A Georgian Giles Coren

The Red Lion in the 1930s

A Georgian Giles Coren

Extracts from an anonymous ‘ Review of Taverns , Inns, Coffee Houses and Genteel Eating Houses’ published in the New London Magazine, July and August 1788.

The web has done part of my work for me by publishing the first part of this survey of eating places, which appeared in the June 1788 issue of The New London Magazine. Luckily, the second and third parts of this series remain offline. So here are some of the highlights of this witty and very politically incorrect survey of eateries in late Georgian London

July 1788

Brentford Eights, an island in the Thames off Brentford

This is rendered famous for pitch-cock eels. It is likewise celebrated for a very favourite Dutch dish called Vater Zuchee. This dish is composed of perch, parsley-roots and vinegar, served up in a deep dish, with slices of bread and butter. The visitors of the Eights, in gormandising this dish, have no occasion for any other knives and forks than what nature has given them. It is common to eat with digits only.

If any stripling of fortune, whether a coxswain of a barge, or the supercargo of a post chaise, wishes to be indulged, he may be served here with zouchee

A Shilling a Day on Food

Found--a cutting of an interesting article from the mid 1920s by Walter M. Gallichan, journalist, novelist and writer on health, sex education and fishing. Undated but probably from the Daily Mail (mention of Woodman Burbidge on the rear of the press-cutting puts in the 1920s when he was chairman of Harrods.) The purchasing power of a shilling (5p) then is about £2.50 now, still a fairly low sum for a day's food.

A Shilling's worth. Full day's Food - by Walter M. Gallichan.

A shilling spent with discrimination will purchase a substantial and savoury meal of non rationed foods. The foods that offer the highest nutritive and force-giving value are still fairly cheap. A shilling may be wasted upon food of an expensive kind containing only a minimum of nutriment. For example, a shilling's worth of jelly may be purchased under the delusion that gelatine is an excellent food, possessing considerable nutritive value. As a matter of fact, the calf's foot jelly commerce and the packet 'jelly squares', thought easily digested and pleasant to the palate, are practically worthless for repairing the waste of the body and giving energy.

A shilling's worth of cheese contains far more nourishment than a piece of beef at the same price.

Leoni’s Quo Vadis restaurant: ‘no better place in the world to dine or lunch’

Leoni printed this praise from the film actress Evelyn Laye in a tiny promotional booklet reprinted to coincide with the Festival of Britain in 1951.The year before, journalist, S. Jay Kaufman, a veteran American, in a letter to Leoni, revealed that from 1911 to July 1914 no 27, Dean Street, Soho, which under Pepino Leoni became the Quo Vadis restaurant in 1926, had been home to himself and the painter Horace Brodsky. Back then, Kaufman explained, the domestic arrangements might have been pretty basic, but the good company had made up for this:

'The cuisine ? Ours! The charwomen ? Ourselves! And to this Adam house came Harry Kemp, John Flanagan, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, J.T Grien, Lillian Shelley, Nelson Keys, Lily Cadogan, David Burton, Louis Wolheim Arnold Daly, Sir Charles Cochran , Leon M Lion, Constance Collier, Granville Barker, and Frank Harris…’

That’s quite a crowd! Laye’s encomium from 1948 is joined in Leoni’s booklet by 'appreciations' from a number of very satisfied customers, including big names, such as stage designer Edward Gordon Craig (‘ I eat better there than anywhere else’) and Max Beerbohm. As for Kaufman himself, he testifies that in his day American stars like Jimmy Durante, Hoagy Carmichael and Joseph Cotton were also regulars at Quo Vadis.

In addition to these big-name recommendations, Leoni’s, booklet features photos of Italian beauty spots,

Pemmican pemmicanised

Found in this comprehensive work aimed at serious travellers, explorers and survivalists - a letter about pemmican. The book is a two volume work, seemingly not transcribed at Google books, although it went through many editions: Hints to travellers: Organisation and equipment, scientific observations, health, sickness and injury. Edward Ayearst Reeves. (Royal Geographical Society, London, 1938.) 

