4
" ... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods?
I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs. "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
5
" After that, we don't talk much until she brings out a ginger cake from the larder.
"An old family recipe," she says. "I've been experimenting with the quantities of cloves and Jamaica ginger. Tell me what you think." And she pushes a slice toward me. I try not to gobble for it, for I am starving.
"The most important thing with this cake is to beat in every ingredient, one by one, with the back of a wooden spoon," she says. "Simply throwing everything in together and then beating produces a most unsuccessful cake. I know because my first attempt was as heavy as a brick---quite indigestible!" She gives a rueful smile and asks if I think it needs more ginger.
I feel the crumb, dense and dark, melt on my tongue. My mouth floods with warmth and spice and sweetness. As I swallow, something sharp and clean seems to lift through my nose and throat until my head swims.
"I can see you like it." Miss Eliza watches me and smiles.
And then I blurt something out. Something I know Reverend Thorpe and his wife would not like. But it's too late, the words jump from my throat of their own accord. "I can taste an African heaven, a forest full of dark earth and heat."
The smile on Miss Eliza's face stretches a little wider and her eyes grow brighter. And this gives me the courage to ask a question that's nothing to do with my work. "What is the flavor that cuts through it so keenly, so that it sings a high note on my tongue?"
She stares at me with her forget-me-not eyes. "It's the lightly grated rinds of two fresh lemons! "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
8
" And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish.
I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think.
"Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry."
"May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns. "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
9
" Pigeons wrapped in the leaves of vines. Oysters in crisp pastry cases. Whole Gloucester salmon in aspic. Yarmouth lobsters cooked in wine and herbs. Glazed tarts of pippin apples. Paper-thin layers of buttery pastry spread with greengages, apricots, peaches, cherries, served with great gouts of golden cream.
"Well," I say, "it's gruel for us tonight, with a smidgeon of salt and pepper." Whereupon he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a twist of greased paper, and opens it. Immediately I smell the tang of heather honey.
"For you, Ann." In his grimed palm sits an oozing chunk of honeycomb as big as a plover's egg.
I clap my hands in delight, my tongue waggling with greed. As we eat our gruel I make the clots of chewy wax last as long as possible, pushing them around and around my mouth, pressing them against my molars, sucking on them 'til they slip sweetly down my throat. "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
10
" I worked on a new dish while you were away. A pudding." She ties her apron tight around her waist. "Milk, cream, vanilla, eggs, and sugar."
"Oh," I say, slightly unsettled at the jauntiness of her tone, at its certainty. "A custard? Did it curdle?"
She ignores my question and tells me that she garnished her pudding with branches of preserved barberries. She asks if I would like to see it. But before I can answer she scuttles to the pantry, returning with a clean pudding cloth over one arm, and my best platter----on which wobbles a custard as large and pale as a harvest moon. Atop are woven branches of barberries that wink like garnets. For a second I am speechless. Her creation---for it is nothing less---is picture-perfect.
She offers me an egg spoon and jabs at the platter. "Go on, Miss Eliza. I saved it for you to taste first."
I dip the spoon into the custard's wrinkled rind and lift it swiftly, curiously, to my lips. As I do so, I'm aware of a sense of serenity washing through me. My anguish over dedications, the lurking accusatory voice that lives inside my head, all of it slips away. And there is only cream and vanilla. It occurs to me that although this glorious pudding is her creation, Ann is partly my creation, and I am partly her creation. Cooking and tasting have provided their own stage and we are performing on it at this very moment. "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
11
" When the crab arrives, I realize I've barely given any thought to Ann and her ministrations. To my surprise she has added a few finishing touches of her own. The crab sits snugly in its pink shell, beside a neat mound of delicately green mayonnaise. How has she colored it green?
"This could be made into a curry," pronounces Mr. Arnott. "In Madras, curried sea oysters are considered the pinnacle of fine food. Anything can be curried... fish, fowl, even eggs."
"Eggs?" Again, he has intrigued me.
"Indeed eggs," he says. "Hard-boiled and placed in a hot curried gravy, they are quite delicious."
I taste the mayonnaise, trying to fathom how Ann has greened it. Simultaneously I try to commit Mr. Arnott's recipe for curried eggs to memory, while also checking the seasoning in the crab.
"Do you think the crab would benefit from a little more lemon juice?" I ask. "Or perhaps chili vinegar should have been used."
"It is certainly fresh." He slowly savors the crab upon his tongue. "It tastes of the sea. "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
16
" My mind veers back to roasted pigeon. And from pigeon, I travel effortlessly, unrestrainedly back to France...the pots of rillettes fragrant with garlic, the boned forelegs of ham yellowed with bread crumbs, the blood puddings curled up like snakes, the terrines and pâtés, the sausages from Lyon and Arles, the jowls of salmon cooked à la génoise, the hundreds of cheeses resplendent beneath their glass bells, the perfumed melons and honeyed apricots "
― Annabel Abbs , Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship
