Food
Dr Johnson was so riveted by his food that "while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible". Until he was sated, he would not speak or respond to anything said at table. As Boswell observes, "this could not but be disgusting". Indeed not. But Johnson (1709-85) could do nothing by halves. He could fast on pease pudding or else gorge like an epicurean pig, "but he could not use moderately".
The lexicographer of food whom I discussed last week was indeed a magnificent eater. Many of the choicest details in Boswell's Life of Johnson pertain to comestibles. Here is the man of letters relishing "roasted kid", or being helped to "fine veal" with gravy and stuffing with a squeeze of orange and lemon zest. Johnson weirdly carried orange peel in his pockets and drank upwards of 16 cups of tea at a sitting. His friend Mrs Thrale owned one teapot that held three gallons. Johnson's belly was no less capacious, and he filled it attentively, "for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else".
"Those who beheld with wonder how much he ate upon all occasions when his dinner was to his taste, could not easily conceive what he must have meant by hunger." Yet the doctor from Lichfield was peculiarly self-conscious, even huffy about his eating. He hated anyone commenting on his consumption and bristled at being pressed to eat anything he didn't want. Boswell recalls how a certain Lady Lochbuy incurred Johnson's displeasure by zealously offering him cold sheep's head for breakfast. "'No, Madam,' said he, with a tone of surprise and anger."
Johnson saw himself as a philosopher of food, not a coarse greedy-guts. "I could write a better book of cookery than has ever yet been written," he boasted. Simplicity was the key - the reduction of 50 ingredients to five. He would advise on "the best butcher's meat" and fowls and vegetables "and then how to roast and boil and compound". Johnson announced that women "cannot make a good book of cookery" - unlike philosophers. But while his brilliant book never materialised, he continued to scoff at the unphilosophical offerings of female hostesses.
Mrs Piozzi said that Johnson's "favourite dainties" were "a leg of pork boiled till it dropped off the bone, a veal-pye with plums and sugar, or the outside cut of a salt buttock of beef". Other friends, too, remembered his fondness for "a buttock of beef", a cut that sounds lip-smackingly gluttonous, if not faintly repellent, especially if we picture Johnson's veins popping as he ate it - though it is really only rump steak: "the part near the tail", as he defined it.
To bake a buttock piece of beef
(This is adapted from Elizabeth Ayrton's The Cookery of England, from a manuscript of 1765.)
1-1.25 kg rump steak, a roasting piece
300ml claret mixed with 150ml red wine vinegar
500g short or puff pastry
1/ 2 lemon, 1tbsp cornflour
Marinate the beef for 24-48 hours in the liquids with salt, pepper and nutmeg. Drain and pat dry. Encase in the pastry, seasoned with fresh salt, pepper and nutmeg and glaze with egg yolk or milk. Give it 15 minutes at 220oC and then 30 minutes at 180oC, covering with foil if necessary. Reduce the marinade by rapid boiling, thicken with the cornflour mixed with water, and season with lemon to taste. Serve this sauce separately, and press no one to take it if reluctant. The most Johnsonian cut is the end piece.
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