my friends: it's been exactly 2 million years since i last used my high dpi gaming mouse to click my tumblr post button. i'm sorry about this! i have no excuse. nothing has really changed in my life—i just got distracted by (then obsessed with) lanyard culture and then i accidentally ate a few of those capsules that grow into little sponge animals when you drop them in water.
in addition to conveying a sponge rhino through my bowels AND inventing some pretty dope basket weave knots, i've written some things that i'd like to share with you. the following short piece is about the intersection of my second and third favourite pleasures: literature and food. if either of these stimuli make your top ten list as well, you may enjoy it...
How big a deal was Charles Dickens in 1842? This is the question I asked a professor friend of mine to get some perspective on the two epic, though wildly different New York dinner parties held in Dickens' honor in 1842 and then 25 years later in 1867. "He was the biggest deal. If he visited your city, the press would scribble about it for days, even weeks afterwards." replied my friend.
"He was a Kim Kardashian?"
"When Dickens first came to New York in 1842, he was only 29 yet he'd already published several bestsellers including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He was a prolific wunderkind that everyone, everywhere was going bonkers over."
"Bieber?"
"Another consideration is that New York was a place to be in the mid 19th century but it wasn't the place to be. To get there back then, to get anywhere, it took a long time. Dickens only visited the U.S. twice for a reason."
"So…like if Justin Timberlake went to Kolkata."
"Sure. Charles Dickens visiting New York in 1842 is like Justin Timberlake visiting Kolkata in 2015. But to keep the metaphor tight, Justin Timberlake will have do the song-and-dance equivalent of writing A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and ten other literary blockbusters by 2040 to be anything near what Dickens' return trip to America was like in 1867."
This is the tale of two dinners. Each was lavish beyond measure. Each included the crustiest of America's upper crust. Each honored Charles Dickens, the Justin Timberlake of the Victorian era. Both meals were paragons of haute cuisine—yet the dinners themselves were poles apart. Comparing the two reveals a fundamental shift in American dining, indeed a fundamental shift in America itself.
Imagine: you're the chairperson of Kolkata's hospitality committee and you just received word from new Mayor Sovan Chatterjee that Justin Timberlake will be visiting your city on his upcoming press tour. What will you serve for dinner?
If you're anything like Chef Gardner* and Mayor Robert Morris, you'll serve the most recherché ingredients you can get your sticky fingers on: truffles, ornamented Westphalia hams, stewed terrapin*, and larded sweet bread. You'll present a soup course with three soups, a fish course with three fish, a boiled course*, a roast course (containing cow, sheep, goose, turkey, bear, and castrated roosters), and a cold dishes course*. At this point, your guests might assume you're just about to wind down to cheeses and melons—but not you, you have over 25 more plates in store—you're only just getting started. Your entrées will require subtitles: macaroni à la Italienne (Italian-style macaroni); vol-au-vent, aux huîtres (oyster pies); and petites pâtés à la Bechamelle [sic] (small gravy patties). You'll spur gout sufferers to relapse with your battery of veal kidneys in Madeira wine, bread-crumbed mutton chops au jus, and larded beef filets. And still, there's the matter of dessert: all manner of puffs, pies, pastries, puddings and something called Madeira jelly. And none of this mentions the edible set-pieces: the pyramids of crystallized candy, spanish macaroni, and other assorted sweetmeats towering in the corner, double-dog-daring each guest to come and take a bite.
Conspicuously absent* from the bill of fare however are vegetables and fresh fruit. Produce only appears as a garnish or gravy: sorrel; olives; peas; and tomato, caper, and celery sauces (this is a comprehensive list). Though fresh fruit is out of the question due to the Februaryness of the banquet (apples do turn up in the puffs, coconuts in the candy, and cranberries in the pies). In the book Delmonico's, Lately Thomas writes, "Literary and promiscuous describes this agglomeration of things good and dreary to eat. The keynote was abundance—profusion—over-abundance —a prodigality of edibles, crudely grouped and offering little basic variety. No one could sample everything, and no one was expected to; Falstaff would have belched at the challenge."
