Glorious food menus that may have piqued Dickens go on sale
IF EVER there was a writer associated with Christmas, it is Charles Dickens. His portrayal of Scrooge’s spiritual transformation in A Christmas Carol set the tone for how the holiday is viewed and celebrated in modern times.
Indeed, the author might have taken inspiration from the feasts held at Bristol’s Bush Tavern between 1790 and 1800. Two “bills of fare” showing the Christmas dinners served at the pub – which Dickens used as a setting in his novel The Pickwick Papers after visiting it in 1835 – are going up for auction, showing some of the startlingly exotic dishes on offer.
In a feast that would surely have had Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim salivating, the pub’s landlord, John Weeks, laid on a spread that included turtles, eels, reindeer tongues, feet and a veal’s head.
The two bills of fare list more than 100 dishes served over Christmas at the Bush Tavern, which stood in Bristol’s Corn Street, in December 1790 and 1800, also included numerous birds, such as cuckoos, owls, golden plovers, swan, larks, sea pheasants (pintail duck) and stares (starlings).
In 1790, Mr Weeks laid on a turtle weighing 47lbs, along with a roasting
pig, reindeer tongue, 18 carp, 16 perch, 14 pheasants and 94 wild ducks.
He outdid himself a decade later, serving a 120lb turtle, along with 122 eels, 78 roach, six saddles of mutton, 116 pigeons and 121 larks and sundry other game, meats and seafood.
Such menus and bills of fare are prized by historians of the period for shedding light on the culinary habits of the day. In the late 1800s, ten or 11 courses were considered normal in affluent circles.
Chris Albury, of Dominic Winter Auctioneers, said: “I’ve never seen anything like it. The amount of food goes on and on. It really is quite impressive.
“The two bills would seem to itemise all the food it offered over the Christmas period, with items then struck off as they were ordered by customers.”
The bills, which are estimated to sell for between £500 and £800 when they go on sale on Wednesday, were among ephemera bought about 50 years ago by a relative of the current seller, including a news “broadside” announcing the death of Admiral Nelson.
Dickens visited the Bush Tavern during a tour of the South West and went on to use it as one of the settings for The Pickwick Papers. The inn was demolished in 1854.
Today, the worst sin in the world, almost, would be to eat a turtle. But we report today that a Bill of Fare for Christmas Day 1790, at a Bristol coaching inn celebrated by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, is up for auction. It proudly lists an avalanche of turbot, eels, teal, coot, snipe, larks, widgeon, venison and reindeer tongues, beneath the prize offering: a 47lb turtle. It was an exclusive sort of viand. At Lord Mayor’s banquets of the time gluttonous aldermen took delight in calipash and calipee, names for the gelatinous substances from the upper and lower shell. It couldn’t go on. As the poor turtle grew rarer, the pragmatic Victorians invented mock-turtle, made from calves’ heads, which is why in Wonderland, when Alice meets the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle, Tenniel draws the latter with the head of a calf.