Cooking with James Baldwin

 “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So read the inspirational quote in the front window of my Brooklyn gourmet market the day I shopped for a meal celebrating the work and life of James Baldwin (1924–1987). These words, coincidentally but not surprisingly, are from Baldwin, who is the man of the moment again thanks to the extraordinary relevance of his writing to today’s America.

BALDWIN’S CHARACTERS HAUNTED FRENCH BISTROS, WHERE OYSTERS WITH MIGNONETTE ARE A STAPLE. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

Baldwin as a novelist is perhaps best known for Giovanni’s Room and Another Country, the former a gay man’s self-reckoning and the latter a brutal and tragic wrestling with being Black in America. He is known to a lesser extent for having lived most of his adult life abroad, first in Paris and then in the Provençal town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, though he always kept up his connection to the Harlem of his birth and was an active participant in the U.S. civil rights movement. Intense and multitalented, Baldwin was also a playwright—he loved actors and the theater—and a critic and essayist. His nonfiction collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time have predicted the future to an astonishing degree.

MY HOMEMADE BAGUETTE WAS IMPERFECTLY SHAPED AND SLASHED, BUT IT TASTED NEARLY RIGHT. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

One of the great Black intellectuals of his era, Baldwin posited race as the central conflict in American life—and identified the “innocence” of race as the white man’s central crime. “I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life,” he writes in Notes of a Native Son. He believed that America taught Black people “with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” This schooling made it impossible to love self or family, made it impossible to live as a Black person in America—Rufus, the main character of Another Country, dies by suicide. In later years, Baldwin claimed that the nation’s fundamental qualities had remained unchanged despite integration and civil rights. “Europe has not yet left Africa, and black men here are not yet free,” he writes in The Fire Next Time. These facts contain “the gravest implications for us all” because “the Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.”

The 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro juxtaposes Baldwin’s words and speeches with images of contemporary protest against police violence in places like Ferguson, Missouri, to great effect.

A CHARACTER IN ANOTHER COUNTRY COOKS A PLATE OF PORK AND RICE WITH SALAD DURING A DOMESTIC DISPUTE. THIS VERSION IS FROM THE CULINARY ICON EDNA LEWIS. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

The root of the racism that defines life in America, Baldwin felt, is fear. White people, Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “had robbed black people of their liberty and … profited by this theft every hour that they lived.” The white man despises the Black man because doing so provides him with a feeling of superiority and he cannot face his crimes against the Black man. “A vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white,” Baldwin writes. Elsewhere, he says: “The crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, [is] that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.”

Baldwin’s thought seems an obvious progenitor to the core ideas of contemporary racial-justice movements. I find it edifying—and a fact to which close attention should be paid—that the influence of Baldwin’s thought has lasted and grown, as a peer to, or perhaps even overtaking, the ongoing generative power of the legacies of other great figures who were his contemporaries. I Am Not Your Negro takes as its starting point an unfinished Baldwin essay on three Black leaders of his time, all of whom were assassinated—Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers—and all of whose deaths affected Baldwin profoundly. Each embraced a slightly different form of activism. Baldwin’s was through his art—and his artistic mission, as he conceived it, was to wrestle honestly, visibly, and unflinchingly with everything he saw as true in himself and in the world around him. As Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming writes, “He was born to translate the painful human experience into art.” Baldwin wrote about the church, about his homosexuality, and about race without regard for the sensitivities of anyone and despite the great difficulty and personal pain inherent in doing so. This truth telling has held tremendous power over the decades since his death.

LEWIS’S TECHNIQUE CALLS FOR THE BUTTER AND WATER TO BE HEATED TOGETHER BEFORE INCORPORATION WITH THE STUFFING. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

I would love to know Baldwin’s thoughts on today’s issues. He was insistent that as a matter of self-preservation, Black people must neither hate white people nor give up on them (despite the manifest temptations of doing so), but very often he had white liberals in his crosshairs, memorably accusing them once of “incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness.” If nothing else has changed, that probably hasn’t either. The Baldwin quotation at my gourmet market, for example—“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”—felt to me more ironic than perhaps the people choosing it had intended, since the shoppers at this particular store are predominantly white and the cashiers are predominantly Black. I was there for oysters and imported French butter and Roquefort cheese—to celebrate James Baldwin, no less—yet I doubt my awareness of race while I made my purchase changes anything. In the more sinister sense, the market’s association of itself with Baldwin probably serves to entrench the status quo.

