Victuals and Drink in Jane Austen

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

HAVE you ever observed, in reading Miss Austen, how frankly and frequently people eat? They are unashamed of food, soberly putting through a full day’s victualing. They breakfast none too early, for Catherine Morland on her first morning at Northanger is awakened by the sun at the cheery hour of eight; and it is a hardship worthy of note that William Price, entering on his lieutenancy, must be up and off by half - past nine. The breakfast menu is slurred over for the most part. In the leisurely breakfast-room of Northanger Abbey, that humorous old scoundrel, General Tilney, sips his cocoa and reads his newspaper. At Mansfield they breakfast on eggs and cold pork, for William and Crawford are breezily off and away, after the manner of gentlemen, leaving their cluttered plates of shells and bones for Fanny to cry over.

If breakfast is a somewhat unemphatic meal, not so the mid-morning collation, always served to visitors. These refreshments vary in kind and quality. While Miss Crawford plays away the morning, harping to Edmund Bertram, her attendant brother-in-law assiduously plies the sandwich-tray, — love is not above bread and butter. Even the indecently humble Miss Bates can offer a caller sweet cake or baked apples from the buffet. But this is mere sit-about-as-you-please refreshment; at Pemberley, the abundance of the feast calls for more decorum. The “entrance of the servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season,” interrupts a most awkward and chilly call. Yielding up the ghost of conversation, the company cheerfully gathers around the table loaded with “beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines, and peaches,” well worth the price of a bad half-hour.

Dinner is a meal of which the hour is not exactly determined, seeming to be shoved at pleasure to one side or the other of four o’clock. At dinner the stand-by is mutton. There is a surfeit of mutton in English literature. It is boiled mutton usually, too. Now, boiled mutton is to my mind a poor sort of dish, unsuggestive, boldly and flagrantly nourishing — a most British thing; it will never gain a foothold on the American stomach or imagination. But the Austenite must e’en eat it. Roast mutton is a different, thing. You might know Emma Woodhouse would have roast mutton rather than boiled; it is to roast mutton and rice pudding that the little Kneightleys go scampering home through the wintry weather.

The manner of serving dinner arouses some questioning. Mrs. Bennet does not invite Bingley to dinner impromptu, “for though she always kept a very good table, she did not think anything less than two courses could be good enough for a man on whom she had such anxious designs, or satisfy the appetite and pride of one who had ten thousand a year.” The two-course dinner with which Jane’s lover was afterward honored comprised venison, soup, partridges, and, I surmise, dessert. One queries at just what item in the menu the dinner was broken into two courses.

Dinner over and the gentlemen’s winedrinking done, the company must have tea and coffee in the drawing-room, served with substantial accompaniment of cake. Coffee would appear to have been an unfeminine thing, for it never appears in the after-dinner equipage unless there are gentlemen present. The tea function varies in formality. At ceremonious Mansfield it is ushered in by “solemn procession, headed by Baddeley, of tea-board, urn, and cake-bearers.” It is all much prettier and cosier at Longbourn, where Jane Bennet makes the tea, and Elizabeth pours the coffee.

But the most savory meal in Jane Austen is the supper that rounds off a social evening. No hungry balls for Jane Austen’s doughty dancers, but draw up and sit down, all of you, and eat in earnest of cold ham and chicken, rout-cakes and ices, and if you are a frail-strung Fanny be flushed and “feverish with hopes and fears, soup and negus.” These are ballroom refreshments; for utter toothsomeness commend me to a little Woodhouse supper, when the “table is set out in the drawing-room and moved forward towards the fire,” — suggestive, this last. It warms the very palate to read of that minced chicken, the scalloped oysters, the apple tarts, the custard, the wine, the muffin. There is nothing niggardly about Emma Woodhouse; husbands for Harriet or food for the hungry, she is always a good provider.

Thus the day’s eating. However, you must still, if you would fulfill your whole duty, sip a glass of warmed wine before you go to bed and sink into the deep slumber of the bountifully nourished.

For the most part Jane Austen treats food frankly qua food, aliment for aliment’s sake and no bones about it, but the victualing of character may be put to more subtle use. The fluctuations of the appetite may indicate an emotional crisis. I reckon up four notable heroines who promptly “go off their food” under amatory discomforts. Of these Marianne Dashwood is the most prominent, of course, — perfectly proper of Marianne. Yet one sympathizes with Mrs. Jennings’s misdirected attentions, — poor Mrs. Jennings, who cannot “cure a disappointment in love by a variety of sweetmeats and olives and a good fire”! Perfidious Willoughby, to work such havoc with a young lady’s digestion! Marianne Dashwood could not eat, but Jane Fairfax would not. Don’t tell me she could not have choked down her mutton and saved a solicitous aunt and grandmamma much anxiety, if she had wanted to! I never did like Jane, — she was close-mouthed and contrary, and I don’t believe she was nearly so pretty as Emma.

Even that buoyant child, Catherine Morland, can be laid low by love, and when reproved for some chatter about the beatific French bread of Northanger, replies from utter heights of woe, “It is all the same to me what I eat.”

But the love-versus-nutriment motive has fullest treatment in the story of Fanny Price. Quite early in the history of her heart we find that when nipped at her rival’s attentions, this sensitive maiden, if cousin Edmund is not there to mix her bedtime wine and water, “would rather go without it than not.” I am glad that Miss Austen is not above sustaining the most spirituelle of her heroines on this nightcap toddy.

To me the most agonizing scenes to which Miss Austen ever works herself up are those that picture Fanny Price’s visit home. Here Miss Austen for once tries to harrow, tries to do her worst, — and that worst is — disgusting food, supreme emblem and expression of the sordidness, vulgarity, and shiftlessness of the family of Price. With positive revulsion the novelist draws that nauseating picture of “ the table, cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca’s hand had first produced it.” This after the venison haunches of Mansfield! It is starvation or surrender with Fanny now, and if Crawford had not misbehaved, dear knows what might have happened! When a delicately reared heroine is reduced to a diet of baker’s buns, it is enough to drive the most faithful heart to matrimony. It must have gone hard with Miss Austen to starve a heroine, for, like Emma Woodhouse, Miss Austen is a good provider. Sometimes you might think her more careful after the stomachs of her people than after their souls, — so much the better for them and for her.