and asparagus in December, that kind of thing.

Mel (00:46:53):

They were so bonkers, weren't I? The class

Annie  (00:46:54):

Thing is just, it's

Mel (00:46:55):

Just, it just, I actually can't even comprehend it. It blows my mind. We

Annie  (00:46:59):

Do it today. We think nothing of eating green beans in the middle of winter, because of course now we fly them in, whereas then they would've just heated hot houses. But it is to some extent, status. And it's one of the interesting things now as you look at modern food culture and you think all these things that, for the Victorians would've been real markers of status. Now the marker of status is to eat locally and to eat seasonally. Yeah.

Mel (00:47:19):

And sustainably use

Annie  (00:47:20):

Organic meat. Absolutely. Absolutely. And to eat like brown loaves with loads of grains on, if you're Victorian, the idea that you would eat brown bread, I mean, you know, it makes you fart. Why would you eat that <laugh>? So,

Mel (00:47:32):

So they were just like completely obsessed with how it, their, like, the way that they came across in society that was so dining was their main,

Annie  (00:47:40):

It's competitive sport. Right.

Mel (00:47:41):

Okay.

Annie  (00:47:42):

Yeah. and if you put on a dinner, I mean, Isabella Beaton who wrote, of course, the book of Household management, which is iconic, talked about the half hour before dinner as being the mistress's greatest ordeal. Oh my God. Because that's the point where she's planned everything, but she's left it all to her cook. Ma, she's not in the kitchen anymore because, you know, secretly she's going to have been down there most of the day, even though she won't admit it. Oh, really? And she's there worrying as to how this dinner's gonna go, because at that point she's greeting her guests. Yeah. She's working out whether they're gonna get on with each other, what she's gonna get out of it. She's working out the statuses, so when they go into dinner, the highest status man takes the highest status woman and so on. And so, and it's this awful. Yeah. And you just think, lordy, you know, today I invite people over, I bang some stuff on the table. I'm like, oh, sorry, I forgot to get any of whatever it is. You know. Oh, oh yeah, we haven't got that. Oh, does anybody want a napkin? Just kitchen roll instead

Mel (00:48:36):

They'd be turning in their graves <laugh>. Yeah.

Annie  (00:48:38):

And I'm like, I'll go and dig some wine out. Anybody got any preferences? And then, you know, by the end of it, the stains on the table cloth and Yeah. It, and, and, and yet you kind of, you think the measuredness of those dinners, the the level of planning that went into them at some level, you know, people often ask, especially if you're working in costume, you wouldn't, you love to go back in the past, you think, well, no, I'm a woman. Yeah. Lordy, I'm not going back in the past. No. Get it. Can't

Mel (00:49:04):

Even enjoy the food you,

Annie  (00:49:05):

You spend ages making. No, well, you can eat quite a lot actually. And of course it is just that when you take it off, it clunks as it goes down. Yeah. but what I'd love to do is ob observe a meal and observe the etiquette and, and see how they, because we know that some of them were tifying because people wrote about them. And the fact that you have all these sort of huge or table arrangements at the end of the Victorian period, which means you can't even have a conversation with the person over the Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. I wrote a book about Queen Victoria, and when you read about her dinners, I mean, they're just, you think, oh, I think I'd have had to claim I was ill and eat in my room. You know, especially in the early days when Jacob Wellington was still alive and he was quite deaf, and he used to yell state secrets over the table, <laugh>.

Annie  (00:49:45):

No way. Yeah. And nobody could laugh because, and, and sometimes depending on the mood of the queen, she would be laughing like a drain. And sometimes she was, when she was younger, she had a very good sense of humor. But even later on, sometimes she'd find something hilariously funny. But, you know, if you ate with the queen, you had to keep pace with her. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> and by the end of her range was a very fast eater. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. But she could also be very slow and I think probably use that deliberately. Mm. Because she didn't have that much power, let's face it. So, you know, what can you do? Well, you can make sure everybody eats at your pace <laugh>. Yeah. But if you are eating and you're kind of, you know, you get given your food after the queen, and then as soon as she's finished, the plates are cleared away and she's eaten her nine course meal in half an hour, you know, you are leaving the table hungry. And we know that people are saying, you know, I didn't get a chance to eat my beautiful mutton because I dared to have a conversation with the person next door to me. And my plate was whipped away before I could even stop.

