BOOK REVIEW: What Darwin ate for dinner

Mrs. Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book: Revived and Illustrated

By Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway

Glitterati, $35, 144 pages, illus.

“Mrs. Charles Darwin’s Recipe Book” commemorates the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.” It does not directly address Darwin’s achievements, yet it is a worthy celebration of them because it delights in so many different ways.

First, most obviously, it is visually enchanting: both beautifully printed and gorgeously illustrated. The pictures include photographs of Down House in Kent, where the Darwins spent most of their married life and raised their 10 children. It also has Victorian drawings of vegetables, fruits, animals and fish, and, most significantly because it is, after all, a cookbook, it has delectable photographs of the featured dishes. Many of them are pictured on Wedgwood china, always a pleasure to look at but particularly apposite because both Emma and Charles Darwin were grandchildren of the great Josiah Wedgwood, a pioneer of English bone china. The Darwins owned a set of Wedgwood’s Waterlily pattern, shown in all its painted glory in one of the photographs and also attractively used as a background on the recipe pages.

The recipes themselves are another of the pleasures of this book. The authors reproduce them as both facsimiles in Emma Darwin’s own hand and also in modernized versions. They confess, “When we started working on this project, the general feeling among those who knew the manuscript was that the food would be, at the worst, dire, at best dull.”

This feeling, a stereotyped attitude toward Victorian food, was further justified by the knowledge that Charles Darwin had a notoriously iffy stomach. Many foods upset it, and he had to eschew even a single glass of wine and participation in dinner parties, which he greatly enjoyed, because the consequences could be days of sickness.

Modern researchers suggest he suffered from Crohn’s disease. Whatever the diagnosis, his illness kept him at home, where, free from social distractions, he could pursue his work. Another consequence was that Emma Darwin and her cooks had to be cautious in their choice of dishes, invariably choosing plain over fancy.

The “good plain cooking” so frequently requested of would-be cooks applying for jobs in 19th-century kitchens is less popular today. Plain cooking is not always quick cooking, nor is it always easy because ingredients must stand on their own merits without help from herbs, spices and other flavorings.

A careless hand turns plain food into dreary food. Emma Darwin’s dishes veer toward blandness, and her instructions for boiling vegetables such as carrots and mushrooms for as much as two hours definitely are not to be obeyed.

Such Victorian lacunae notwithstanding, the authors write, “The food proved very good indeed. We picked up a few interesting tips … pickled walnuts in a sauce for beef and red currant juice in raspberry jam were just two.”

They are generous with their own tips, too. In testing their selected recipes, they strayed very little from the paths Emma Darwin marked out. Nevertheless, they took contemporary cooking methods into account and adapted the dishes for the modern kitchen - always, however, adding informative accounts of how the dishes would have been cooked at Down House.

Some of the recipes came to Emma Darwin from family and friends. Turnips cresselly is a unusual and pleasant-sounding dish of creamed baby turnips that originated in the home of her Welsh mother. Lady Skymaston’s pudding is a rich custard, while the compote of apples came from the greatest botanist of the 19th century, Dr. Joseph Hooker.

Other dishes are staples of Victorian cooking, sometimes easy to spot as Emma Darwin’s versions of recipes in Eliza Acton’s “Modern Cookery for Private Families” of 1845. Yet other recipes are quite unusual and therefore especially intriguing.

For example, rissoles are usually a sort of meatball made of leftover potato and roast beef or lamb, but Emma Darwin’s potato rissoles are made from pieces or ham or other filling rolled in a potato pastry and then fried. Croquettes today also usually include mashed potatoes, but Emma Darwin sticks to the older, slightly trickier, and generally nicer method of making her fish croquettes with a very thick bechamel.

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