The 1842 Dickens dinner was the Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End of tendered banquets. It was a spectacular blockbuster that reveled in how blockbustery it could be*. It was was an over-produced hodge-podge of oddly arranged ingredients, a pastiche of confused sources, a maze of throw-away tangents and no clear transition between its major components. The guests* finished the event feeling stuffed yet never fully satisfied and were left wondering what it was that they just spent several hours doing.
The banquet itself may seem ghastly to a modern eater but it was the very archetype of fine American dining in its day and its hosts were heavily congratulated on pulling off such a lavish feast. An account printed the following day in the New York Herald states that Dickens "was in high spirits, laughed heartily, ate heartily, drank wine with . . . Washington Irving, the Mayor and…everybody that asked him, and that was over a hundred." Indeed, Dickens was outwardly grateful for such a warm reception and gave every indication that he relished his dinner in New York and tour of the U.S. But then he returned to England and wrote two scathing and somewhat bilious books set in America, Martin Chuzzlewit, and American Notes. This is how Chuzzlewit describes the particulars of a New York Dinner, one that seems suspiciously familiar:
All the knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost in self-defense, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast time to-morrow morning…The poultry…disappeared as rapidly as if every bird had…flown in desperation down a human throat. The oysters, stewed and pickled, leaped from their capacious reservoirs, and slid by scores into the mouths of the assembly…Great heaps of indigestible matter melted away as ice before the sun. It was a solemn and an awful thing to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges; feeding, not themselves, but broods of nightmares, who were continually standing at livery within them. Spare men, with lank and rigid cheeks, came out unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, and glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry…[There remained a single] comfort—it was very soon over.
[cue record scratch]
Twenty-six years elapsed before Dickens returned to America. In that time, the U.S. grew by seven territories and nine states. The ticking cogs of industrialization had rolled out of the Northeast via channels carved from telegraph wires and railroad ties. The U.S. had wrestled Texas away from Mexico and at one dark point even operated as two separate governments. In the time since Dickens last set foot on an American gangplank, the country had gone through puberty. Had the culinary scene grown up as well? Would Dickens be welcomed back after making such ungenerous observations (at best) and spiteful sneers (at worst)? And why would he even want to rear his head in the place he lampooned so severely? The answers are yes, yes, and money—Justin Timberlake had grown in popularity in the intervening years, but so too had Kolkata.
When Dickens arrived in New York in 1867, he was sick, secretly broke, and two years away from death. He was also more celebrated than ever and his American hosts were eager for a do-over, after all, the international perception of American fine dining would be at stake. The storied Delmonico's Restaurant, then the finest dining establishment North America, now a culinary legend, was chosen as the location for the extravaganza. The fate of the New York hospitality industry would be left in the hands of Delmonico's chef de cuisine, the great Charles Ranhofer*.
If abundance was the keyword of the 1842 dinner, refinement* was the word of 1868. Where the first dinner had sixty-odd, incongruous plates, the second featured a heavily-edited menu of thirty. Dishes like quartiers d'artichauts Lyonnaise (artichokes), épinards au velouté (spinach soup), and petits pois à la Anglaise (English peas) are still just as intricate as their '42 predecessors, but they also mark a return to vegetables, and offer a balance not found in the Atkins-tastic first dinner. Lately Thomas chronicles some other major improvements,
Symmetry has been imposed upon variety, the meal charted along a definite line of development; it is no longer a superfluity of abundance. The sauces contain shadings that the palate could catch...The clumsy crutch of two languages has been thrown aside, for New York's educated diners had passed that primer stage. There are a multitude of literary allusions…a soup named for Dumas, chopped lamb à la Walter Scott, grouse à la Fenimore Cooper…timbales à la Dickens...And not only are the diners carried by easy transitions from course to course, they are so wafted in a way to reanimate flagging appetite. The concluding stages, especially, are beyond the scope of the simple pastries of 1842, when two versions of that insipidity, blanc mange ("rose color" and "almond"), were a pale alternative to repetitious "puffs,"…and "plum puddings, blazing." "Madeira jelly" would melt with confusion before "corbeille de biscuits Chantilly" (1868), and those jolly "apple puffs" would be country cousins beside "lait d'amandes rubané au chocolat"
While waiters poured sherrys, champagnes and perfect coffees and the guests enjoyed confections by the ones, twos, threes, and petit fours, Dickens arose to say a few words. Would he renew his negative opinions? Would he pretend he never had them in the first place? Or would he just talk about his latest book and why everyone in the room should buy four copies?