Mel (00:50:34):

And it's, it's insanity.

Annie  (00:50:36):

Absolutely mad. And knowing that etiquette, that's the point. You had to know what you were doing. So

Mel (00:50:41):

How, how would you learn? How would you know about it? See, that was, you were just like

Annie  (00:50:45):

Trained. Like you were either born to it and you were trained from the age wo about, from the mb Well, from the age of eight <laugh>. Yeah. I mean, you, what's the point in children before they were seven, it was really that kind of attitude. Yeah. They all, they were just in the nursery. Thank you. Once they could speak and reason and talk to you in Latin, much more exciting. So at that point, you start to train them at family dinners, they would come in and they would learn to eat. And by the time they were 13, they would be expected, not at, at big dinners, but, but by and large they would be expected to be able to know what they were doing. But it's one of the reasons towards the end of the 19th century, you start to get all these etiquette guides published.

Annie  (00:51:17):

Because at that point you've got a lot more people earning money in the trades who want to be able to eat in public or eat with people at dinners and, and not embarrass themselves. And it's also the reason that when you start to get proper restaurants, restaurants that we would recognize as restaurants, rather than chop houses or inns from the 1890s onwards, they become phenomenally popular for eating out. Because now you can invite people over to a restaurant instead of to your house. And the etiquette is known because you can learn how to eat in a restaurant. Yeah. Very easily. You know how a restaurant works. You can go along and test it on your own if you need to. So restaurants become forums for eating out at the end of the 19th century for people who are unsure about what they're doing in their houses. And it also turns out to be much cheaper as well. Especially if you've got a female cook who's quite cheap, but perhaps not brilliant. Mm-Hmm. Rather than renting a man for the day, you just go to a restaurant instead

Perry (00:52:11):

Seeking a unique getaway. Why not book a Jersey Heritage Holiday? Let from Coastal towers, cozy cottages and country apartments, we have something for everyone. Jersey Heritage members get a discount. So sign up now. How accurate, 'cause there's a lot of like period dramas and stuff now as, like you mentioned Downton Abbey before and, and all these kind of shows. How like, accurate are the betrayals of like dining and manners and the food that's on the table? Would

Annie  (00:52:42):

You say it varies? I wrote the official Downton Happy cookbook. Yeah. Did you? I did, yes. And I watched all the food scenes in the show, and I would say they get slightly more accurate when you watch them, as I did very carefully. You realize in the first series, they don't actually eat, they just bang their knives and forks on the table, <laugh> and they just go, yeah, that's all they do. Keep my eye out for that now. So and after that they do start eating, but they always have the fish course. That's what they always have there. So, because it looks good because you've got white and you've got green, because on camera, most food, let's face it, is Beil Brown. Yeah. So the fish course looks good. So the service style is largely accurate. The food varies, I have to say.

Annie  (00:53:27):

There are some things that make appearances in Downton Abbey, which really shouldn't be there. Like crumble. Oh, just, no, don't gimme a crumble on a table till the 1950s. Thank you very much. Oh, really? That late? I didn't know that. Well, it, it comes out of American crisps. Americans still have a thing called crisps. So you do get mentions of it in the thirties, but very, very few. And then it, it really comes to prominence during the second World War because you can make a crumble with the same ingredients as pastry, but a lot fewer of them. So it's quite a good wartime recipe to eke out ingredients. Right. And it sort of takes off after the war. Lemon drizzle cake. If you see a film with lemon drizzle cake in before the seventies, then just turn it off. <Laugh>. It's not historically accurate, just don't even go there.