The typed letter headed What is pemmican? was a response to 'Questions & Answers' at the magazine Geographical of September 1998. It was sent in by one Alan Gurney from the  Isle of Islay.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820), the first European to cross the full width of North America, described pemmican as the food used by North American Indians on their travels. It was made from dried and pounded caribou meat mixed with an equal proportion of melted caribou fat. The resulting mixture was then packed into bags, eaten, uncooked, on the march. This high calorie convenience food was adopted by the North American fur traders on their long cross country travels. Pemmican -- made from beef rather than caribou -- heated in a Nansen cooked former the famous "hoosh" of Arctic and Antarctic explorers. The Bovril company made a man-pemmican (about half protein and half fat) and a dog pemmican (two thirds protein and a third fat).

Macaroni Cheese by Wilfred Pickles

From "As We Like it" Recipes by Famous People edited  by Kenneth Downey  (Arthur Barker, London 1950.)  There is much mention of rationing as in this recipe from Wilfred Pickles. Rather forgotten today but at one point his shows on BBC Radio and TV attracted millions. He also appeared as the grumpy father in Billy Liar (1963).

Macaroni

Here is the recipe I promised you: in these days of shortage of meat this is a recipe which is easy to make and all of the food is unrationed.

First, steam some macaroni in a pressure cooker for 10 minutes, then make a white sauce with grated cheese. Put this cheese sauce over the macaroni, fry some rings of onions crisp, grill some tomatoes and serve with hot, dry toast. And by gum it's grand!

Wilfred Pickles and his wife Mabel

Cherry Cake by Enid Blyton, Mulled wine by Evelyn Waugh

From "As We Like it" Recipes by Famous People edited  by Kenneth Downey  (Arthur Barker, London 1950.) Famous people included Joyce Grenfell, Georgette Heyer, Leslie Charteris, Douglas Fairbanks, Christopher Fry, Celia Johnson Vivian Leigh, Richard Mason, Charles Morgan, Ivor Novello Laurence Olivier, Wilfred Pickles, Freya Stark, Richard Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt ,Katherine Hepburn, Enid Blyton and Clementina Churchill. The book has a forward by Edwina Mountbatten of Burma and she writes that every penny from the sale of the book will go to the funds of the Returned Prisoners of War Association. There is much mention of rationing and tinned food  but Evelyn Waugh goes for an extravagant and slightly incapacitating mulled wine in full Brideshead fashion.

Mulled Claret (for six persons)

Take six bottles of red wine (it would be improper to use really fine Bordeaux, but the better the wine, the better the concoction.)  Any sound claret or burgundy will do. 1 cup full of water; 2 port glasses of brandy; 1 port glass of ginger wine; 1 orange stuffed with cloves; peel of two lemons; 3 sticks of cinnamon; one grated nutmeg.

Heat in covered cauldron. Do not allow to simmer. Serve hot and keep hot on the hob. Should be drunk at the same temperature as tea. 
To be drunk during and after luncheon in February or after dinner on any winter evening. 

Enid Blyton's recipe is for a fairly simple and economical  Cherry Cake for the children…

This is a cake my own children love, and is easy to make when children come to tea.

Ingredients:

Half pound of margarine. 3 eggs. 6 ounces castor sugar.6 ounces cherries. 6 ounces flour. A few drops of vanilla essence.

Method: Beat the margarine and sugar till soft and creamy, drop in eggs one by one and beat well in between each. Add flour gradually, and lastly cherries and flavouring. If too stiff, add a little milk. Bake in a moderate oven to start, and then drop to Regulo 3. It takes about 1 1/2 to 2 hours to bake.

This is just as nice with fruit instead of cherries, or ginger cut up it is excellent.

Half the quantity makes a nice little cake for tea, but only takes 3/4 to 1 hour to cook.

