Serving a red herring
FOR a striking snapshot of just how radically Britain has changed over the past century or so, head to the kitchen. One wonders what the Edwardians would have made of Yotam Ottolenghi and Jamie Oliver. They might have been rather thrown by pomegranate molasses, but certainly no more so than a modern audience seeking historic inspiration for a showstopper dish.
Buckingham Palace, ever the arbiter of taste, marked Derby Day 1906 with a lunch spanning 10 courses. You should be able to recreate the haunch of venison and saddle of lamb (although bear in mind they appeared as a single course), but just try tracking down ortolan. And even the gamest wine merchant might struggle to produce a 40-year-old vintage of still champagne to pair with it.
Although most smart hosts of that era would restrain themselves to a mere eight courses, throwing a dinner party was a lavish affair. In her Edwardian country house handbook Upstairs & Downstairs, author Sarah Warwick suggests that the menu bill for a ‘typical’ society dinner for 20 people would have been around £60. For context, the annual salary of a housemaid at the time was roughly £20.
Auguste Escoffier was celebrity chef du jour, but his most successful acolytes could also charge an impressive premium for their services. Indeed, so important was the success of these dinner parties to an Edwardian hostess that a good chef might well command a wage 10 times higher than a butler.
Even when dishes appear familiar, it’s worth remembering how their price and availability has shifted over the years. Smoked salmon is a prime example. Unless you had access to this delicacy from your own estate, it would have been difficult and expensive to procure. Even the luxury food emporium that is Fortnum & Mason only listed smoked salmon for the first time in its 1950 catalogue, priced at 25/- (£1.25) per pound. For the same money you could have popped around the corner to Berry Brothers & Rudd and come away with a bottle of Bordeaux first growth Château Lafite 1945 with plenty of change to spare. These days Lafite has rocketed firmly into the territory of the super-rich, while the salmon-farming boom that began in the 1970s has reduced this former treat to the status of unpalatable supermarket sandwich filler.
Other items from that 1950 Fortnum’s list are rather trickier for today’s ambitiously nostalgic hostess to track down. Only someone on particularly good terms with their butcher would be likely to succeed in serving dressed boar’s head today, and their guests’ enthusiasm might not reward the effort. Meanwhile, woodcock may not have quite disappeared from modern menus in the same way as plover, curlew and bittern, but they’re certainly now a specialism too far for Fortnum’s.
In the face of post-war austerity, when not only were many luxury ingredients scarce but also the staff required to prepare and serve them, it was inevitable that menus were forced to evolve, even at the smartest addresses. For the hostess trying to navigate her way through this time of social upheaval, advice was on hand from the likes of Nell Heaton, whose manual The Complete Cook is packed with culinary pearls.
To a modern eye these recommendations tend to range from the entertainingly retro to the frankly stomach-churning. Take Heaton’s tip that pigeon ‘can be served to taste like grouse, if they are stuffed with half a red herring each during cooking’. Her advice to remove the herring before serving brings only moderate relief.
Fortunately for diplomatic relations, President Kennedy swerved such gastronomic innovations at the 1961 Buckingham Palace dinner given in his honour. Indeed, the menu of pea soup, fillet of sole, saddle of lamb and Grand Marnier soufflé looks far more closely aligned with appetites and tastes of today than it does to that blow-out Derby Day feast 55 years earlier.
Fortnum & Mason only listed smoked salmon for the first time in 1950