Jane Austen's Table

by Robert Tuesley Anderson

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From picnicking on Box Hill and supper at the Netherfield Ball, to Mrs. Bennet's family dinners and strawberry picking at Donwell Abbey, food plays a valuable role in the novels of literary heroine Jane Austen.

Jane Austen's Table brings readers a sumptuous array of recipes that capture all the spirit and verve of the food of Jane Austen's world and the Regency era, adapted and reimagined for the modern day. Including recipes such as Netherfield White Soup, Box Hill Picnic Pies, General Tilney's Hot Chocolate, and Summer Berry Delice, this beautiful collection of over 70 recipes provides an irresistibly charming experience of Austen's novels like no other.

This beautiful cookbook also features fascinating insights into the food of Jane Austen's world in the form of short essays and recipe notes, making this the perfect addition to any Austen fan's bookshelf.

· Recreate the delicious meals, picnics and tidbits from the novels of Jane Austen, and indulge in all the luxury and splendour of the Regency period.
· Discover food and drink for every occasion, from picnics and suppers to sweet delights for your very own routs and balls.
· Immerse yourself in Austen's world and all the pomp and charm of the eighteenth century with detailed notes and essays featured throughout.

Release date: October 7, 2021

Publisher: Octopus Books

Print pages: 160

Sample

Breakfast

Henry Crawford’s Lazy Breakfast Eggs

Mrs Cassandra Austen’s Buttered Eggs

Porridge

Gentility Breakfast Brioche:

Lady Susan’s Raspberry & Mascarpone

Mary Crawford’s Tarragon & Mushroom

Love & Friendship Pain Perdu

Donwell Abbey Strawberry Jam

Bath Buns

Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s Caraway & Raisin Breakfast Bread

Pound Cake

Frank Churchill’s Cardamom Coffee

General Tilney’s Hot Chocolate

FOOD & AUSTEN’S FLOURISHING HEROINES

Picnics, Nuncheons & Light Bites

Box Hill Picnic Pies

Elizabeth Martin’s Sausage Rolls

Perfect Picnic Parcels

Stuffed Tomatoes

Uppercross Mushroom Pies

Duck, Pear & Raspberry Salad

Pickled Vegetable Salad

Mr Collins’s Pea Soup

Chestnut Soup

Mary Musgrove’s Meat Platter

Dr Grant’s Sandwich Tray

Turkey, Watercress, Cranberry & Mayo

Beefsteak & Caramelised Leek

Club Sandwich

Plum & Crushed Peppercorn Jelly

Chestnut Jam with Whisky

Mrs Reynolds’s Peach Pickle

Captain Frederick Wentworth’s Ship’s Biscuits

Georgian Fruit Salad

Strawberry & Lavender Shortcakes

Gingered Pear Juice

William Cowper’s Melon Cooler

PICNICKING REGENCY STYLE

Dinner

Netherfield White Soup

Salmagundi

Chawton Cottage Garden Risotto

Lyme Bay Mackerel

Cassandra’s Lobster & Asparagus

Mr Gardiner’s Slow-Cooked Fish

Mansfield Wood Roast Pheasant

Chicken Curry

Mrs Bennet’s Venison Pot

Rabbit Stew

Mrs Thorpe’s Veal Pie

Hunsford Parsonage Ginger Pork Chops

A Potato & Cauliflower Curry

Henry Tilney’s Nice Mushroom Patties with the Nicest Onion Jelly

Frank’s Roast Vegetables

Spinach & Potato Gratin

FOOD AT SEA

Trash & Sweet Things: Ices, Cakes & Puddings

Summer Berry Delice

Mr Woodhouse’s ‘All-Apple’ Tarts

Whipt Syllabub

Mrs Elton’s Ice

Godmersham Melon Sorbet

Cherry Almond Ice Cream

Lydia’s Whim-Wham

Devizes Cheesecakes

Martha Lloyd’s Ratafia Cakes

Chawton Cottage Plum Pudding

Mrs Weston’s Wedding Cake

Gingerbread Loaf

Seashell Valentines

Charlotte Lucas’s Mince Pies

COOKBOOKS & RECEIPT BOOKS

Entertaining: Routs & Balls

Rout Cakes

Fanny Price’s Rose Garden Delights

Steventon Treacle Tarts

Mrs Jennings’s Shortbreads

Negus

Mrs Allen’s Tea Punch

Champagne Ice

Lydia Bennet’s Orgeat

Admiral Croft’s ‘Great Comet’ Grog

ASSEMBLIES, ROUTS & BALLS





The characters in Jane Austen’s novels belong to the well-to-do, leisured gentry and, even when thrown into straitened circumstances like the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility (1811), spend much of their time socialising – and, consequently, eating and drinking.

Alongside the everyday round of breakfasts, teas, and family dinners we find a profusion of more formal meals and ‘rout’ suppers, and even – in perhaps the most famous scene in all of Austen – an idyllic summertime picnic. This last takes place in Emma (1815), where the whirl of social engagements and the meals that accompany them seem to preoccupy the characters more than in any of the other novels.

The food served up to us in the pages of Austen’s fiction closely reflects the rich, heavy fare commonly eaten by the landed gentry in what can be loosely termed the Regency period (roughly 1795–1837). Ingredients were necessarily almost all local and seasonal, with the produce for the kitchen largely sourced from a surrounding estate or from an adjoining vegetable garden. More exotic foodstuffs like sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate and spices as well as tropical fruits, such as the pineapple, were imported from the expanding British colonies but were, of course, expensive even for the rich.