Annie  (00:54:09):

But it depends a bit on the film. So for example, the Favorite, which of course is set in the Reign of Queen Anne, is a brilliant film. Absolutely love that. Completely inaccurate food. They've got blue icing, stable blue food coloring, not invented till the 1930s. Yeah. What? But the film itself is heightened reality. Yeah. So you can get away with things like that. I think it very much depends. If the film is a food film, then there's very little wiggle room. So the recent film <inaudible> that came outta France what's it in English? The Taste of Things. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, which purports to be a food film, which wants to be the new Bette's feast where, you know, you've got 14 minutes of plot and two hours of food porn. Yeah. <Laugh>. And there's like, the first 40 minutes is just preparing food. There's no wiggle room there to get it wrong.

Annie  (00:54:53):

Yeah. And they do get it wrong on at least three occasions. And I mean, you, you wouldn't know, I think, unless you were me. Yeah. And about five or six other people. But the Turbo kettle scene is really annoying. <Laugh>. Yeah. And anyway, and so's the ice cream scene <laugh> and they had, you know, a historic advisor and they had a, a Pierre Ganger who's a million mis land star chef who knows Modern Cuisine Classic, but not the tweak that they had for the Victorian era. It's a lovely film. Yeah. But it is not 100% accurate. And it should be because it's that, but how do you get it accurate? Mm-Hmm. You know how, because at one point it crosses the boundary from being a film or a series into being a documentary. Yeah. And that's a very different thing.

Annie  (00:55:38):

I mean, call The Midwife is another thing where there's food in it. There's a lot of food in Call The Midwife a lot of cake there. It's very accurate. Because the producer was really, really keen to make sure that it was absolutely bang on. Yeah. To the point that at one point they had, I think Broccoli served and Broccoli at that point it had been in and it had gone away again and it come back. But it wasn't something that was being served then or wouldn't have been in the East end of London. So they faded out the color to make it into cauliflower. Oh, interesting. Because they'd filmed it by mistake or she hadn't picked up. Oh. So they went into that level of detail, that level of detail. And I only know that 'cause <inaudible>. But anyway, <laugh>. But that's a, that's a really, it's an interesting context that one because it's a very specific social context, the East End poverty food, little bit of middle class food, but it's also an era people remember or think they remember Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. So there's, it's very difficult to get it right because people's memories will go well, I didn't have that. Yeah. But generally it was around Yeah. But I didn't have it. A lot of people did. Yeah. But I didn't have it. So it's more problematic to some extent for the fifties than it would be for the Ed Edwardian period. But I say, you know, it just depends on the film of the series. I mean, I could, you know, go on and on about inaccuracies and things, but it does depend on what Yeah.

Perry (00:56:54):

The more, you know, it's harder to watch, isn't it really? Yes. I find with on I watch you know, I love like the early medieval period, but I just can't watch any of the kind of drama shows set in those periods. 'cause The costumes are always like, I

Annie  (00:57:06):

Think it depends on what they're doing. I mean, there's that awful but hilarious Robin Hood with Tarn Eggerton, the one where they're wearing it. Yes. They're they've got like machine gun CrossBoss. Yeah, yeah,

Perry (00:57:16):

Yeah. <Laugh>. And

Annie  (00:57:17):

They're doing like, you know, barrel rolls

Speaker 6 (00:57:19):

And like Yeah. And you're thinking,

Annie  (00:57:21):

What? And they're eating off hotel ware. Yeah. Yeah. They sit there in the middle of a, there's a scene where they're sitting there eating where, you know, they just had a massive battle where they killed everybody. And they're sitting there eating something not accurate off what is very clearly, you know, a Sbit Hotel white plate. And you

Speaker 6 (00:57:38):

Think Yeah.

Annie  (00:57:39):

At the very least you could have gone for like a bit of wood.

Perry (00:57:42):

I know. Just a little bit of, a little bit

Annie  (00:57:43):

Of, and that was the bit that annoyed me. And I'm like, <laugh>. Yeah. You know what, this is like the least accurate film ever. They are, you know, they, they're, they're making proto tanks outta wood <laugh>. Yeah.

Perry (00:57:53):

Yeah.

