January 2006

What, if anything, is Instant Postum? Tuesday's food quotation

You are a damned idle dog, why don't you send me the Latin tag on the Sparrow memorial that I want for my very good story? I tell you, you will regret it if you trifle with me. I have put you into it, a very agreeable character so far, reading the Decline and Fall and eating white currants. But it is well within my means to make you read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and drink Instant Postum.

1926 Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letter to David Garnett, 1 December [ Sylvia and David: the Townsend Warner / Garnett letters (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) p. 31]. Note: The story, entitled 'The maze', was actually published in The Salutation in 1932. Mr Slumber remains aloof from the villagers, reading Herodotus and eating whitecurrants.

The question posed above has been miraculously answered by 'Stargzer', a regular contributor to the Alphadictionary forum:

It's a coffee substitute created by C. W. Post (of Post Cereals) in 1895. My uncle used to drink it when I was a kid. I had it once or twice, but don't remember much. I think it was vaguely coffee-flavored. As for me, I bought a used espresso maker for US$5.00 which I keep at work. A 12-ounce espresso can keep me going for the day.

European cranberries: Monday's food quotation

Cran-berries are offered at the door.

1788 Gilbert White, Diary, 9 July [Gilbert White's year, OUP, 1982]

Milk, bread, bloaters and right-wing politics: Sunday's food quotation

The law requiring pasteurization of milk in England was a particular target of Uncle Geoff's. Fond of alliteration, he dubbed it the "Murdered Milk Measure", and established the Liberty Restoration League, with headquarters at his house in London, for the specific purpose of organizing a counter-offensive. "Freedom, not Doctordom!" was the League's proud slogan. A subsidiary, but nevertheless important, activity of the League was advocacy of a return to the "unsplit, slowly smoked bloater" and bread made with "English stone-ground flour, yeast, milk, sea salt and raw cane sugar.

Wherever he went Uncle Geoff carried stacks of copies of his letters to the Times and Spectator, together with printed directions for preparing unsplit, slowly smoked bloaters and home-made bread. My mother gave wholehearted support to his ideas on health, to which she added a few of her own. Not only were we strictly forbidden to eat any tinned food, but adherence to Mosaic diet laws was enforced as rigidly as in any orthodox Jewish household. Pork, shellfish, rabbit were proscribed for schoolroom fare on the grounds that Moses had considered these foods unhealthy for consumption by the Israelites, and because my mother had a theory that Jews never got cancer.

1978 Jessica Mitford, Hons and rebels (Quartet Books) p. 29

Chocolat Angélique and its preliminaries: Saturday's food quotation

Last night the Cronyns ... came to dinner. I gave them:
Soup. Bayonne ham and salad. Paella and red cabbage sweet and sour cooked in wine with apple and onions, Chocolat Angelique, cheese. Chocolat Angelique is made with 2 oz butter, 2 oz grated chocolate, 4 tablespoons of sugar, 3/4 pint of milk - boiled down to a thick cream - then 3 tablespoons of rum stirred in.

1973 Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letter to David Garnett, 21 February [ Sylvia and David: the Townsend Warner / Garnett letters (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) p. 173]

Bingo's picnic: Friday's food quotation

'I've just been superintending the packing of the lunch-basket ... There's ham sandwiches ... and tongue sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and lobster and a cold chicken and sardines and a cake and a couple of bottles of Bollinger and some old brandy --'

1930 P. G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves! 'Jeeves and the old school chum'

Austrian home made spirits: Thursday's food quotation

'By the way, just try this Schnapps ...' It was juniper-spirit, of the year 1882. With all respect for its antiquity, I found myself unable to appreciate the stuff. Then he gave me ... some of his own Obstler (made of apples) only three weeks old. A little crude, but of good promise. So we went through the lot. His own Zwetschgenwasser -- excellent! Then Kirsch, from the neighbouring village of Tiefis, which makes a speciality of this Schnapps, distilled from the small mountain cherries; of mighty pleasant flavour. Next, Enzian; the product of the yellow Alpine gentian. Whoever likes Enzian -- and who can help liking it? -- will have nothing to say against that of our Silberthal, which has a well-deserved reputation for this brand. Beerler, I enquire? No, he says; nobody makes bilberry spirit any more. 'Which is a pity.' 'This infernal war --' 'It has shattered all the refinements of life.'

1923 Norman Douglas,Together chapter 2

A greedy Puritan: Wednesday's food quotation

I found him, fast by the teeth, i' the cold Turkey-pye, i' the cupboard, with a great white loafe on his left hand, and a glasse of Malmesey on his right.

