In the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 Winter 2022 semester class on Food, Gender, and Environment taught by Dr. Alex Ketchum, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, raced, and classed within the global context. As part of the course, students visited McGill’s archives and special collections to have a hands on experience with historical cookbooks (more on that here: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2022/02/class-visit-2022.html). The Special Series of Student Posts is a collection of student reflections on what information we can glean from cookbooks.
Food, Gender & Domesticity - The Jane Austen Cookbook
by Miranda Lepore
The Jane Austen Cookbook, written by journalist Maggie Black and literary critic Deirdre Le Faye in 1995, introduces historical information about the lives of famous author Jane Austen’s characters through the contextual perspective of food. Although food is rarely mentioned in Austen’s stories except as a facet for mockery, and thus is difficult to study as a historical artifact, the contextualization of Austen’s works through food offers readers an intriguing insight into the historical dining practices of the 19th century British upper-class (Black and Le Faye 7). The purpose of The Jane Austen Cookbook was to modernize the recipes eaten by Austen and her characters in Regency Era Britain (1750-1820), while also offering historical context of dining and meals for fans of her novels to enjoy. The recipes themselves were taken from the personal cookbooks of two individuals who were connected with Austen; Martha Lloyd (1765-1843), who lived with Austen for some time, and Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys (1738-1817), an old friend of Austen’s mother, Mrs. George Austen (Black and Le Faye 7). As elaborated on in the text, food, and more specifically, dining, acted as the backdrop for many gathering scenes in Austen’s works (Black and Le Faye 10). For instance, in some of her most famous works, such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Austen used the context of dinner dining to introduce characters and further the plot (Black and Le Faye 8). Dining, more generally, was an incredibly elemental part of the upper-class lifestyle of which Austen came and wrote from because it was a primary form of socialization (Black and Le Faye 12). As such, Black and Le Faye took advantage of any opportunities available to them, in which food or meal was used to set the scene in Austen’s stories, in order to contextualize social and domestic life of the Regency Era alongside her prose.
Similarly to contemporary Western society, although far less explicit now, the burden of domestic food preparation and hosting fell primarily to women in 19th century Britain, whether that be as hosts, who were typically upper-class and white, or as servants, of whom were often racialized and/or of lower socio-economic status (Black and Le Faye 16). As Black and Le Faye articulate, hosting was often a form of ostentation and pride for families of this time, and signified prestige and class (Black and Le Faye 12). As such, hosts and servants would spend months completing the numerous stressful tasks that this required of them, including food collection and preparation, formal invitations, and other domestic duties. This pressure was only emphasized by their lack of contemporary modern technology that we often rely on today, for instance, light, refrigeration, and many other electrical particulars (Black and Le Faye 7). For instance, without the aid of refrigeration, it was necessary for 19th century hosts to order food just far enough in advance that it would arrive on time, but not too far in advance that it would spoil before guests arrived (Black and Le Faye 16). Alternatively, certain fresh foods would have to be harvested or collected at certain times of the day, to ensure the safety of daylight, or properly prepared to last until certain times of the year, to ensure the safety of plenty (Black and Le Faye 18). As such, while typically a delight for guests to attend, food and hosting duties were often a welcomed burden for many hosts (Black and Le Faye 16).
This text presents many incredible and foul sounding meals, including, “soup, fish, meat, game, poultry, pies, vegetables, sauces, pickles, sweet and savoury puddings, and custards and jellies” (Black and Le Faye 11). However, I chose to focus on Austen, Black and Le Faye’s apple pie recipe, as apple pie continues to be of particular significance in Austen’s work (Black and Le Faye 60-61). In Austen’s posthumously published, biographical compilation of letters and notes, Jane Austen’s Letters, additionally edited by Le Faye, Austen writes the noteworthy line “good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness” (Austen 291). Although this quote originated in a separate context, its significance here relies on its reflective alignments with the values exhibited in the historical portion of The Jane Austen Cookbook.“Domestic happiness,” as Austen establishes, appears to be the goal of food and more specifically, formal dining, for those of the 19th century. As such, I chose to bake an apple pie as a symbolic representation of domesticity.
Apple pie that I made for my friends and family.
Through further research into the symbolic representation of food from the early 19th century, I discovered the text Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women's Fiction, 1770-1830, which elaborates on the role of food within women’s literature from Austen’s period. While investigating Mary Wollstonecraft’s work, the author, Sarah Moss, notes that there were some foods that have heavily gendered associations. For instance, foods like “preserved meats or ‘rich gravy’”, were considered so masculine that it was unsafe for parents to let their daughters read about them, let alone eat them (Moss 5). In contrast, “pastry and fruit [were] universally recognised as feminine tastes” (Moss 5). This societal representation aligns with the cookbooks priority of fruit related desserts, for instance pie, muffins and biscuits, as women would often be planning and hosting these events (Black and Le Faye 60-65). However, the overconsumption of fruit and pastry was perceived as masculine or indulgent, maintaining the gendered socialized notions of the era that women should not eat too much or betray their gender (Moss 5). In direct opposition to this, I made sure to eat the entire pie, sharing with friends and family to align my actions with Austen’s use of food and dining as a sign of connection, rather than domesticity or 19th century gender norms.
After baking the apple pie, I still had leftover dough. This is a phenomenon that often occurs when making dough of all varieties, and sometimes there’s just not enough to justify storing it in your freezer, finding it six months later during a deep-clean, and throwing it away. This time, I challenged myself to use all of the leftover dough, with the intention of creating minimal food waste, which would have been a priority during the Regency Era, considering how inaccessible food was in comparison to today (Black and Le Faye 7). As such, I used the rest of the dough to create a Tartelette aux Echalotes, a French dish that typically consists of shallots, butter, maple syrup and vinegar. To maintain the theme of this exercise, I used leftover shallots that I’d pickled earlier in the week with spices and cooked them directly in the dough with butter and syrup to taste. This recipe was created entirely independent from The Jane Austen Cookbook, and allowed me to add a creative, sustainable, economical, and historically accurate twist to this experience.
Although gendered assumptions about who should and shouldn’t be in charge of domestic work have reduced since Austen’s texts were originally published in the early 19th century, and even since the publishing of The Jane Austen Cookbook in 1995, there’s no doubt that these presumptions are still prevalent in contemporary Western culture. In making this apple pie, I intended to both make and use the recipe as historically accurate as I could given my circumstances, while also dispelling the patriarchal notions about domesticity that were associated with food and gender in the Regency Era, by resisting outdated sentiment embedded into food through literature.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. “The Letters of Jane Austen”. Jane Austen's Letters, 3d edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, InteLex Corp., 2004, _ -61.
Black, et al. The Jane Austen Cookbook. Chicago Review Press, 1995.
Moss, Sarah. Spilling the Beans: Eating, Cooking, Reading and Writing in British Women's Fiction, 1770-1830. : Manchester University Press, 19. Manchester Scholarship Online. Date Accessed 25 Feb. 2022 <https://manchester.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7228/manchester/9780719076510.001.0001/upso-9780719076510>.