It’s discouraging, and it can be difficult to feel much optimism for the solutions currently on offer for the ongoing problem of racism in America. Today’s objectives seem to be mostly the same ones we’ve already been attempting, just more so. Yet if Baldwin is to be believed that nothing has changed—and I do believe him—these methods already haven’t worked for half a century. It’s possible that we just haven’t tried hard enough, but it’s also possible we aren’t trying the right things. In reading Baldwin, then, I tried to learn something new by mimicking his openness as a writer with my openness as a reader. I attempted to read with the same tolerance for difficulty and complexity with which he wrote, and to encounter surprises, to find not what I expected but what I didn’t. In the end what struck me most was the power of his contention that “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.” I imagined all the ways the world might look if we gave up American whiteness and American Blackness both—they are linked, after all; they live and die together—and found in this exercise an arena for ongoing meditation.

THE APPLE-HERB STUFFING FOR EDNA LEWIS’S CROWN ROAST OF PORK USES A LOT OF BUTTER, BUT IT’S SO WORTH IT. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

It’s much easier to cook dinner than to provide answers, even when the dinner is an elaborate feast befitting one of our greatest writers. And while the people in Baldwin’s books are usually short on money or appetite—moral nausea has that effect—the writer found food important in a variety of ways. He risked his life on many occasions to protest segregated dining. In his bohemian youth, he was often hungry. Later, he famously became a bon vivant. Describing Baldwin’s great love, Lucien, Leeming says, “They both loved laughter, food, sex, and, above all, drink.” This might seem trivial, but it was a central part of Baldwin’s philosophy: he thought that our fear of sensuality was a fear of ourselves and that without loving ourselves, we would not be able to love others. In one oft-quoted passage of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin writes of this American fear and the importance of overcoming it in our liberation:

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and becomes as joyless as they have become.

Thus emboldened, I started out with the mission of re-creating a meal from the culminating pages of Another Country, when the Black heroine, Ida, is making a dinner of rice and “tomatoes and lettuce and a package of pork chops” for her white lover, Vivaldo, while they say terrible things to each other. The scene is full of precise cooking instructions, like the way Ida “walked to the table and opened the meat. She began to dust it with salt and pepper and paprika, and chopped garlic into it, near the bone.” But Vivaldo and Ida eventually abandon the dish—“Come away from the stove, I can’t eat now,” Vivaldo says—and I thought its simplicity was not in the spirit of Baldwin’s sensuality. To truly channel him, I had to go at least partially French. For that, I had a scene from Giovanni’s Room in which the self-denying gay hero, David, first and doomfully falls in love. David’s Paris is Baldwin’s Paris, and I imagine it being a scene from Baldwin’s life when the two men go to a working-class bar in Les Halles to consume “white wine and oysters,” which Giovanni says “is really the best thing after such a night.” Eating them, “Giovanni sat in the sun, his black hair gathering to itself the yellow glow of the wine and the many dull colors of the oyster where the sun struck it.”

My efforts to combine these elements achieved a really exciting serendipity. I served a plate of oysters on a restaurant-style bed of crushed ice with a homemade mignonette, paired with a Where’s Linus? Sauvignon Blanc made by the Black American winemaker Chris Christensen. My spirits collaborator, Hank Zona, suggested this wine as a dry, crisp, citrusy option that “goes nicely with fresh shellfish” and is “like the squeeze of lemon on the raw oyster.” Where’s Linus? is a collaboration between Christensen and the boutique distributor Jenny & François Selections; it’s more widely available than Christensen’s own, also highly recommended, line of Bodkin Wines.