With the poise of Lady Dedlock and polish of Dr. Marigold, Dickens addressed his audience and apologized for his prior behavior,
"…on my return to England…[I resolve] to record that wherever I have been [in America], in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. [Applause.] This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. [Tremendous applause.]
The event was a smashing success. As a critic later pointed out, the guest of honor had eaten crow for dinner even though it was not on the menu. Four days later, Dickens left for England just as I.R.S. G-men were about to nab him for not declaring $180,000 in income from his American book tour.
[Record scratch resolves to Bourne Identity style techno music]
Whereas the 1842 Dickens dinner was the story of Charlie and the Cheesecake Factory, the follow-up was something more like Charlie and Glass Elevator full of French Laundry. A critical adjustment was underway, not only was the New York culinary scene maturing, so too was the scrappy country known as the United States.
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Footnotes
A highly-regarded caterer of his time, but not so highly regarded that his first name is locatable via the usual modern methods.
Turtle!
Does "boiled beef à la mode" mean what I think it means?
A cold hare patty sounds like something I would fish out of a shower drain. I'd rather eat oysters in aspic jelly and I have a shellfish allergy.
A further indication of the over-the-top, not quite thought-out atmosphere of the banquet can be found in the twelve marble busts that decorated the room: (two founding fathers, four of history's greatest Romantic poets, two famous Roman orators, two deities, a Supreme Court Justice, and—the guest of honor, Charles Dickens.)
From a modern perspective at any rate. Or, on second thought, maybe not.
And what of Dickens' many groupies? Were they allowed to dine with the assembly? According to Thomas, no. The men "were honored by the semipresence of a number of ladies, who sat in a group around Mrs. Dickens and through the open door of an anteroom were permitted to witness the festivities as far as was consistent with propriety." [Delmonico's]
This is also the tale of two Charleses. Chef Charles Ranhofer would go on to invent Lobster Newberg, popularize Baked Alaska, and introduce U.S. diners to a buttery fruit known as the alligator pear (which is today called the avocado*)—the 1868 Dickens dinner was the Timberlake of literature meeting the Timberlake of cuisine.
* a replacement name that sounds much more benign until a friend of yours points out that avocado comes from the nahuatl word for testicle.
And what of the decor? Did the same head-scratching busts preside over this second dinner? Thankfully no, though a New York World reporter does mention that, "Confections were converted into…tempting pictures of the most familiar characters of the great novelist…Sairy Gamp and Betsy Frig and Poor Joe and Captain Cuttle blossomed out of charlotte russe, and Tiny Tim was discovered in pâté de foie gras."
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Sources
Bennett, James Gordon. "The Grand Literary, Fashionable, Legal, Judicial and Miscellaneous Dinner to Boz on Friday Night, at the City Hotel." The New York Herald. Feb. 20 1842.
Dickens, Charles. Speeches, Letters, and sayings of Charles Dickens. New York, 1870.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzelwit. New York, 1884.
Kitton, Frederic. Charles Dickens: His Life, Writings, and Personality. London, 1902.
Thomas, Lately. Delmonico's: A Century of Splendor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967.