How to be Happy on the Riviera 2

The second part of a posting of a complete book How to be Happy on the Riviera by Robert Elson W. (Arrowsmith Ltd., 11 Quay Street, Bristol, 1927). There is plenty on food and restaurants (including menus and tips on coffee, ice cream and liqueurs) and some good descriptions of gamblers in Monte Carlo - 

"Little old women in Victorian black silk dresses and bonnets; others attired in the fashions of twenty or thirty years ago; exotic-looking young women, wearing extravagant parodies of the fashions of to-day – some exactly like cinema vamps; women like men, and girls like boys. A duke who is a frequent visitor summed it up neatly: 'There are always a lot of queer wild-fowl about'...you may see incredibly ancient men; wild-looking men with immense manes of hair; gaunt men with sunken cheeks and bony hands who might have come out of a novel by Mrs. Radclyffe, unnatural-looking young men who might have been created by Mr. Michael Arlen; people who impress you as half crazy, others who look as if they had been dead a long time, only they don't know it.'

CHAPTER V

A Day in Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo has become democratised. You will see more nursemaids and children, more plainly-dressed, commonplace people, than smart folk, in the famous gardens; and in recent years new-comers have generally expressed disappointment on the Terrace. "What a dowdy lot!"

  Nevertheless, the place still retains its peculiar charm. The part that matters is coquet. (I am sorry there is no English equivalent: coquet implies a combination of smallness, smart-sness and nattiness.)The Casino with the terrace and gardens,three out of the four luxe hotels and most of the other first-class ones, the best restaurants and cabarets, the Sporting Club and the Palais des Beaux Arts–secondary places of entertainment belonging to the Casino – and the chic shops, are all packed into an area of less than a thousand yards square; and within this area everything that money can do to keep up appearances is done. There are no beggars, no hawkers, no advertisement hoardings.

Eating Chinese in late 1940s Soho

Forwarded to us by a loyal jot watcher. One restaurant was favoured by celebrities - Johnnie Mills, Bobby Howes, Coral Browne, Sandy Powell, Ivan Maisky and Lady Cripps - probably impressive names in their day. I especially like the bit about Lord Tredegar bringing his own jade chopsticks...

Click to read

Stanley Jackson’s brief but brilliant Indiscreet Guide to Soho is crammed with so much colourful reportage on the immediately post-war night life, petty crime, Bohemian characters and restaurants in this popular quarter of London, that it is difficult to choose what to Jot down. In the end, I opted for two pages on Chinese restaurants. Jackson attributes our ‘craze‘ for eating Chinese to our sympathy for the nation’s stand against the ‘Jap Fascists‘, but the trend must surely pre-date this.

Incidentally, what happened to the redoubtable ‘Ley-On’s ?’

I once met Anton Mosimann

Another 'once met' jot - this from tireless jotter RMR. He reminds me there was anthology of such meetings edited by Michael Ondaatje (with David Young and Russell Banks) called Brushes with Greatness (Toronto, 1989). Many of the contributions are Canadian but there are one or two superstars (John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Dalai Lama, Jayne Mansfield). They solicited contributions for a second volume but so far it has not been published.


Anton Mosimann

It was just before Christmas 1998. The brilliant Swiss chef had recently opened a swanky new restaurant in the heart of Belgravia . I wanted to see this, but, I was more looking forward  to discussing with him the six thousand cookery books he had amassed —one of the finest collections in private hands—and most of which had recently installed into his Mosimann Academy in trendy Battersea. And there was always the chance of a free meal….

Some hope. There was no food on offer, but I did get a coffee, which was very, very good. I sat in the restaurant drinking it while waiting for Mosimann to turn up. While I sipped I gazed up at the framed menus from around Europe that adorned the walls from top to bottom. I waited, and waited…

Eventually, the great man arrived and he showed me into what looked like a board room. On the table were a dozen or so of his favourite books, which included one dated 1507,the oldest cookery book ever printed. The actual interview was less interesting. Before we began he made it known that he could give me only twenty minutes. Mosimann seemed less than happy talking in English and I had to lead him a little in his responses. There were too few nuggets to chew on, but two stuck in my mind. The first was his determination to try out many of the recipes from his antique books and manuscripts, including a 1737 recipe for cheesecake, which he revealed came from Germany, rather than America. The second was his conscious decision not to decorate his restaurant with pictures, but to frame his huge archive of menus, which had accumulated over many decades, and stick them on the walls instead. The latter I considered a stroke of genius.