I next made baguettes from scratch, following the injunction from The Fire Next Time to eat better bread, and served them with Roquefort cheese mashed together with fancy French butter, as Baldwin believed was proper. I riffed on the pork chops, rice, and salad by making them from the pages of Edna Lewis, an icon of the kind of Black Southern cooking that influenced the Harlem of Baldwin’s youth. My salad follows Lewis’s loving descriptions of how to mix different greens and how to make a dressing, including shaking it up in a pint Mason jar. My rice is her red rice, the secret ingredient of which is the rice itself—either Carolina or “popcorn” variety. Once baked, this mild, creamy, small-grain variant makes jewellike little clumps, and the balance of pepper, smoke, and sweetness is exquisite. Lastly, I’d read a Saveur magazine article by a woman who’d dined with Baldwin at a restaurant owned by a friend of his in the South of France—the kind of long, legendary afternoon meal the writer was known for. For dessert they’d eaten fresh pineapple, and Lewis happens to have a recipe for a spectacular, show-stopping crown roast of pork garnished with pineapple and stuffed with a glazed-apple-and-herb bread mixture. This is far from the simple chop that Ida made, but its unabashed gustatory wow factor seemed right. Zona paired it with a Maison Noir OPP Pinot Noir, from the Oregon winemaking operations of Andre Mack, a Black restaurateur and vintner based in Brooklyn. The OPP Pinot Noir is less ripe and fruity than the California styles of the same grape, but it still has “plenty of that cherry fruit flavor that goes well with pork,” Zona said, along with notes of herb and spice to match my stuffing.

THIS CRISP, LEMONY SAUVIGNON BLANC FROM THE BLACK AMERICAN WINEMAKER CHRIS CHRISTENSEN IS THE IDEAL PAIRING FOR OYSTERS. PHOTO: ERICA MACLEAN.

The Frenchness and the Black Americana fit perfectly together. Lewis is more Alice Waters than country cook, and every one of her recipes I’ve tried has been revelatory. Even my baguettes, which were denser and chewier than I think proper, were fresh homemade bread, which is never bad. The crown roast of pork was not difficult in terms of technique and seems like something everyone should be doing for a holiday table. I’d make any one of these dishes again, and I highly recommend them as an entire spread, complete with the wines.

To speak of our holiday tables: that we all ought to sit down together and eat—that we can do better—was something Baldwin believed, though fitfully and with difficulty. I can only hope he’ll be right about that, too, as he has been about so many things. In the meantime, at least we have his books to learn from.

French Bread with Roquefort Cheese and Butter

Adapted from a King Arthur Baking Company recipe.

For the starter:

1/2 cup cool water

1/16 tsp yeast

1 cup flour

For the dough:

all of the starter

1 1/2 tsp yeast

1 cup and 2 tbs lukewarm water

3 1/2 cups flour

1 1/4 tsp salt

Note that this recipe takes twenty hours and needs to be started the night before.

To make the starter, mix everything together to create a soft dough. Cover and let rest at room temperature for about fourteen hours; overnight works well. By then, the starter should have expanded and become bubbly.

To make the dough, mix and knead everything together—by hand, mixer, or bread machine set on the dough cycle—to make a soft, somewhat smooth dough. It should be cohesive, but the surface may still be a bit rough. If you’re using a stand mixer, knead for about four minutes on medium-low speed (speed 2 on a KitchenAid). The finished dough should stick a bit at the bottom of the bowl.

Place the dough in a lightly greased medium-size bowl, cover the bowl, and let the dough rest and rise for forty-five minutes. Gently deflate the dough, and fold its edges into the center, then turn it over in the bowl before letting it rise for an additional forty-five minutes, until it’s noticeably puffy.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly greased work surface. Gently deflate the dough, and divide it into three equal pieces.

Round each piece of dough into a rough ball by pulling the edges into the center. Cover with greased plastic wrap, and let rest for at least fifteen minutes (or for up to an hour, if that works better with your schedule).

Working with one piece at a time, flatten the dough slightly, then fold it nearly (but not quite) in half, sealing the edges with the heel of your hand. Turn the dough around, and repeat: fold, then flatten. Repeat this whole process again; the dough should have started to elongate itself.

With the seam side down, cup your fingers, and gently roll the dough into a log. The recommended length is sixteen inches. However, that made a baguette that was too long to fit on my cookie sheet. Measure your baking surface before you embark, and adjust accordingly. Taper each end of the log slightly to create the baguette’s typical pointy end.

Place the logs, seam side down, into the folds of a heavily floured cotton dish towel or onto a lightly greased or parchment-lined sheet pan. Cover them with lightly greased plastic wrap, and allow the loaves to rise until they’re slightly puffy. The loaves should look lighter and less dense than when you first shaped them, but they won’t be anywhere near doubled in bulk. This should take about forty-five minutes to an hour at room temperature.

