HUNGRY LIKE V. WOOLF

You know me, I disagree with Virginia Woolf on most things – Joyce and Lawrence for instance - and she’s obviously completely and utterly wrong when she writes in A Room of One’s Own, that novelists, ‘seldom spare a word for what was eaten.’ What novelists had she been reading? In the works of Dickens for instance, according to Margaret Lane in ‘Dickens on the Hearth’ there are 35 breakfasts, 32 dinners, 10 luncheons, 10 teas and 8 suppers in The Pickwick Papers alone. Virginia Woolf wasn’t keen on Charles Dickens, so perhaps she didn’t read him very closely. 

Virginia Woolf holding an invisible sandwich.

I wonder if she ever read Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories.  It seems unlikely although (in one of those literary confluences which in the end are too common to be genuinely surprising) the first book length collection of William stories was published in 1922, the same year as Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (also The Waste Land).

If she did read Just William I think she’d have disapproved, but I imagine  Dickens might have rather enjoyed William – a character painted in broad strokes, though never quite what he seems and never entirely predictable, and much defined by food.

Yes, I’ve been revisiting William, another combination of comfort reading and comfort.  In a story titled ‘A Question of Grammar,’ William and the Outlaws raid his family’s pantry.  ‘Ginger seized the remnants of cold ham and picked the bone.  George with great gusto drank a whole jar of cream.  William and Douglas between them ate a gooseberry pie. Henry ate a whole currant cake. Each foraged fir himself. They ate two bowls of cold vegetables, a joint of cold beef, two pots of honey, three dozens oranges, three loaves and two pots of dripping. They experimented upon lard, onions and raw sausages …’

This is wonderful and now I discover, thanks to an amenuensis, there’s a book titled Just William’s Cookin’ Book.

It’s an odd one to be sure.  It was published in 1970, as a tie-in for a television series of William, and it wasn't written by Richmal Crompton.  In another confluence this was just one year after Richmal Crompton died.  Her last book William the Lawless was published posthumously, also in 1970.

Part of the problem with Just William’s Cookin’ Book is that if the fictional William actually did any cooking it’d involve lard, raw sausage and very possibly frogs, and obviously they can’t put that out as a children’s book.  And since they want it to function as an actual cookbook there are some recipes here that I think would have been very alien to William and his family and his family’s cook: lasagna, moussaka and croque monsieur among them.  And yet, and yet …

There’s also a ‘recipe’ not that you’d need one, for Cheese Crumpets, a great standby when I was growing up and still a serviceable treat even now, like cheese on toast, substituting a crumpet for the bread. 

 Inspired by William, I made some.  I should have left them under the grill a bit longer so that the cheese melted more, but I was too eager.

Now it so happens that I’ve been reading Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and boy is it a wild ride in all kind of ways. Here, in his office, Mr. Grewgious is planning dinner, saying to his assistant Bazzard, ‘And perhaps you wouldn’t mind stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth.  For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dishes that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing that may happen to be on the bill of fare – in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.’  This is dinner for three.  William Brown would be salivating.

The 1935 movie of Drood.