The twenty minutes flew by. Looking back at what I had actually recorded, I knew that there wasn’t enough, so I turned to his autobiography and amplified some of his answers to my questions.

In fact, this interview was the shortest I’d ever done—some of the others have gone over the three hour mark. But I’m glad I did it. How often can one boast of having handled a cookery book printed in 1507?

I once danced with...Lord Weinstock

We were sent this interesting reminiscence by a jotwatcher (thanks JWB). He points out that our 'I once met' posts depend on one having met a famous person. Many people have never met anyone famous - but almost everybody has met someone with a good story about someone well known that they had met - the 'I danced with a man, who danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales' phenomenon.* This greatly opens up the field so please  send more in...

I was at university with a guy who became an acclaimed professional cook. At one point in the late 1980s he was cooking for Lord Weinstock at his country mansion in Wiltshire. Lord Weinstock (1925-2002) was a billionaire entrepreneur and built the General Electric Company into one of Britain's leading industrial conglomerates. He remembers Lord W (a sort of Alan Sugar of his time but with much increased  sophistication) leaving for work some days in a private jet and then seeing him on the news addressing politicians in Europe and then seeing him chauffeured back up the drive in time for supper. He had a fine wine cellar and  was especially fond of Cheval Blanc vintages which he would drink with ice. I said this seemed like a faux pas and a waste of wine (red and £600+ a bottle)  but my culinary pal said that in matters of taste there were no rules and he couldn't possibly comment… 

*What did he say? 'Topping floor!'

Le Matelot (London restaurant run by a psychiatrist) 1955

A review of the Le Matelot restaurant found in Bon Viveur's London & the British Isles (Dakers, London 1955). Bon Viveur was a pseudonym for Fanny Cradock and her husband the fly-whiskered Johnny. They later became celebrity TV chefs. The use of the word gay at the time tended to indicate merry, jolly, insouciant, zany etc., although the restaurant went on into the 1960s (possibly later) and is referenced at The Lost Gay Restaurants site. The girl in the coral jeans and exposed midriff sounds distinctly modern and the whole scene described might be something out of the 1961 Tony Hancock movie The Rebel. The owner roaming the restaurant in horns is not something you see in current London eateries.

LE MATELOT

You will either be enchanted by this small restaurant or embarrassed. It is unique. The proprietor, Dr. Hillary James, is a psychiatrist by day and a restaurateur by night.

On Christmas Eve he wears horns. We keep a regular date there on Christmas eve now. The staff are young, gay, inconsequential and yet highly efficient and courteous. But Le Matelot is informal. Witness,the extremely pretty young Miss who, on our first visit, plonked down our ratatouille, remarking casually, ‘mon Dieu quel Plonk' (anent the garlic). This same nymph, wearing coral jeans, exposed mid-riff, holly in her fair curls and mistletoe in her buttonhole, nonchalantly removeda champagne cork, poured the wine (not for us - we dislike drinking champagne all through a meal) and tossed the cork back down the restaurant to a colleague in a South American hat, a printed silk blouse and a pair of somewhat startling pants. ‘Corky,’ he said - quite untruthfully, as he smelled the cork. Then both grinned at the contented customer and continued to carry in dishes _ of Avocado Vinaigrette (3s.), Coquilles St. Jacques (3s.), Corn on the Cob (zs. 6d.), New England Grilled Gammon with Sweetcorn (6s.), Poulet Henry IV (5s.), superb Stilton cheese (2s. 6d.), and Dames Blanches (2s.) for the sweet-toothed.

It is a delightfully uninhibited, scatty little place, brimming with custom, canopied with fish-nets, discreetly lit and gay, gay, gay, in our stuffed shirt old town. We hope you’ll like it as much as this year’s crop of B.V. recommended regulars.