Speaker 6 (00:57:54):

So I think with that one,

Annie  (00:57:56):

There's sometimes you just have to go with willing suspension of disbelief. Yeah. but if they've made a big thing of the food being amazing, then you do, I find I do sort of end up going. But you know, if I was a costume nerd, then I'd find the same thing about, you know, rampant use of cri ins. I mean, don't even get me started on the Bridgeton corsets. They would

Perry (00:58:17):

Really

Mel (00:58:18):

Oh, were they bridge? No,

Annie  (00:58:19):

No. I know it, I know it's an alternative reality. I'm

Mel (00:58:22):

Not, I'm not keen on Bridgeton Not

Annie  (00:58:24):

A fan. No, me neither. Not a fan. I, I struggled through the first series because I thought I should watch it. Yeah. And I, I can't, the plot alone made me so angry that I wanted to flush Daphne down the Lou

Speaker 6 (00:58:35):

<Laugh>. 

Mel (00:58:36):

We're gonna call this episode Slaying Bridge.

Speaker 6 (00:58:38):

<Laugh> Bridgestone is terrible. I like you've got this gorgeous Duke. Yeah.

Annie  (00:58:43):

And then she's just entrapping him. And then, you know, she, she wants a baby. So, you know, everybody else has to cow ow to her. And he's got perfectly good reasons for not wanting one actually. Yeah.

Mel (00:58:53):

So what's their food

Annie  (00:58:53):

Like? Terrible.

Speaker 6 (00:58:55):

<Laugh>. <Laugh>. Absolutely terrible. There's not much of it. There's not that storyline <laugh>.

Annie  (00:59:00):

It's, yeah. No, no, don't. But it is a parallel world. So maybe they have invented brightly colored fairy macaron that didn't come along until the 1980s. In the 1780s.

Speaker 6 (00:59:10):

<Laugh> <laugh>. Well,

Perry (00:59:12):

How'd you find, how'd you find the Crown? Because I know that's a bit more modern actually. Have you not watched it?

Mel (00:59:17):

Okay. I, I love the Crown

Perry (00:59:18):

I've seen the first season. I really like it.

Mel (00:59:19):

I do really

Annie  (00:59:20):

Like the Crown. It's on, on my sort of hit list. I got sidetracked into watching the West Wing. Which Oh, okay. Yeah. Doesn't have any food in apart from Chinese takeaway <laugh>. And yeah. And the Americans, which I adore, which does not have any food in either. So really a little few, but they're not food shows. That makes sense. You can enjoy it more. You don't have to worry about the Yeah. <Laugh>. And I think also because I spend most, because I'm, I at the moment, I'm writing, well, two books at once. So I think one of the things I do quite like doing is finding something that doesn't have any historical food in so that I'm not forced to engage in the evenings if I'm watching something. Yeah.

Mel (00:59:58):

So you can actually relax and unwind Yeah. For writing two clips.

Annie  (01:00:00):

Yeah. Because even things that I love, sometimes there's just one mistake that will make me squeak. Yeah. Yeah. Like in Wolf Hall where they have dinner in the evening, I mean, what's going on with that <laugh>? Just call it a supper and you all right. Or change it to, you know, 11 o'clock, which is when the tutors actually had dinner and you'd have got away with it. Yeah.

Mel (01:00:17):

11:00 PM or am

Annie  (01:00:19):

Am So dinner dinner's got a lot later during history dinner's the main meal of the day. And as soon as you define it as that, you realize that it can be a movable feast. So why,

Mel (01:00:28):

Why so early?

Annie  (01:00:29):

Because you could you only have dinner if you're rich, I

Mel (01:00:33):

Guess if you are eating that many courses and eating that much.

Annie  (01:00:35):

I know for the tutors it's two or three courses. It's, it's even pre Aron says it's not even been that codified. So if you're rich and you're tutor, you're sitting down at 11, you're having a huge meal. And if you are very wealthy, there's processions of food coming in and all sorts. Correct. And it's a very elaborate system of eating. So you have messes, hence the idea of a mess room or a mess system. If you're the king, you are the only person eating from your mess. If you are a noble, it might be two or three people to your mess, by the time you get to the sort of servants you are eight people to a mess. And the mess is only potage and bread or something, and cheese. Whereas if you're the king, you've got five or six different beautiful meat dishes.