Toward the end of the rising time, preheat your oven to 450 with a cast-iron pan on the floor of the oven or on the lowest rack. Start to heat three cups of water to boiling.

If your baguettes have risen in a dish towel, gently roll them, seam side down, onto a lightly greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Using a bread lame or a very sharp knife held at about a forty-five-degree angle, make three to five long lengthwise slashes in each baguette.

Load the baguettes into the oven. Carefully pour the boiling water into the cast-iron pan, and quickly shut the oven door. The billowing steam created by the boiling water will help the baguettes rise and give them a lovely, shiny crust.

Bake the baguettes for twenty-four to twenty-eight minutes, or until they’re a very deep golden brown. Remove them from the oven, and let them to cool on a rack. Or, for the crispiest baguettes, turn off the oven, crack it open about two inches, and allow the baguettes to cool completely in the oven, until both the baguettes and the oven are at room temperature.

Serve with Roquefort cheese at room temperature, mashed together chunkily with about two tablespoons of high-quality butter, also at room temperature.

Oysters with Mignonette

For the mignonette:

4 tbs red wine vinegar

1 tbs shallot, finely minced

1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper

For the oysters:

12 oysters

about 4 cups crushed ice

lemon wedges (for garnish)

To make the mignonette, combine all the ingredients in a small decorative dish, and stir.

To serve the oysters, prepare a plate of crushed ice, and place it in the freezer. Open the oysters using your method of choice, making sure to reserve as much liquid as possible in the shell. Place each opened oyster on the ice in the freezer as you go along. Serve immediately with the dish of mignonette and lemon wedges for garnish.

Edna Lewis’s Red Rice

From In Pursuit of Flavor, by Edna Lewis.

5 or 6 slices of good-flavored bacon, cut into half-inch pieces

2/3 cup chopped onions

1 tsp dried thyme leaves

a green pepper, seeded and chopped

2 small round hot peppers, seeded and chopped

2 cups fresh tomato puree

1 tbs brown sugar

2 cups cold water

2 cups Carolina or popcorn rice

1 cup or more small pieces of cooked ham or fish

salt

freshly ground black pepper

Cook the bacon in a heavy-bottomed saucepan until crisp. Remove the bacon pieces from the pan, and set aside. Pour off half the bacon fat, and heat the remaining fat over medium-high heat. Add the onions, stir, and simmer for a few minutes. Stir in the thyme, and then add the green and hot peppers. Mix well, and add the tomato puree and brown sugar. Add the water, and stir in the rice.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Cover the pan, and let the mixture simmer on a low burner for about fifteen minutes, until the rice begins to cook. Add the bacon pieces and the ham or fish. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Stir well, and spoon the mixture into a casserole or rice steamer. Cover tightly, and bake in the oven for forty-five minutes to an hour, until the rice is tender. Keep warm until ready to serve.

Crown Roast of Pork with Herb Dressing, Garnished with Pineapple

From In Pursuit of Flavor, by Edna Lewis.

For the glazed apples:

2 tbs butter

3 medium-size green apples, cored and quartered

1/3 cup light brown sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg

For the herb dressing:

7 cups diced white bread cubes, a day or two old

1 cup finely chopped onions

1 1/2 cups chopped celery

1/3 cup chopped celery leaves

1 tsp salt (or more to taste)

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

2 tsp crumbled dried sage leaves

1 tsp dried thyme leaves

1 tbs Bell’s Seasoning

1 1/2 cups cold water

2/3 cup butter

For the crown roast:

a 6 to 8 lb crown roast of pork

2 garlic cloves, peeled and cut into slivers

ground ginger

salt

freshly ground black pepper

For the pineapple garnish:

a fresh pineapple

a small one-inch round cookie cutter (or equivalent) to core the pineapple

4 tsp butter

1 tbs brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350. Be sure to adjust the oven racks so the roast has ample headroom.

To glaze the apples, heat the butter in a skillet until it foams. Add the apple quarters, brown sugar, salt, and nutmeg. Cook over moderate heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are tender and well glazed. Set aside.