Name: Le Matelot

Address: 49, Elizabeth Street, S.W.1

Tel.No.: SLOane 1038

Proprietor: Dr. Hillary James

Hours of Opening:

Luncheons (Monday to Friday): 12.30 to 3 p.m.

Dinners: 7 to II p.m.

Saturdays and Sundays: Dinners only

Licensed for the sale of Wines

Bon Viveur at the Connaught

A review of the Connaught Hotel's restaurant found in Bon Viveur's London & the British Isles (Dakers, London 1955). Bon Viveur was a pseudonym for Fanny Cradock and her husband the fly-whiskered Johnny.They later became celebrity TV chefs. The style is of its time, revelling in luxury after the austerity of the decade since the war -'shriek for grilled kidneys...'

Where Maitre Chef de Cuisine Pierre Toulemont rules the kitchens the restaurant must inevitably prosper. The Connaught is severely English in the most distinguished manner. The wine butler stalks majestically across the panelled dining room bearing the silver salvo which, from time immemorial has been the proper platter from which to proffer (decanted) port. Overseas visitors will capture here some of the nostalgic atmosphere of old London where rendezvous with gastronomy is kept by the subjects of King Edward VII, King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II.

Let us not commit the solecism of discussing price, beyond stating that the best is never cheap– a repellent word in any context – but is seldom exorbitant – that is reserved for the fashionable, which is quite another thing.

Esther Rantzen in School Mag 1958

Saus—age—s…!

While in the Upper Sixth of the prestigious North London Collegiate School, where her schoolfellows included psychologist Susie (then called Susan) Orbach, budding writer Esther Rantzen seems to have got her head down working for her scholarship to Oxford. For in the school magazine for 1957/58 we look in vain for her name among the Orchestra, Netball, Hockey, Tennis, Rounders and Swimming teams. She wasn’t a prefect and doesn’t even appear to have bothered herself with the Drama Group, which is bizarre. But she was a member of the School Magazine Committee, which may account for her two contributions—a slightly silly piece of verse about cows and this long appreciation of food, rendered as a dream.  This gastronomic knowledge must have stood the presenter of That’s Life in good stead when it came to offering members of the public bat stew and selecting rude shaped vegetables to titter at.

Would hyberbolic Esther have made it as a novelist, like her ancestor Ada Leverson, author of The Little Ottleys (and known to Oscar Wilde as 'The Sphinx') had not the BBC come calling ? We’ll never know. [R.H.]

Love at First Bite- click to read!

Elvis's Cook

Memories Beyond Graceland Gates by Mary Jenkins (cook and housekeeper to Elvis known at Graceland as Mary Langston, her married name) published in USA by Eastland in 1989.

In this food orientated book Mary writes that Elvis returned from a concert tour in 1972 and told her about a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich he had eaten while on the road. Mary said it took her three tries to get the sandwich to his satisfaction, and then she cooked them for him the rest of his life. By all accounts she was a very good hearted woman and 'truly loved Elvis.' This old Amazon (2008) review has good background on this rare and expensive ($200) book and sheds light on the dream of the King of Rock:

This is a very positive book about Elvis ... it was wrote by Mary Jenkins ...Mary cooked for Elvis for years ... She loved Elvis dearly and his fans... Mary never said one negative thing about Elvis in her life... In the house Elvis purchased for her Mary would invite the fans in for a visit if she felt good she enjoyed cooking meals like she did for Elvis for the fans I was honored to be among one of the fans she cooked for along with Sharon and Sue...I will always remember the days I spent with her listening to Elvis stories ... the book is a must to any Elvis Fan collections... Mary passed a couple of years back she is missed by all for the love she had for everyone the beautiful smiles she gave everyone she met, the funny stories she would tell about Elvis such a pleasure to be around ... oh yes, she is the one that made the banana sandwiches for Elvis... The first one she made was a flop the next one Vernon stood beside her telling her just how to make it the way Elvis like it ... this book is one every fan should have in their collection...
Shirley

Platos Venezolanos - Lobster Margarita

A Venezuelan Cook Book put out by Creole Petroleum Company (published in New York about 1959) - illustrator unknown but not unlike Warhol of that period (see Bookride) A 20 page pamphlet. Not impossibly scarce. The lobster dish is the centre spread. Best washed down with something from Louis Roederer..