Annie  (01:01:15):

So with the Ts, you're eating all of that at 11 and then you're gonna have a supper later on in the day. Right. And you see that dinner hour get later. So for the Stewarts, you're talking sort of 1700 dinner is about two o'clock. By the time you get to the end of the 18th century, it's usually about five o'clock bit later. Quite possibly if you are wealthier. 'cause You're always pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. And to some extent that reflects working patterns. Although if you are super wealthy, you don't have to work, doesn't matter you whatever you wanna and if you're Queen Victoria, you're eating dinner at sort of eight, half past eight, nine o'clock. Whereas at that point in the 1830s, the aristocracy is eating their dinner that late. But here, the vast majority of people, and indeed in the British mainland, the vast majority of people would still be having dinner if they had it at all at what we would call lunch hour.

Annie  (01:02:01):

But for most people, you didn't have dinner because dinner was a really prestigious meal. You invited people to, so for most people, you would have breakfast, you would then have, you might call it dinner, but you might call it luncheon later on or lunch. And then you might have supper. You still get confusion today depending on where you live and what your class background is. People might call their midday meal dinner, they might call it lunch, they might call it anything. You know, you might well call your evening meal dinner or tea or supper. And that all depends on who you are, where you're brought up, what your regionality is. And it, it's largely to do with this 19th century period, whether dinner gets so late that people invent lunch. And whether you are a lunch person or a dinner person, you know, when you're at school, when I was little, they were always called school dinners, even though they were at lunchtime and now they're school meals because it's just a kind of generic term. Yeah. But it's very dependent on who you are.

Perry (01:02:50):

I feel like you'd have, we didn't have school dinners at my school, but you'd have like dinner ladies. Yeah. But they would serve lunch from, from people that did have school dinners. That's kind of how they spoke about

Annie  (01:03:01):

It. Yeah. Because for the working classes, your dinner was at midday because that was your main meal when you would leave the fields and you would go home or you might have dinner out on the fields. But the chances are, and especially if you're a school kid, you'd go home, you'd have that big main meal to sustain you, then you'd go back to school, then you'd come home in the evening and you might have tea. Yeah. You might have supper. Yeah.

Mel (01:03:23):

That's my cousins were brought up in mainland Portugal. And they would have a two hour gap in the middle of the day where they'd leave school at 11 and go back at like half one, two, even three hours sometimes. 'cause They'd go and have like, lunch is the main meal of the day. And then in the evening it would be something like a soup or maybe like a sandwich or a toastie or something really light. Well, so that's exactly not that light, but

Annie  (01:03:43):

It's this 18th century pattern of eating here.

Mel (01:03:44):

So the Europeans still do that. Like their, that lunch is their main meal. Yeah. And when

Annie  (01:03:48):

The English went abroad in the 19th century and discovered that people in Europe were still a lot of the time doing that, they were aghast. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. There were letters between Queen Victoria and her daughter and Victoria's going, whoa, that's really early to eat. I hope you're all right. <Laugh>. I do make sure that you have something in evening. Do you want some rusts? Shall I get the children to send you some cake <laugh>? And there's this real worry. Yeah. And yet of course the French eat their main meal in the evening at eight o'clock. And eight o'clock is when everybody eats. Because then television starts at nine. But they also have often a main meal at, at lunchtime as well. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And you know, one of the reasons that the French suffer less from the kind of snackage creep of, of England and Scotland and America is because actually if you have a full meal at lunchtime, then you're sustained

Mel (01:04:34):

Until

Annie  (01:04:34):

Yeah. Yeah. But then you add in gutta for the children, which is the equivalent of tea or afternoon tea here, or Luu five o'clock as it's sometime cool in French because that's when the English would have their afternoon tea. Yeah. So for the French Afternoon Tea Lu five o'clock 'cause it's very associated with Englishness. Wow. And you start to see the way in which meal patterns creep and the way in which different nations again are down from

Mel (01:04:56):

The dot. Yeah.

Annie  (01:04:57):

And yeah. And you see the fact that actually the British influencers spread out as well as British food being a magpie of things coming in. It, it is just a one way system actually. Well

Mel (01:05:07):

That's actually a really nice way to conclude our episode, I think. Yeah. That, that statement.

