Food - Bee Wilson hopes Charlotte Bronte ate better than Jane Eyre
In childhood, the miseries of bad food are amplified. Every lump in the custard rolls across the tongue like a tennis ball. An off piece of fish tastes as if the whole sea has gone bad. Grease hovers like an insult on top of mince. Hunger, too, is greater in childhood, but even so, many of the slops fed to children are just too yucky to eat.
Sensitive children everywhere can relate to Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's vulnerable heroine. The cruel rations she endures as a child at Lowood School rank among the most vivid descriptions of food in English literature. Who, having once read about it, could forget the burnt porridge she is given for breakfast? Charlotte drew on experience in writing that "burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it". Jane's ordeal continues: "the spoons were moved slowly: I saw each girl taste her food and try to swallow it; but in most cases the effort was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over but none had breakfasted."
As you will know if you've read it, things get worse. Half a slice of bread with coffee for tea, with a scrape of butter kept as a treat for Sundays only. An oatcake and water for dinner. The sole respite comes from "a good-sized seed cake" supplied by the angelic Miss Temple, which tastes like "nectar and ambrosia". But the brutal daily diet leaves the girls weak and susceptible. Jane's dear friend Helen Burns (based on Charlotte's sister Maria) dies of consumption, a loss Jane only really recovers from in the saturnine arms of Mr Rochester.
Little Charlotte Bronte was as well-acquainted with an ill-treated stomach as was her creation Jane. Natural fastidiousness made her rebel at the rancid smell of school food. Perhaps she inherited from her father, the Reverend Patrick Bronte, a fear of dyspepsia (he always dined alone, to help his digestion). But you wouldn't have to be very fussy to object to the dirty meat and rice boiled in rainwater served at Cowan's Bridge School. Mrs Gaskell says the milk there "was often 'bingy', to use a country expression for a kind of taint far worse than sourness". Stews contained dubious alien bodies. Charlotte's small appetite shrank. She drank her evening coffee in a mug smeared with tears.
Once home at Haworth parsonage, as a grown-up, Charlotte's diet improved. There was a dear old housekeeper, Tabby, who made three wholesome meals a day: legs of mutton and potatoes boiled "to a sort of vegetable glue". There were famous sponge cakes, and good pies. It sounds like the Victorian equivalent of "comfort food" - but then, Charlotte must have needed all the comfort she could get, watching her siblings die, first Branwell, then Emily, then Anne, before she, too, succumbed to "a dreadful sickness" when "the very sight of food occasioned nausea".
She died before she was 40. Villagers mourned the kind lady who had brought them Christmas spice-cakes, and puddings. Perhaps pies, too. Florence White, the great chronicler of regional dishes, says in her Good Things in England that the Bronte sisters enjoyed Haworth bilberry pies, made with the juicy flesh of baked apples. It is a consoling thought.
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Bilberry pies
Not having any fresh bilberries to hand, I drained a 454g jar of Polish bilberries (saving the juice for poaching pears). Bake three large apples for 40 minutes with butter and sugar, scrape off the pulp and mix with the bilberries, adding sugar to taste. Put in a pie plate, thinly lined with shortcrust, brush the top-crust with egg white and sprinkle with caster sugar. Bake for 15 minutes at 220 C, then another 15 minutes at 190 C. Serve with cream to keep out the wuthering cold.
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