Here is a lobster dish with an incomparable flare and fillip to the Venezuelan sauce that will earn for any woman the distinction of being the "hostess with the mostes'." We think you'll agree that any descriptive adjectives would only be superfluous and could not really begin to do justice to the wonderful succulence of this dish.

Lobster Margarita • Langosta Flambée Margarita

4 pkgs. frozen lobster tails
1/4 c. butter or margarine
1/2 onion, minced
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1/4 tsp. oregano
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 c. flour

3/4 c. canned beef consommé
1/2 c. apple juice or cider
juice of 1/2 lemon
dash of Angostura bitters
2 tbs. chopped parsley
2 egg yolks
3 c. cooked rice
1/4 c. rum
parsley sprigs to garnish

Put lobster tails in cold water which has been salted. Heat until water comes to boil, at which time the lobster tails are done.

  Meanwhile, melt half of the butter or margarine in a saucepan and sauté chopped onion and garlic until tender. Add remaining butter, seasoning and blend in flour. Now stir in beef consommé, apple juice, lemon juice and bitters and heat. Stir constantly until thickened and smooth. Add chopped parsley.

  Lightly beat egg yolks with a fork, add a little of the heated sauce to the yolks, and then stir them back into the sauce. Simmer, stirring for 2 or 3 minutes.

  Rinse lobster tails, remove from shell and cut in half crosswise. On a Iarge round platter, make a wreath of hot cooked rice, fill center with lobster.

  In a small skillet, heat 1/4 cup rum, remove from stove, carefully, ignite and let burn until flame almost disappears. Now top lobster with hot sauce and finally pour burning rum over all. Garnish with parsley sprigs and serve at once. Serves 6.

 

E.V. Knox ('Evoe') Vitamins

 From the papers of Edmund George Valpy Knox (1881 - 1971), comic writer, poet and satirist who wrote under the pseudonym Evoe. He was editor of Punch 1932-1949, having been a regular contributor in verse and prose for many years.This piece is probably from the 1950s after his editorship. In the archives is a good pic of him, at present unfindable (will upload soon) - for the moment this below. He was married to the daughter of the Winnie the Pooh illustrator E.H.Shepard. Mary Shepard in her turn illustrated Mary Poppins. His daughter from an earlier marriage was the Booker prize winning novelist Penelope Fitzgerald - known in the family as 'Mops' and author of the book below on the gifted Knox family.

                             
VITAMINS
It seems to be the invariable practice of those who are recovering from the fall scourge of influenza; or desire to ward off its attacks, to eat grit. The substance takes various forms, but nearly every family consumes with one or other of its daily meals a spade or shovelful of marl, concretes sawdust, fine gravel, or sand.
    The discovery of this new diet basis was providential in the extreme. An eminent doctor was watching an ostrich at the zoo; and noticed the bird devouring several pieces of paving-stone and a couple of bricks. Interested he returned the following day and found the ostrich looking, if anything, fitter than before. Immediately the idea struck him:
    "What if vitamins lurk in the gritty part of farinaceous substances., banished by modern mechanical methods of food preparation from our daily fare?"
    Analysing a gritty substance he found a vitamin lurking there, and his theory was confirmed.
    Grit became instantly one of the most fashionable ingredients of the British breakfast menu. My friends the Wilkinsons emerge refreshed from the following imbroglio each day:

Oranges

Rubble

Sour Milk

Wholemeal Bread

Koffum

    A word as to one or two of the other salient features of this petit dejeuner.