To make the herb dressing, put the bread crumbs, onions, celery, and celery leaves in a large bowl, and toss. Add the salt, pepper, sage, thyme, and Bell’s Seasoning, and mix with your hands. (Lewis specifically recommends using dried herbs instead of fresh here for the slightly different flavor they impart.) Heat the water in a small saucepan; when it is hot, add the butter, and let it dissolve. Pour this over the crumb mixture, and mix well with your hands or a wooden spoon. Gently stir in the apples. Cover the dressing until you’re ready to fill the crown roast.

To prepare the roast, make slits in the meat with the point of a sharp knife and insert the garlic slivers. (Being fairly aggressive with the knife makes this easier.) Liberally cover the roast on the inside, bottom, and all sides with ginger, salt, and pepper. Spoon the dressing into the center of the roast, pushing it down with your hands as best you can. (I had a fair amount of extra dressing; how much you need will depend on the amount of room inside your roast.) Place a sheet of tinfoil in the roasting pan, set the roast on top of it, and shape the foil up around the bottom of the roast.

Place in the oven, and bake for two and a half to three hours, until the meat is tender and completely cooked. You may have to cover the bones of the roast and the filling with foil during roasting to prevent drying. Test the roast for doneness with a meat thermometer or by inserting a cake tester or small skewer into the meat, piercing the inside of the roast through the dressing. If the tester goes into the meat easily, it is done.

To prepare the garnish, cut the spiny rind from the pineapple with a large knife. Slice the pineapple into six slices, each about half an inch thick. Use a small cookie cutter to cut out the core in a neat circle. Melt the butter in a wide, heavy skillet until foaming, and sauté the slices for a few seconds on each side. Sprinkle the pineapple with brown sugar, flip, and continue to fry until browned.

When the roast is done, lift it from the pan and, being careful to prevent the stuffing from falling out, slide the roast off the foil and onto a large serving plate. Garnish with the pineapple slices. Serve the roast by cutting between the ribs to cut off whole loin chops.

Edna Lewis’s Green Salad

From In Pursuit of Flavor, by Edna Lewis.

For the dressing:

1/2 cup cider vinegar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1/2 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp dry mustard

1 tsp scraped onion

1 clove garlic, peeled and cut in half

2/3 cup olive oil

For the salad:

1 good-quality tomato, cut into wedges

4 cups any mixture of high-quality greens (Lewis recommends combining different greens, “some bitter, some sweet,” and particularly likes “arugula, Bibb and Boston lettuces, early romaine, black-seeded Simpson, purslane and cress”)

To make the dressing, put all the ingredients together in a pint jar with a lid, and shake until the salt is dissolved. Remove the garlic. Shake again just before dressing the salad.

To serve the salad, toss all the greens together with the tomato and dressing to taste. Serve at the end of the meal, “after the main course but before dessert,” Lewis says. “I like to put a good goat cheese and bread on the table, too, and perhaps open another bottle of wine.”

Wine!

Please join Valerie Stivers and Hank Zona on Friday, December 18, at 6 P.M. for a virtual literary wine tasting on The Paris Review’s Instagram account. We will be discussing food in the work of James Baldwin, the culinary legacy of Edna Lewis, and recommended wines from Black-owned wineries such as Maison Noir.

The wines seen in the story are the Where’s Linus? Sauvignon Blanc from Jenny & François Selections and the Maison Noir OPP Pinot Noir, which is widely available in stores and on wine.com and drizly.com.

Anyone who would like more specific advice on how to find these wines near them can email us (hank@thegrapesunwrapped.com).

(Source: The Paris Review)

Royal family shares recipe for Victoria sponge cake from Buckingham Palace pastry chefs

Cake was named after Queen Victoria ‘who regularly ate a slice of sponge cake with her tea’, royal family states

Throughout lockdown, many people have been turning to baking to keep their minds occupied.

From sourdough bread to scones, members of the public have been throwing on their aprons and whipping out the wooden spoons as they refine their culinary skills at home.

Jumping on the baking bandwagon, Buckingham Palace has shared the recipe to one of the most quintessentially British bakes: the Victoria sponge cake.

On the royal family‘s social media channels, the Palace explained that the recipe has been shared to mark the royal garden parties, which were due to take place this May before being cancelled.