The extravagance of the Georgian dinner table was only partly about sustenance; it was also – and especially in the context of entertaining – about status: the plain old showing off of wealth, consumption and ‘good taste’. The aspirational Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813), a good few steps down in social rank than her new neighbour, Mr Bingley, is at pains to show that her dinners are as good as, if not better than, his – despite (or because of!) the French-inflected pretensions of his cooks.

It is for social aperçus like this and to highlight her characters’ foibles that Austen most often uses food in her novels. Meals and ingredients are rarely described sensually – Austen was no gourmand, no Regency Colette; she was, above all, a realist and describes food in a matter-of-fact way, even while freighting it with symbolic, ironic, or humorous meanings. Thus, when Emma Woodhouse, queen of the Highbury social scene, sends her rival, the slightly ailing Jane Fairfax, a packet of expensive ‘arrow-root’ (which was used to make the jellies given to invalids), she is really drawing attention to her rival’s subordinate, impoverished position, and when Miss Fairfax coolly sends back the same with ‘a thousand thanks’, she is asserting her independence and her refusal to be patronised.

We do not have to rely only on the novels themselves when looking for evidence for how Austen and her contemporaries ate. The writer’s surviving letters provide a rich treasure trove of domestic detail (we learn, for example, of Jane’s role in making the family tea and cocoa in the morning) as do, crucially, the two surviving ‘receipt books’ associated with the Austen family: one created by Martha Lloyd, who lived with Jane Austen and her mother and sister at their cottage in Chawton, and the rather grander one associated with Jane’s brother, Edward Austen Knight, who owned the nearby landed estate, Chawton House. In addition, the Georgian period saw plenty of professionally published cookbooks, the most famous of which, Hannah Glasse’s bestselling The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), was still widely in use in Austen’s time.

In this book, we have mined all these sources to bring readers a sumptuous array of recipes that capture the spirit and verve of the food of Austen’s world, but adapted and reimagined to suit our modern taste for lighter, healthier, more convenient dishes (Regency dishes were often labour- as well as calorie-intensive!). Here you will find modern recipes for everything from Mansfield Wood Roast Pheasant and Mary Musgrove’s Meat Platter to Dr Grant’s Sandwiches, from General Tilney’s Hot Chocolate to Rout Cake and Dowell Abbey Summer Berry Delice. The recipes are arranged according to the principal Georgian meals – breakfast and dinner – accompanied by additional chapters devoted to Nuncheons, Tidbits & Picnics; Ices, Cakes & Puddings; and Routs & Balls.

While we may not have the leisure, time, or money of an Emma, an Elizabeth, or even an Elinor to dine in truly ‘Jane Austen’ style, a little of its opulence and a little of its romance can never really go amiss at our modern meals. This book will show you how.



There are very few breakfast scenes in Jane Austen’s novels. Perhaps this was because of the novelist’s sense of propriety; after all, breakfast was – and still is – the most intimate and private of meals, taken when a household was still in mufti, so to speak, not quite ready to face the day and for the round of visits and visitors this might entail.

While for most ordinary men and women of the Georgian period breakfast was often a hearty affair featuring bread, meat and ale, eaten early to get the working day off to a good start and on a full stomach, for the gentry breakfast was typically much lighter and certainly more leisurely, taken as late as ten or eleven o’clock. In the cottage at Chawton, Hampshire – where Jane Austen wrote her last three novels – we know that the writer, her mother and her sister ate little more than tea and toast for the meal, and that only after an hour or two of small chores, a short country walk, or even a round of letter writing. Jane Austen, for example, fitted in an hour’s practice at the pianoforte before she set about making the family’s tea.

Nonetheless, in grander homes, breakfast could become much more elaborate. At the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, the Prince Regent’s favourite breakfast consisted of two pigeons and three beefsteaks, washed down with white wine, a glass of dry champagne, two glasses of port and a glass of brandy. There was such a thing as a compromise: during a visit to a wealthy relative, Jane Austen’s mother wrote a letter praising the elegance of the breakfast table, which featured ‘Chocolate Coffee and Tea, Plumb Cake, Pound Cake, Hot Rolls, Cold Rolls, Bread and Butter’. It is such elegance that is the watchword in the recipes here.

This slow-cooker recipe is ideal for a leisurely Sunday breakfast. It’s quick to prepare: just pop everything in the slow cooker and leave it to cook gently while you read the papers and drink a cup of coffee.



The supremely health-conscious Mr Woodhouse’s advice to the elderly Mrs Bates in Emma is somewhat in line with our attitude to eggs today – they are good for you when eaten in moderation.

‘Mrs Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else; but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see—one of our small eggs will not hurt you.’

The following recipe, then, is a late Sunday morning treat. Imagine the rakish Henry Crawford, the antihero of Mansfield Park and Fanny’s suitor, having risen late after a Saturday night on the town, sitting down to this hearty meal, prepared by his cook or manservant. Perfect washed down with another raffish delight, Frank Churchill’s Cardamom Coffee.

SERVES 4

PREP + COOKING TIME: 55 minutes

25g butter

4 thin slices of honey roast ham

4 teaspoons spicy tomato chutney

4 eggs

2 cherry tomatoes, halved

1 spring onion, finely sliced

salt and black pepper

4 slices of buttered toast, to serve

1. Preheat the slow cooker. Use a little of the butter to grease four 125ml ovenproof dishes (checking first that the dishes fit in your slow-cooker pot). Press a slice of ham into each dish to line the base and sides, lea. . .