1631 Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Faire act 1 scene 6

Conservative propaganda: Tuesday's food quotation

My mother was a staunch supporter of Conservative Party activities. Although she was never particularly enthusiastic about our local Member of Parliament ("such a dull little creature," she would say sadly), Muv campaigned faithfully at each election. Crowds of placid villagers were assembled on the lawn at Swinbrook house to be harangued by our uncles on the merits of the Conservative Party, and later to be fed thick meat sandwiches, pound cake, and cups of nice strong tea. Our family always had its booth at the annual Oxfordshire Conservative Fête, where we sold eggs, vegetables from the kitchen garden, and quantities of cut flowers.

Jessica Mitford, Hons and rebels (Quartet Books, 1978) p. 19

Baker's cake: Monday's food quotation

The Monday of the Feast [Fordlow Feast] was kept by women and children only, the men being at work. It was a great day for tea parties; mothers and sisters and aunts and cousins coming in droves from about the neighbourhood. The chief delicacy at these teas was 'baker's cake', a rich, fruity, spicy dough cake, obtained in the following manner. The housewife provided all the ingredients excepting the dough, putting raisins and currants, lard, sugar, and spice in a basin which she gave to the baker, who added the dough, made and baked the cake, and returned it, beautifully browned in his big oven. The charge was the same as that for a loaf of bread the same size, and the result was delicious."

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Penguin modern classics, 1975, p. 231)

The Divers dined on bouillabaisse: Sunday's food quotation

The Divers went to Nice and dined on a bouillabaisse, which is a stew of rock fish and small lobsters, highly seasoned with saffron, and a bottle of cold Chablis.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the night (Penguin classics, 2000, p. 287)

Virginia Woolf's passion for cooking: Saturday's food quotation

I have only one passion in life -- cooking. I have just bought a superb oil stove. I can cook anything. I am free forever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you it is better than writing these more than idiotic books.

1929 Virginia Woolf, Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 26 September [A reflection of the other person: the letters of Virginia Woolf, volume IV, 1929-1931 (Chatto & Windus, 1978) no. 2073]

The first cantaloupe melon: Friday's food quotation

August 22: Cut the first Cantaleupe, the largest of the Crop: weighed 3 pds. 5 oun: & half. It proved perfectly delicate, dry, & firm, notwithstanding the unfavourable weather ever since the time of setting.

1758 Gilbert White, Diaries [Gilbert White's year (OUP, 1982)]

Argan oil

What's argan oil? To find out, start here .

Christmas sandwiches: Thursday's food quotation

29 December. Snow in the night and when we stop for our sandwiches on the road to Garsdale Head Dentdale is in immaculate relief with the Howgills ghostly beyond. They're Christmas sandwiches (cold pheasant, apple sauce, Cumberland sauce and lettuce, followed by mince pies) then we go on down to Mallerstang.

2002 Alan Bennett, Diary [Untold stories p. 303]

Etymology online, continued

The American Heritage dictionary  online includes separate brief dictionaries of Indo-European and Semitic roots, the former by Calvert Watkins, the latter by John Huehnergard.

The English for pâté de foie gras d'oie: Wednesday's food quotation

'... Here's a little pie (a gem this is, both for size and quality), made in France. And what do you suppose it's made of? Livers of fat geese. There's a pie! Now let's see you eat 'em.' 'Thank you, sir,' I replied, '... they are too rich for me.'

1852 Charles Dickens, Bleak House ch. 3

Buying sweets at Swinbrook: Tuesday's food quotation

Burford has, indeed, become a sort of minor Stratford-on-Avon, its ancient inns carefully made up to combine modern comfort with a Tudor air. You can even get Coca-Cola there, though it may be served at room temperature ... For some reason Swinbrook, only three miles away, seems to have escaped the tourist trade, and has remained as I remember it more than thirty years ago. In the tiny village post office the same four kinds of sweets -- toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh Rock and butterscotch -- are still displayed in the same four large cut-glass jars ranged in the window.

1978 Jessica Mitford, Hons and rebels (Quartet Books, 1978) p. 9

Swiss rarebit: Monday's food quotation

Their destination was a hotel with an old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding , a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers. Many parties at long tables blurred into one great party and ate fondue -- a peculiarly indigestible form of Welsh rarebit, mitigated by hot spiced wine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the night [Penguin classics, 2000, p. 191]

Slipcoat cheese: Sunday's food quotation

My Lady of Middlesex makes excellent slipp-coat cheese of good morning milk, putting cream to it.

c. 1648 Kenelm Digby, The Closet Open'd

Cheese, green cheese and spermyse: Saturday's food quotation

There is iiii. sortes of chese ... grene chese, softe chese, harde chese or spermyse. Grene chese is not called grene by the reason of colour, but for the newnes of it, for the whay is not half pressed out of it, and in operacion it is colde and moyste ... Spermyse is a chese the which is made with curdes and with the iuce of herbes.