Wilson, Rufus Rockwell. "Foreign Authors in America." The Bookman. Vol XIII, New York, 1901.
last fall, with the aid of an attractive botanist who has the hots for my older brother, i began perfecting a 2,400 year-old recipe for gruel. there are older food recipes* out there but this one is certainly the most precise. it contains over 25 ingredients (one of which is fine sand) and takes days to make (mostly because gathering seeds is highly time consuming).
you might be wondering how such an old recipe was recorded—and the answer is neither parchment nor clay. in fact this particular gruel recipe was reverse-engineered from the stomach contents of a murdered european man from the age of iron. because his body was preserved for posterity in bog water, modern scientists have been able to determine (down to the smallest kernel) the type of gruel that the bogman had for dinner—and the answer is danish weedseed gruel.
i have written about the bogman and given my own recipe for his gruel over at the awl. if you're so inclined, you can make your own tonight—you'll just have to fly to denmark with your gleaning basket to do so*.
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*for instance, check out this 3900 year-old sumerian beer-making poem.
*the fine print: some of the ingredients may cause photosensitivity and blistering of the skin.
what does elephant taste like? some intrepid individual over at the awl searches through every single book on the google books website and gets an answer for you.
As anyone educated by "The Flintstones" knows, one of prehistoric man’s favorite meals was barbecued mastodon ribs. Paleolithic cave paintings seem to support the claim (though whether the ribs were prepared with a dry rub or marinade is still a hot topic in archaeological journals). In fact, evidence suggests that early hunters found their way to the new world in the first place by chasing mammoth herds as they fanned across continents. So how did the cow, an ugly-looking milk monster from Vermont, become the utilitarian protein of the masses while the elephant, the mammoth’s lumbering grand-nephew, is only ever eaten in animal cracker form? The long answer involves section headings like animal lifespan, infrastructure, social taboos, endangered species lists and insurmountable husbandry challenges.
The short answer, however, is simple: the elephant has the strength of a hundred Danny Trejos. Add in its trunk and a set of thrashing tusks, and it's best not to mess with one. But back in the day, certain adventurous individuals did eat elephant flesh and live to tell the tale for our vicarious benefit. Here are their wild accounts. READ MORE
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special thanks to aaron cohen for his help in gathering information.
who among us hasn't fantasized about having a delectible dish named in their honour? i for one tried to convince my college roommate that peanut-butterfinger-and-jelly à la raynor (an open-faced pb&j with butterfinger crumbles on texas toast) would be the next big thing™. i doubt that pb&j à la raynor can be found on the menus of better restaurants, though here is a list of dishes that can (or could):
Lamprey à la Rabelais · a preparation of lamprey eels · named for François Rabelais, the French satirist.
Lobster cutlets à la Shelley · fried lobster cutlets with mushrooms and cream sauce · named in honour of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Omelette Arnold Bennett · an unfolded omelette with smoked haddock · invented at the Savoy Hotel for the writer Arnold Bennett.
Omelette André Theuriet · an omelette with truffles and asparagus · named after French novelist and poet André Theuriet.
Salade à la Dumas · a potato and beet salad · created by Alexandre Dumas.
Schillerlocken · cream-filled puff pastry cornets · named after the curly hair of the German poet Friedrich von Schiller.
Timbales à la Irving · a preparation of of minced meat in a rich sauce baked in a small pastry mold · named for Washington Irving.
Turkey-Grenades à la Jules Verne · turkey and rice in a puff pastry in a cream sauce · named for Jules Verne.
Veal pie à la Dickens · veal in pie form · created upon the occasion of Charles Dickens visiting Delmonico's in New York City.
Wild Duckling à la Walter Scott · duck with Dundee marmalade and whisky · named for the Scottish writer Walter Scott.
Bisque of Shrimps à la Melville · prawn soup · named for Herman Melville.
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pictured: schillerlocken
note: several of these dishes were created by chef-to-the-stars, charles ranhofer. if you are interested in attempting to make them, many of their recipes can be found in ranhofer's encyclopædic cookbook, the epicurean (1894).
