Book of Cookery: Kitchen Essays, by Agnes Jekyll

Just finished reading my first Persephone book, a collection of essays by Agnes Jekyll, an Englishwoman who wrote columns published in a newspaper from 1921-22. All the very short essays are on recipes, entertaining, and how to feed people, and they are excessively charming. They reflect an interesting “modern” attitude in the wake of the Great War, and despite the writer being a noblewoman, she expects that while some of her readers will be wealthy and have a large domestic staff, there is a wide audience of middle-class readers who have a small staff or none at all, and are therefore interested in how they can do these things for themselves. Things may be shifting a bit glacially, but they are shifting.

I would love to try some of these recipes, but as a not-so-accomplished cook, I think many of them would be difficult. Most of them assume equipment, knowledge, and assistance that I don’t have. – a hair sieve, for instance, or a charlotte mold. Measurements are not always precise, although more so than, say, the average medieval recipe – things call for a “walnut” or “filbert” sized piece of butter, or instruct the dish to be cooked in a “slow oven.” Or the recipe may have great details for some of the dish, but it will finish with instructions like, “Serve with a standard white sauce.” I have no standard white sauce! Is this a cream sauce, or something with cheese, or is it hollandaise?

There was obviously a much more defined taste for savory mousses and things with aspic in the 1920s than is generally called for today and most people will not serve calves brains or kidneys for breakfast. (I know people still eat salmon mousse, but I think chicken or shrimp mousses are not frequently found.) Turtle soup isn’t a treat, and as far as I know you can’t find it in a can in stores. Although tongue sandwiches are talked about with great love, I don’t think I’ll be trying them any time soon, let alone pickling and then smoking my own ox tongues.

On the other hand, some of the recipes sound delicious, particularly the breads, and many of the desserts. I’ll post some of her them for the curious.

I read this just after reading Julia Child's My Life in France - it's funny how interested I am in reading books and watching programs about cooking, even though I don't cook all that well myself. But I find it endlessly fascinating. A person pledging themselves to cook every recipe in Kitchen Essays would have less overall work to do than Julie did for Julia Child's book - there are not nearly as many recipes included. But I imagine you'd have to do a lot more "test-kitchen" sort of work to get them all correct.

ETA: aapis_mellifera mentioned this useful site for understanding cookery terms of the time period.

More on 1920s cookery

Sayers readers take note! An old friend of the ham family appears in the essay on breakfast:

Of course a really first-rate ham, such as the peach-fed Spanish variety, or those excellent but costly brands from Yorkshire, Bradenham, or Cumberland, deserve special treatment in their boiling, such as a bottle of madeira and the addition of vegetables, spices, and herbs. Thus enriched, they should make ceremonial debut at a luncheon or dinner-table, accompanied by Cumberland sauce and a skillfully composed salad before appearing at the breakfast sideboard.

Now I want to try Bradenham ham.

From the essay titled Cottage Hospitality:

Bread and Butter Pudding, for six persons.
Cut about six thin slices of bread and butter from a tin loaf, remove crust, cut into squares or rounds. Arrange in a nice white buttered dish or oven-proof glass oval. Add a few stoned raisins or well-soaked sultanas, sprinkle with castor sugar. Break 2 whole eggs and one extra yolk into a basin, whisk up, pour on 1/2 pint of hot milk flavored with vanilla, and pour this on to bread and butter; then embellish the top with some halved glace cherries and acorn-sized pieces of crushed loaf sugar. Cook to attractive brownness in a slow oven for 3/4 hour,a nd serve with fresh cream. Good both hot or cold.

I could definitely follow this recipe, and I think I will. Although I don't know what a "tin loaf" might be. And I'd have to look up castor sugar, too - I used to know what it was but can't recall.

This one from the Dance and supper essay, on the other hand, seems a waste of a good chicken to me:

For a good cold Cream of Chicken for the supper table, steam a large plump fowl till tender. When cold point the meat, and pass through a hair sieve mixed with enough cream to make it light, season to taste, add 3 or 4 leaves of gelatine dissolved. When nearly set, pour it into a plain round charlotte or brick-shaped mould previously lined with aspic of the chicken stock, turn out, and serve very cold with a garnish of shredded and creamed celery, or a fruid salad, or chopped aspic and cress. a similar treatment of lobster makes a good mousse,a nd the economist can use whiting for its basis.

I'm not sure why that's so off-putting...probably because I'm not a fan of aspics and savory mousses. The flavor is probably very good, but the mouthfeel just doesn't work for me.