“The Victoria sponge was named after Queen Victoria, who regularly ate a slice of sponge cake with her tea, each afternoon!” the royal family stated.

The instructions shared by the royal family denote the official Victoria sponge recipe used by Buckingham Palace’s pastry chefs.

In addition to the recipe, the royal family has also shared a video demonstrating the correct techniques needed to produce the fluffy, jammy sponge.

Here is how to make a royally approved Victoria Sponge cake, according to Buckingham Palace’s pastry chefs:

Ingredients

For the sponge:

• 3 eggs
• 150g caster sugar
• 150g unsalted butter
• 150g sieved self-raising flour
• 1/2 tsp of vanilla essence
• Jam (strawberry or raspberry)

For the buttercream:

• 150g softened unsalted butter
• 220g sieved icing sugar
• 1/3 vanilla pod or vanilla essence

Method

For the sponge:

• First, pre-heat the oven to 180C (375F, gas mark 4).
• Grease and line two eight-inch cake tins. If you only have one cake tin, you can bake the sponge and slice it in half.
• Cream the caster sugar, vanilla essence and softened unsalted butter until light and fluffy. You can do this either by hand with a wooden spoon or with an electric whisk.
• Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl.
• Gradually add the beaten eggs to the sugar and butter mixture. Do so a little bit at a time, in order to avoid any curdling.
• Sieve the flour and then gently fold into the mixture
• Pour equal amounts of the cake mix into the two cake tins and smooth them over.
• Place the cake tins on the middle shelf of the pre-heated oven, baking for around 20 minutes, until the cake looks golden brown.
• After 20 minutes, check the cake is well-baked by inserting a skewer. If the skewer comes out clean, the cake is ready. 
• Remove the sponges from their tins and leave them to cool.

For the buttercream:

• Cream the softened butter for the buttercream with the sieved icing sugar and seeds from the vanilla pod (or vanilla essence) .

To assemble the cake:

• Ensure that both sponges are completely cold before spreading a layer of jam onto the surface of one sponge.
• Next, spread a thick layer of buttercream on top of the jam. If you prefer, you can spread the buttercream first and then do the layer of jam second.
• Once the layers have been spread on one sponge, place the second sponge on top and gently press down.
• Sprinkle with icing sugar and, as per the Buckingham Palace pastry chef’s suggestion, serve with a pot of fresh English tea.

This recipe was shared on the royal family’s website here.

(Source: Independent)

Everything the Queen eats and drinks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

While you may assume her Royal Majesty the Queen enjoys fine dining every day, this isn't always the case.

According to The Telegraph, twice a week the head chef to the royal household, Mark Flanagan, provides the Queen with menu suggestion which she can approve by ticking off or crossing out.

However, Darren McGrady, a former chef in the royal kitchens, said that the Queen is "not a foodie. She eats to live, unlike Prince Philip who loves to eat and would stand and talk food all day."

“When she dines on her own,” he added, “she’s very disciplined. No starch is the rule."

We took a look at the Queen's typical day of eating and drinking, from the tea she drinks and biscuits she eats when she wakes up to her low-carb lunches, her nightly glass of Champagne, and penchant for chocolate.

Scroll down to see what Her Royal Majesty the Queen has for every meal — and in between.

Deciding what to eat must be tough when you're a royal. Luckily, her Royal Majesty the Queen has a team on hand to help her pick her menu — even when she's shopping at Waitrose.

The Queen starts her day with tea and biscuits.

She has a freshly brewed pot of Earl Grey tea (no milk or sugar) in bone china cup, with a few biscuits, according to BT.

She then moves on to breakfast, which normally involves cereal and fruit.

She's partial to Special K, according to The Telegraph. Kellogg's, Quaker Oats, and Weetabix all hold royal warrants.

However, she likes her cereal to be served from Tupperware, which she believes keeps it fresh.

She occasionally opts for toast and marmalade...

Jam in the royal household comes from Wilkin & Sons.

...Or, on some occasions, enjoys scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and truffle.

However, she prefers brown eggs.

She thinks they taste better, according to The Guardian.

Before lunch, she enjoys a gin and Dubonnet (a sweet wine-based aperatif) with a slice of lemon and a lot of ice.

It's likely she uses Gordon's Gin, which has a royal warrant.

