THE (PICKWICK) CLUB SANDWICH, KIND OF

Over the New Year we were in Ipswich for an afternoon and had a sandwich at Pickwicks Coffee and Tea House.  

What you see above is two half shared sandwiches, one a tuna melt, one a cheese and chorizo.  On the day, at that hour, they hit the spot.

 

You know I haven’t read so very much Dickens, (as a boy I was alienated by worthy BBC tv adpatations) but somehow we all know that The Pickwick Papers is a jolly, rollicking and full of food. 

 

The word sandwich or sandwiches appears 8 times in finished text. There’s no mention of tuna or chorizo, though there is a reference to German sausage. The best cluster of sandwich mentions is this one, as Mr Pickwick boards a coach.

 

‘Heads, heads—take care of your heads!’ cried the loquacious stranger, as they came out under the low archway, which in those days formed the entrance to the coach-yard. ‘Terrible place—dangerous work—other day—five children—mother—tall lady, eating sandwiches—forgot the arch—crash—knock—children look round—mother’s head off—sandwich in her hand—no mouth to put it in—head of a family off—shocking, shocking! Looking at Whitehall, sir?—fine place—little window—somebody else’s head off there, eh, sir?—he didn’t keep a sharp look-out enough either—eh, Sir, eh?’

‘I am ruminating,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘on the strange mutability of human affairs.’

 

Well, it’s something we all do once in a while, sometimes over a sandwich.

 

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.

NICHOLSONS & COBBLERS

I’ve been reading Nicholson Baker’s filthy new novel House of Holes.  Above are respectively the UK and US covers by which you might judge it.  It certainly contains lots of sex and madness, but not much food, and mouths are generally involved with things other than eating.  Still the book reminds us – if you need reminding - that a sherry cobbler was served to Charles Dickens when he made his speaking tour of America in 1842.  Baker, or rather his characters, also tell us it was the first drink made with crushed ice, that Dickens loved it and had his character Martin Chuzzlewit drink one, and that in 1850 Dickens bought five pounds’ worth of Wenham Lake ice, the transatlantic ice trade then being big business.

The passage from Martin Chuzzlewit runs as follows.  It seems the term ice cube had yet to be invented.

He produced a very large tumbler, piled up to the brim with little blocks of clear transparent ice, through which one or two thin slices of lemon, and a golden liquid of delicious appearance, appealed from the still depths below, to the loving eye of the spectator.

 ‘What do you call this?’ said Martin.

But Mr. Tapley made no answer; merely plunging a reed into the mixture — which caused a pleasant commotion among the pieces of ice — and signifying by an expressive gesture that it was to be pumped up through that agency by the enraptured drinker.

Martin took the glass with an astonished look; applied his lips to the reed; and cast up his eyes once in ecstasy. He paused no more until the goblet was drained to the last drop.

“There sir,” said Mark, taking it from him with a triumphant face, “If you should ever happen to be dead beat again, when I ain’t in the way, all you’ve got to do is, to ask the nearest man to go fetch a cobbler.”

         “Go and fetch a cobbler!” said Martin.

A character in House of Holes also says, “You know the English talk a good game, but they’re such hypocrites.  All that business about how vulgar it is to have ice in drinks.” This, as the English would say, is bollocks.  They English are not hypocritical about vulgarity: they’re proud of it.  It’s true that the English use less ice than Americans, and the Scots very definitely don’t want ice in their whisky, but it’s got nothing to do with any imagined vulgarity, it’s because they don’t want their booze diluted.  It’s the same reason that Americans don’t want ice in their martinis.  But hey, the English don’t need me to defend them.

It seems the sherry cobbler did indeed enjoy a vogue in the late nineteenth century.  Recipes, of course, vary, but a typical one involves 3 oz sherry, 1/3 oz triple sec, 2 oz soda water, 1/4 oz sugar syrup.   I can’t say it really gets my juices flowing, but an awful lot is going to depend on what kind of sherry you use.

What Dickens actually wrote in American Notes was this:

“The planter’s house was an airy, rustic dwelling, that brought Defoe’s description of such places strongly to my recollection. The day was very warm, but the blinds being all closed, and the windows and doors set wide open, a shady coolness rustled through the rooms, which was exquisitely refreshing after the glare and heat without. Before the windows was an open piazza, where, in what they call the hot weather — whatever that may be — they sling hammocks, and drink and doze luxuriously. I do not know how their cool rejections may taste within the hammocks, but, having experience, I can report that, out of them, the mounds of ices and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry-cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.”

I don’t know what he means.  Is his mind discontent because he can’t recreate the drink?  Surely he could.  Or does he think the drinks are so vile that the mere thought of them sets his mind in a whirl?  Perhaps there’s a deliberate ambiguity.

And yes, that “planter’s house” is a giveaway - Dickens was on a slave plantation, though he says of the owner,  “I believe that this gentleman is a considerate and excellent master, who inherited his fifty slaves, and is neither a buyer nor a seller of human stock; and I am sure, from my own observation and conviction, that he is a kind-hearted, worthy man.”

Incidentally when Dickens made his second visit to the United States, in 1867, Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico’s in New York, created a number of dishes bearing his name, including “veal pie a la Dickens” and “beetroot fritters a la Dickens.”  There was also a dinner at Delmonico’s in his honor where “timbales a la Dickens” was served, though not the veal pie or the beetroot.  The menu, which appears in Ranhofer’s book, The Epicure, makes no mention of sherry cobbler.