Food - Bee Wilsonon the animal in Beatrix Potter
There are many books dealing with the experience of eating, fewer with the experience of being eaten. And in this second category, none are finer than those of Beatrix Potter.
"'Now, my dears,' said old Mrs Rabbit one morning, 'you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.'" These straightforward lines, uttered by a portly bourgeois gentlerabbit in a blue dress, are just as frightening as anything in Thomas Harris. Run, Peter, run! Don't let Mr McGregor have his fun! "One, two, three, four! five! six leetle rabbits!" exclaims the sinister farmer as he drops the flopsy bunnies into a sack in another story. What a relief it is when Benjamin Bunny saves his offspring and replaces them with "three rotten vegetable marrows, an old blacking-brush and two decayed turnips".
In Potter's world, appetites are rapacious and unstoppable. Peter must eat his radishes and lettuces, Mr McGregor must have his rabbit. Ribby the cat can eat five hot muffins at a sitting. Old Mrs Rabbit carries home currant buns in a basket. The two bad mice are so greedy that they hack away at a plaster ham from the doll's house until they break it, "'It is as hard as the hams at the cheesemonger's,' said Hunca Munca."
There is a brutal great chain of being at work, in which the losers are geese, rabbits, mice and pigs (of all Potter's animals, Pigling Bland is the most vulnerable); the winners are foxes, rats, cats, dogs and humans. Dogs and cats are both meat-eaters, but not of the same meat. The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan is about what happens when a pussy-cat dishes up a pie "of the most delicate and tender mouse, minced up with bacon" to a dog who prefers veal and ham. Miscegenation between the species will always end in tears, as Jemima Puddleduck would realise if only she weren't " a simpleton". Her dinner party with the "bushy long-tailed gentleman", for which she brings "sage and thyme and mint and two onions" for her own stuffing, is a Sadeian seduction masked by dreadful politeness. Ginger and Pickles, a tom-cat and a terrier who keep a shop, salivate at the mice and kittens who buy their wares, but hold their bloody impulses in. '"It would never do to eat our own customers. They would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchitt's.'"
Being eaten is usually also a code for something else - the horrors of the big bad world. Mrs Tabitha Twitchitt is an "anxious parent", whose worst fears are confirmed when her son Thomas is abducted by rats - Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria - and made into "a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding". As his sisters Moppet and Mitten hide in a flour barrel and an empty jar, fat little Tom Kitten is rolled in a bundle and tied in "very hard knots". "First they smeared him with butter and then they rolled him with dough". But even rats are fastidious in Beatrix Potter. Samuel Whiskers suspects the string may prove indigestible. Thank God, he never gets to try it.
Tom Kitten pudding
I have found currants to be a very acceptable substitute for cat. Preheat the oven to 180 C. Butter four cups. Mix 100g currants with 140g breadcrumbs, 50g self-raising flour, 90g shredded suet, 50g sugar, some grated nutmeg and a pinch of salt. Mix two eggs with one tbsp milk and stir into the mixture. Pour into the cups and bake in a bain-marie for 20-25 minutes. You can, if you prefer, boil the whole thing in a floured muslin bag (for one hour), but boiled pudding, like string, has a tendency to be indigestible.
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