1542 Andrew Boorde, Compendyous Regyment

English cheeses in the 16th century: Friday's food quotation

And here in Englande be diuers kindes of cheeses, as Suff., Essex, Banburie &c. according to their places and feeding of their cattel, time of the yere, layre of their kine, clenlinesse of their dayres, quantitie of their butter.

1562 Wilyam Bulleyn [cited by F. J. Furnivall in Early English Meals and Manners (1868)]

Somerset proverb: Thursday's food quotation

If you will have a good cheese, and have 'n old, you must turn 'n seven times before he is cold.

1678 John Ray, English Proverbs

Specialties of Ville Platte, Louisiana: Wednesday's food quotation

Across from the Pig Stand there was a little mom-and-pop grocery with a hand-painted sign that said We sell boudin and a smaller sign that said Fresh cracklins ... The boudin were plump and juicy, and when you bit into them they were filled with rice and pork and cayenne and onions and celery.

1995 Robert Crais, Voodoo River

Restless house guests, a problem for the thoughtful housekeeper: Tuesday's food quotation

I am writing under great difficulties -- that is I am entertaining week end visitors. Do you ever let yourself in for that particular effort? One keeps looking to see if they are enjoying themselves. They aren't. Well then what can one do? Suggest a picnic. But the mutton is almost ready. Never mind -- we will eat it at dinner. So that is what is happening this very instant in Sussex -- we are going to boil some eggs and go off to a wood and sit on the roots of beech trees among pine needles and ants in a high wind and eat hardboiled eggs -- dont you wish you were with us? Well, I rather do.

Virginia Woolf, Letter to Dorothy Bussy, 1 September 1929 [A reflection of the other person: the letters of Virginia Woolf, volume IV, 1929-1931 (London, Chatto & Windus, 1978) no. 2066]

About the author

Everything you want to know (or, at least, everything you need to know) about Andrew Dalby can now be found here. This new page has links to information about each of my books and how to buy them.

A spice garden: Monday's food quotation

Ther was eek wexing many a spyce,
As clow-gelofre, and licoryce,
Gingere, and greyn de par[ad]ys,
Canelle, and setewale of prys,
And many a spyce delitable
To eten whan men ryse fro table.

c. 1370 Geoffrey Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose.

Chaucer was translating from French, and here's the original French text he was working from. I first used this quotation in Dangerous Tastes: on this page, as a bonus, you can find the complete description of this dream spice-garden, in old French (with modern English translation) and in Chaucer's middle English version.

Marriage is like vinegar: Sunday's food quotation

Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --
A sad, sour, sober beverage -- by time
Is sharpen'd from its high celestial flavour,
Down to a very homely household savour.

1819 Byron, Don Juan canto 3 verse 5

Not finding treasure: Saturday's food quotation

'Dig away, boys,' said Silver, with the coolest insolence; 'you'll find some pig-nuts and I shouldn't wonder.'

1862 R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island ch. 31. the Oxford English Dictionary identifies pig-nuts in this quotation with earth-nuts, Bunium Bulbocastanum. Is that really what Long John Silver meant?

The problem with ordering fruit-trees from catalogues: Friday's food quotation

Gather'd the only & first Apricot the tree ever bore, it was a fair fruit, but not the sort sent for: being an Orange & not a Breda. Scarce any of Murdoch Middleton's trees turnout the sorts sent-for.

Gilbert White, Diary 5 August 1765 [Gilbert White's year, 1982]

Is Cheshire cheese mentioned in Domesday Book?

Many recent books and many websites say it is. It isn't, and I'd like to know how the mistake started. So far as I know, Cheshire cheese is first mentioned in 1586, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was said at that time to be the best cheese in England, and no doubt it took a long time for that reputation to be gained, but how long seems to be unknown. The twelfth century historian, William of Malmesbury, as a preface to his history of the bishopric of Chester, says that the people of Chester loved their milk and butter (see today's Latin quotation), but, sadly for the cheese websites, he doesn't mention Chester cheese; nor does any other medieval source that I have yet found.

Supper at Haileybury college in 1856: Thursday's food quotation

Elliot would make us a little supper of delicacies which his mother used to send him from Trinidad, namely chocolate, cassava cakes, and a peculiarly delicious jam known as 'Governor's plum' jam.

1896 John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian chapter 4

London Library

Here's the redesigned website of the London Library, the lending library unlike any other, founded by Thomas Carlyle.

Surfeit of rabbits: Wednesday's food quotation

We seem to live on stewed rabbit day after day, until even the cats turn up their noses. The truth is the keeper caught 4 rabbits in the garden last week. And as "Ecomonie" is the watch word of our house, we must perforce mange lapin.