Perry (01:05:11):

Yeah. It is nice.

Annie  (01:05:12):

Embrace the, the Britishness spreading. Yeah. I know that there are now two British restaurants in Paris.

Mel (01:05:18):

Really? Oh, that, yeah.

Annie  (01:05:19):

That call Frankin of the, of the Hogan Dining Rooms has just, the Pi King has just opened a British restaurant. Yeah. British restaurant sounds very wartime, doesn't it? Because it does. He's he's a what, what else would you call it though? Let's, let's, let's re reclaim that term.

Perry (01:05:35):

I love British food. <Laugh>. I read honestly like I, my girl, my my fiance always laughs at me because I'm, I'm like such a proponent of it. People always say they hate it. And I'm like,

Annie  (01:05:46):

But what do you hate about that?

Perry (01:05:46):

Sausage rolls pies. Like Yeah. All of this stuff. I mean I know that. Yeah. I love

Mel (01:05:49):

The stud and bad

Annie  (01:05:50):

British food is really bad. I horrible sausage roll with the squidgy sausage meat. That's more sort of cat food than anything is, is horrible. But a really good pie. Yeah.

Perry (01:06:01):

Do you know even like British fast food, I love, do you know what I love going about England? Gres. I look forward to it. You've lost. I'm like, I can't wait to go to England. I'm gonna eat

Mel (01:06:09):

A sausage. Annie's out. Annie's out people.

Annie  (01:06:12):

But good fish and chips is sublime. When you've got batter on the fish that cracks like glass and you've got chips. None of this French frying nonsense. Oh yeah. Big thick chips. Loads and loads of salts. Mushy peas. Yeah. Although the mushy peas, you always have to remember to open stir before you start the rest. 'cause Otherwise you finish the meal and the mushy peas are still volcanic. Yeah.

Mel (01:06:31):

I'm so hungry now. I know. I know.

Annie  (01:06:34):

But you know, I think also Seit puddings, if I had to sum up quintessentially British food, a state and kidney pudding. Mm. Like a proper or a ve and ham pudding. Properly steamed in a seit crust. I love a soit crust. So pastry is so easy. Never

Mel (01:06:47):

Tried. Nice.

Perry (01:06:48):

I just dump any pie? Any pie Dumping?

Mel (01:06:51):

Yeah. I don think, think I've ever really tried a proper dumpling? No. Have you've got kitchen here. Are we gonna start rusting? Lots of dumplings. Don't

Perry (01:06:57):

Feel,

Mel (01:06:58):

Are we gonna have a cookie lesson with Alex?

Perry (01:07:00):

You know what, that'd be so good to have one of the, at the, the food exhibition wouldn't have like a kitchen and do I

Mel (01:07:04):

Think we looked into it, but logistics were tricky to make food in an exhibition. Yeah. It's

Annie  (01:07:08):

Also awful trying to feed the public examples because then you end up being a caterer and it's

Mel (01:07:12):

Hard. Yeah, it's a tricky

Annie  (01:07:12):

One. But you've got a cafe there,

Mel (01:07:14):

Aren't you? We do. Yeah. Nice. Massive invade their kitchen. Well you could

Annie  (01:07:17):

Just suggest then that they put on a dumpling or tea <laugh> and really Herbie dumpling, something that's been steamed and then potentially baked so that you can slice it and you get that crispy outside.

Mel (01:07:28):

Sounds delicious.

Annie  (01:07:29):

That sounds so good. If you want, here's a recipe. There's a recipe for fashionable apple dumplings, which I'm always going on and on and on, on about. But it's one of my absolute all time favorites and it's dead simple. So if you wanna see how great British food can be, take an apple and a good one. Not a sort of,

Mel (01:07:43):

Do you recommend a type of apple?

Annie  (01:07:45):

Well, I would recommend something like a peas. Good nonsuch, but since you can't get them anymore thanks to the thi market, it's only selling five varieties of apple. I would go for a bra burn or a, you could even use a golden or one of the various wonder varieties, but not a sort of Red Delicious or something. You don't want anything that's too modern and crisp. You want something that's a good all rounder just hollow out the middle. So just core it, fill it with marmalade or mince meat all round here. You could fill it with black butter. Black

Mel (01:08:10):

Butter.