    Sour milk was introduced many years ago from Bulgaria. An eminent traveller noticed that Bulgarians never died, and thought that there must be some reason for this, as visitors to Bulgaria were not nearly so fortunate. Analysing a Bulgarian, he found that he was entirely full of sour milk. This led him to suppose that the germ of sour milk is equivalent to the germ of perpetual life; and in many cases the hypothesis has been abundantly proved. More than one septuagenarian viveur has confessed that but for sour milk he would be no more than sixty or sixty five years old today.

Mulk Raj Anand 'Curries' 1932

An early work on the subject. The author gives the names of two London suppliers of all the ingredients used in the book - Stembridge in Cecil Court  and C.A. Naidu in Lexington Street, Soho. Anand begins with a tribute to Norman Douglas "...with that subtle irony and happy wit characteristic of him, Mr. Norman Douglas once declared that 'Curry is India's greatest contribution to mankind.' Those whose lucky star has bought them under the spell of Mr. Douglas will understand the sense in which that epigram is true. I laughed heartily when I read the statement...'

Mulk Raj Anand also quotes Aleister Crowley:-

'...Curries with their vast partitioned platter of curious condiments to lackey them, speak for themselves. They sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle, sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, inscrutably inspiring and intelligently illuminating, like Cambodian carvings.'

Here is a simple recipe from Anand


DAL (LENTILS)
1/2 lb. lentils
1/2 oz. butter
1 small onion (sliced)
1/2 teaspoonful of black pepper
1/2 teaspoonfulred pepper
1/2 teaspoonful powdered turmeric
Salt to tatse.

Carefully pick the stones out of the dal and soak for about an hour in a panful of cold water. Put it to boil in a panful of boiled water. Sprinkle in some salt and turmeric and stir. When the lentils are tender, fry the sliced onion in melted butter with black and red pepper in a different pan. Pour this fried mixture into the pan containing the dal to the consistency of porridge over a gentle heat. Take care while putting in the butter to keep the lid partly on so that the liquid does not fly back to your face and hands.

A simple dal that might be improved with frying a small amount of cumin seeds and some chopped garlic. The orange dal needs no soaking, but some lentils require much longer than an hour and stones can still be found.

Coffee Then and Now

Press cutting (Sunday Times, London?) dated 1960 found in a copy of Aytoun Ellis's book Essence of Beauty. Interesting how the modern Mocha is no longer a food drink...

SIR,–No meals were served in the seventeenth-century coffee-houses. The serving of coffee after dinner was however an established practice before that century ended, although only in the nobility. Richard Hoare, the goldsmith, who had removed from Cheapside to Fleet Street in 1690, made " a plain coffee port " for Lord Derby, to be sent to Knowsley with " six pounds of coffee berries." (The coffee doubtless came from Hoare's neighbor at Temple Bar–Thomas Twinning.)

  By the mid-eighteenth-century, when most of London's 2,000 coffee-houses had closed down or become clubs, taverns, or chop-houses, coffee was served with meals in certain of the inns and eating-houses, particularly in provincial towns like Chester, Exeter, Liverpool, and in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

  Anyone who has tasted Mocha coffee as made in the early coffee-houses–" the bitter black drink " (as Pepys called it)–will agree that it was food and drink in one! The only complaints appear to have come from " the trade," jealous of this new and formidable rival, and from the women, who complained that they were neglected by their husbands whose addiction to this " enfeebling " drink made them " as unfruitful as the desert from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought."

                J. A. Aytoun-Ellis

    Sussex.

                        *                        *                        *                        *                        *

SIR,–In " The Cook's Oracle " by Dr. Wm. Kitchiner (seventh edition, 1823) you read:-

  Coffee, as drank in England, debilitates the Stomach, and produces a slight nausea. In France and in Italy it is made strong from the best coffee, and is poured out hot and transparent. In England it is usually made from bad coffee, served out tepid and muddy, and drowned in a deluge of water, and sometimes deserves the title given to it in " The Petition against Coffee," 4to, 1674, p. 4, " a base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking Puddle Water." . . . . No coffee will bear drinking with what is called milk in London.

Has the situation changed very much?

                W. H. S. Williams.

    Tenterden.