1929 Carrington, letter to Julia Strachey, February? [from Carrington: letters and extracts from her diaries (1970)]

Dating the origins of Indo-European and Slavic languages

In Linguistica Brunensia (2005) Vaclav Blazek collaborates with Petra Novotna on a glottochronological study of the Slavic languages. The hundred-word table that they used is usefully set out in full, for all the languages, on pages 67 to 77. According to their calculations, North Slavic (Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian) split from the rest in AD 520/600, South Slavic (Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Macedonian and Bulgarian) in 720, Czech-Slovak in 900. The remaining three, Sorbian, Polabian and Polish, split in 1020. The split between Russian and the two other North Slavic languages came in 1070, between Macedonian and Bulgarian in 1220, between Slovene and Serbo-Croat in 1300, between Czech and Slovak also in 1300, between Ukrainian and Belorussian in 1630 and between North and South Sorbian also in 1630.

If you believe in glottochronology your faith will probably not be shaken by the enormous differences between this calculation and the one developed by the late S. Starostin at Santa Fe in 2004. Starostin found that the earliest split was between Bulgarian-Macedonian and all the rest, and this happened in 130 AD. North Slavic then separated off in 270, said Starostin, followed by Polabian-Sorbian in 420 and by Slovene-Serbo-Croat in 670. Polish split from Czech-Slovak in 780.

An appendix to this paper gives the glottochronological analysis of the whole Indo-European that emerged from the same research by Starostin, who calculated that Anatolian separated from the rest ofIndo-European in 4670 BC, Tocharian in 3810 BC, Celtic in 3350 BC, Armenian-Albanian-Recky in 3020 BC, Italic-Germanic in 2860 BC. Indo-Iranian separated from Balto-Slavic in 2710 BC. Armenian, Albanian and Recky split in 2590 BC, Italic and Germanic in 2500 BC, Iranian and Indic in 2000 BC, Baltic and Slavic in 1210 BC, Brythonic and Goidelic (the two branches of Celtic) in 1000 BC, and Tocharian A and Tocharian B in 20 BC.

Not eating prunes: Tuesday's food quotation

She was not a girl who believed in mincing her words, and a racy little anecdote she told about a man who refused to eat prunes had the effect of causing me to be a non-starter for the last two courses.

1930 P. G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves! 'Jeeves and the old school chum'

Etymology online

A splendid range of etymological dictionaries can be found on line at the Santa Fe University site. I leave that link there, but I wonder if this is just one of the portals that leads to the Indoeuropean languages project: if you use this link instead, you'll find some essential guidance on how to use these slightly rebarbative databases.

And here's a site (in German) devoted to Etymology itself, the study of word origins.

Nesquik, preferably strawberry: Monday's food quotation

[Tracey Emin] memorably records that her mother worked at a club in Ramsgate called Gay Nights, and that at one time her diet consisted only of fish fingers and Nesquik ('preferably strawberry').

2005 Henry Hitchings, review of Tracey Emin's Strangeland in the Times Literary Supplement (23 December 2005) p. 9

Heavenly bodies in proto-Indo-European

In Linguistica Brunensia (2005) Vaclav Blazek has published a little etymological dictionary of the names of heavenly bodies in Indo-European languages. Entries include sun, moon, star, planet, the individual planets visible to the naked eye, the Pleiades, Sirius, the Pole Star, the Great Bear and Orion. In the last case there is no clear Indo-European parentage for the Greek name, which may be a loanword ultimately traceable to Sumerian. In all other cases, astronomical names recorded in various early Indo-European languages appear to be cognate and to tell us something about the astronomical vocabulary of proto-Indo-European.

Tropical fruit in 18th century England: Sunday's food quotation

December 10: Mr Taylor brought me a pine-apple, which was, for the season, large, & well-flavoured ... Eat a very delicate Cantaleupe: it had a bottle-nose, & grew close to the stem. Sav'd ye seed.

1792 Gilbert White, Diary (Gilbert White's year, 1982).

Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse 'pinery', an accessory to a country estate which, says [Fran] Beauman, 'every self-respecting aristocrat' aspired to possess.

2005 Bee Wilson, Review of Fran Beauman, The Pineapple in the Times Literary Supplement (2 December 2005) p. 36.

How can you tell the writer is American?

As enthralling as the events of his life undoubtedly were, is there anything new to say?

Michael Saler, reviewing Dane Kennedy's biography of Richard Burton ( The Highly Civilized Man [Harvard, 2005]) in the Times Literary Supplement (9 December 2005) p. 16

In Europe, order from alapage.com