Food History

I just re-read What Katy Did At School, one of the sequels to What Katy Did, after a break of too many years to count comfortably. When I last read it, I was significantly younger and I read it to put myself in the book. I was the right age to be there. This time (though I really don’t like to say it), I read it with the eye of a writer and of an historian. Unfortunately, this blog is about food history, so you’re going to have to pretend the writer and most of the historian don’t exist. The bit of me that does exist is the food history bit. Its brain lies somewhere near my waistline.

Here are some random thoughts:

The book was first published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Quite a few of the cookbooks I used for my impressive list of fried food recipes come from around then. This means that when crullers arrive in Katy’s Christmas box, and jumbles, I know exactly what they ought to taste like. As a child I like the sound of jumbles, but as an adult crullers fascinate me more. They fascinate me more because I can’t imagine packing fried foods and sending them three days away.

Part of the problem is that I’m Australian and forget the chill factor in a Northern US December. Partly it’s because we assume that fried food are for immediate consumption. We don’t eat fried foods in the same way. In fact, we don’t think of them in the same way. Crullers need to be fresh and fragrant in our world.

We don’t eat pudding in the same way, either. For the girls at school it was the core of lunch. It was considered unfilling, even when accompanied by unlimited bread and butter and much sauce. It’s odd that we would find that overfilling.

No vegetables mentioned for school lunch. I didn’t notice a single vegetable reference in the book at all, which doesn’t mean people didn’t eat them (we know they did), it meant they weren’t remarked upon. Meat was readily available, though not as cheap as the hated pudding. Until the school changed ownership, the girls were eating meat every day.

My favourite mention of food in the whole book was that the good people of Barnet really treasured canned oysters and thought the tin or solder flavour was an improvement on fresh oysters. Canning wasn’t that widespread then and the lids would indeed have been soldered on.