Annie  (01:08:11):

A good one. A very good one. Then you wanna make a sue it crust. So in old money it's eight ounces of flour and three ounces of seit. So what's that in modern? It's 225 grams of flour and 85 grams of seit. You want and a pinch of salt. Put that in a bowl. You don't, probably won't need all the amounts. Depends how many apples you've got. Put that in a bowl with some cold water. Mix it up into a, a, just a generic pastry. It should just be dry ish to the touch. Mm-Hmm. A bit tacky rather than sticky. Really easy. You don't need cold hands. You don't need to rest it. You don't need to do anything with the CIC crusta. You've made it up. Roll it all out. Wrap your apples up in this CIC crust. So that amount of ci crust, probably do about 4, 5, 6 apples, something like that.

Annie  (01:08:52):

Then you wanna get a knitted dish cloth. But if you can't get knitted dish cloth, then just use a pudding cloth. So just a piece of detail will do the knitted dish cloth is the key to it being fashionable though. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> you wrap it all up in that you wanna, you know, wet the dish cloth and then put a little bit of flour on it and just shake it out. Tie that around your apple. And then you're gonna boil them for about 45 minutes, which will cook the soic crust and cook the apple and heat through your black butter or marmalade or whatever. It's in the middle. Then you're gonna peel off your dishcloth and your apple dumplings will look like they're knitted because they've taken on. Oh wow.

Mel (01:09:24):

Dishcloth.

Annie  (01:09:25):

That

Mel (01:09:25):

Sounds

Annie  (01:09:26):

So cool. Now that's how you'd serve them in the Victorian area. Just like that. You cut them open, hot or cold, they're fine. 'cause The apple will have sort of slightly become melty and everyth. I love that. Yeah, love. I would do them with custard or ice cream at that point. Oh. But if you want a build, a modern build, because recipes evolve. You put them in the oven at that point quite hot, and you just flash them for about 15 minutes or so till the outside goes crispy. Because at that point you get a crispy outside crust, you get a gooey, beautiful, fluffy soit crust. You then get your apple, which is of course whole and hasn't disintegrated because you haven't used anything stupid like a bramley. Yeah. Then you get the crispy hit from whatever's in the middle, that punch of the marmalade or the sourness of the black butter. So you've got sweet, you've got savory, you've got sour, you've got everything in one. And text texturally, you've got crispy, you've got goo, you've got, I mean it's just, it has everything. And then if you've got ice cream on top of horse, you've got cold and hot.

Mel (01:10:16):

<Laugh>. My mouth is actually, you're so good at like selling so good at explaining

Annie  (01:10:20):

It. Exactly that point. You go, oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. The Victorians did know what they were doing.

Mel (01:10:24):

Yeah. Oh my god. I'm good. I feel like we need like a part two of this episode <laugh>, because there's so much more to talk about with we're the dishes out, you know? Yeah. We can taste them. We should do like a tasting session. I love that.

Annie  (01:10:36):

That would be quite good fun, wouldn't it? Do you wanna come

Mel (01:10:38):

Back? Yeah, yeah. Take it. Get, just sit up a ho. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Annie  (01:10:43):

Talk pan. Let's just do,

Mel (01:10:45):

And we'll just, and you can describe everything you're doing today.

Annie  (01:10:47):

We've got a three day special. Yeah.

Mel (01:10:48):

<Laugh>. Yes. Yeah. And Meam Perry are not gonna fit through the door <laugh>. Yeah. Oh my God. And

Annie  (01:10:53):

That's all right. Because that's what Corsetry and a very physical lifestyle is all about. Absolutely.

Mel (01:10:58):

Oh, well thank you so much. Thank for coming. Thanks very much. Pleasure to have you Annie. Thank you. I can't wait to have lunch now. <Laugh>, if you enjoy today's episode, don't forget to click on the subscribe button for more. Make sure to

Perry (01:11:12):

Check out Annie's publications, including the official Downton Abbey cookbook and the greedy Queen eating with Victorian.