Lunch is something simple, like fish with vegetables.

She likes to eat grilled Dover sole with wilted spinach or courgettes, according to former royal chef Darren McGrady.

She's also partial to a simple grilled chicken with salad.

She has a "no starch" rule when she's eating along, meaning no potatoes, rice, or pasta, McGrady told The Daily Mail.

Every day, she takes afternoon tea.

It's served with fingers sandwiches such as cucumber, smoked salmon, egg and mayonnaise, or ham and mustard with the crusts removed (to save calories, no doubt), as well as jam pennies — tiny raspberry jam sandwiches cut into circles the size of an English Penny.

It also comes with McVitie's rich tea biscuits, scones, and cakes, her favourites being honey and cream sponge, ginger, fruit, and the chocolate biscuit cake which was served at Will and Kate's wedding, according to McGrady.

For dinner, fillets of beef or venison, pheasant, or salmon come from farms in Sandringham and Balmoral.

The meat is turned into Gaelic steak, and served with a sauce of mushroom, cream and whisky. She also loves a Sunday roast, when it's served well done.

While her former chefs didn't mention condiments, the likes of Lea & Perrins, HP Sauce, and Heinz ketchup all hold royal warrants.

Dessert includes strawberries, also from Balmoral, or sweet, white peaches from the greenhouses at Windsor Castle.

The Queen also adores chocolate, whether it's a luxury or grocery store brand.

Charbonnel et Walker, Bendicks, and Prestat all hold royal warrants, but supermarket brands like Cadbury and Nestlé could also be found in the royal household.

Along with the chocolate biscuit cake that's one of her favourites, she also loves chocolate mousse and a traditional chocolate ganache sponge cake.

And, last but not least, she finishes her day with a glass of Champagne.

She usually has a glass of Champagne in the evening, according to The Independent, likely chosen from the eight brands— including Bollinger, Lanson, and Krug — that have been given royal warrants.

And, of course, warrants have been given to a number of fine wines, though she isn't a huge fan.

(Source: BI)

How the food of Charles Dickens defined Christmas

Charles Dickens was a serious foodie and his literature introduced a festive menu that has barely changed since the Cratchits gathered round their table in A Christmas Carol, writes Emma Jane Kirby in  BBC. Read on: 

"The thing about Dickens," says food historian Pen Vogler as she takes a tray of caraway seed biscuits out of the oven, "is that he knew what it was like to be hungry."

She's explored how cuisine shaped his writing in her recipe book, Dinner With Dickens. In it she recreates dishes that the literary giant wrote about, and shows how he used food to create character and comedy but also highlighted social issues.

She's also whipped up a Christmas pudding but thankfully has avoided making gruel.

"Dickens did not have food security as a child," continues Pen as she slips the steaming biscuits onto a wire rack to cool.

"His novels often contain innocent, hungry children - he wanted to show readers that good food and nourishment were a human right, even if you were poor."

Before Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843, Christmas pudding was known only as plum pudding

When Charles Dickens was 12, his father was imprisoned for debt and while the rest of the family went to live with him in prison, Charles was sent to work in a blacking factory where he had to manage his tiny wages to buy penny buns and bread to eat.

His interest in food, says Pen, stems from this time.

David Copperfield offers these seedy biscuits to a young girl he has fallen in love with as a token of his esteem

In his writing, his characters' attitude to food often gives us clues to their morality. Fat adults often starve thin children; characters who share and enjoy lavish feasts are good, characters who make lavish food just for show or who waste food are generally bad. Think Miss Havisham's wedding cake….

"If the right emotional feelings are not there, it is worse than worthless," says Pen. "Food's got to be enjoyed in the right way and appreciated. Food for him was much more emotional than showy."

Charles Dickens was a serious foodie (check out his leg of mutton stuffed with oysters) who was famous for his generous dinner parties; his wife Catherine even published a little book of recipes to suit all budgets.

"If Dickens had been alive today," muses Pen as she chops apples, "I could definitely see him judging Bake Off, although he was much more of a savoury man than a pudding man."

She grates some nutmeg. "There are very few cakes and puddings in his writings except in the autobiographical David Copperfield where he remembers the sweet tooth and treats of childhood."

Fat adults often starve thin children in Dickens' work, like Oliver Twist

Pen's little black cat watches attentively from the floor as she stirs currants into her Christmas pudding mix. She tips in a very generous amount of brandy.

"Dickens loved a drink!" she says. "He even sent a recipe to a friend for punch so we know exactly how he made it - and his characters drink it all the time! He also drank champagne and claret for celebrations and things we've lost the taste for like purl, flip, dog's nose and wassail."

In 1843, Dickens published A Christmas Carol, which contained the famous scene of the Cratchits contentedly gathered round the crackling fire with their goose, apples and oranges, chestnuts and the "speckled cannon ball" pudding.

With his emphasis on a family gathering, believes Pen, Dickens set the template for today's Christmas celebrations.

"Until the publication of a Christmas Carol," says Pen, "Christmas pudding was known only as plum pudding - but after that, plum pudding was afterwards always referred to as Christmas pudding… and if you think about it, our Christmas menu hasn't changed since the Cratchits!"

Dickens' wife Catherine published a book of recipes which included one for leg of mutton with oysters

Leg of Mutton Stuffed with Oysters

Young John Chivery, son of the Marshalsea Turnkeeper, is rewarded for running "mysterious missions" with a banquet, for which Miss Rugg "with her own hands stuffed a leg of mutton with oysters." Dickens invited Daniel Maclise to share the same dish before a night walk through the slums (letter, November 20, 1840), and later invented his own twist, adding veal to the stuffing, served at the office of his journal, Household Words.

SERVES 6-8

2 tablespoons freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 dessertspoon freshly chopped thyme leaves

1 dessertspoon freshly chopped savoury

2 hard-boiled egg yolks

6 oysters, cleaned, shucked, and chopped, reserving the liquor, or 6 finely chopped anchovies

3 garlic cloves, minced (I think garlic is better than onion in this dish, but if you prefer to follow Catherine, use one very finely chopped shallot)

leg of mutton (or lamb if you cannot find mutton), approx. 5½-6¾ lb/2.5-3kg

2 teaspoons all-purpose/plain flour

1¼ cups/300ml lamb or chicken stock

Preheat the oven to 425°F/220°C/Gas 7.

Chop the herbs as finely as possible - a meat cleaver is useful for this. Bind them together with the egg yolks, oysters (or anchovies), and garlic (or shallot).

Using a sharp knife, make about 6 indentations in the fleshy part of the leg of mutton (or lamb) and push in the mixture. If you make the indentations at a slight angle, you can pull the fat back over the cut.

Place the meat in a roasting pan and roast in the preheated oven for about 30 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325°F/160°C/Gas 3. Baste the joint with the fat and juices in the pan and continue roasting for 15-20 minutes per 1 lb/450g.

When the meat is done, remove it from the oven, cover with foil, and let it rest for 15-20 minutes.

Make the gravy by mixing the flour with the fat in the roasting dish over a low heat, and slowly adding the stock and the oyster liquor. Skim the fat off the gravy (putting it in the freezer helps it coagulate on the top) and serve as it is, or add to the Piquant Sauce ingredients

PIQUANT SAUCE

1 shallot, finely chopped

a little oil

1 tablespoon finely chopped gherkins

1 tablespoon finely chopped capers

4 tablespoons good red wine vinegar

1 anchovy fillet, pounded

Sweat the shallot in the oil until it softens, then add the gherkins, capers, and vinegar. Simmer for 4 minutes.

Make gravy from the joint, add the oyster liquor (to make about 1¼ cups/300ml), the shallot mixture, and the pounded anchovy. Simmer for a few minutes before serving in a gravy boat.

"Adult hunger is dangerous in Dickens," warns Pen as she puts the kettle on for tea.

In A Tale of Two Cities, adult hunger leads to riot and revolution, and in Great Expectations, the hungry Magwitch, an escaped convict, is dangerous and frightening to young Pip who must steal food for him.

The seedy biscuits are delicious - the same kind that the young David Copperfield offered to a little girl he had fallen in love with as a token of his esteem- and they go beautifully with our Darjeeling tea.

Pen has worked out that good characters take tea in Dickens' work while the slightly dubious ones tend to drink coffee.

Under the circumstances, it seems only polite to pour another cup and have another soft seedy biscuit...