HIDDEN CORNERS
‘Roncival and
winged peases ’
A Cook’s guide to the food collectionS Cookery writer Jojo Tulloh finds that the literary qualities and classic recipes of the Library’s food titles of the past still have much to offer the contemporary gastronome
A
nyone who studies in the Library regularly will know that food can be a hard subject to banish from your mind. In the hour before lunch, the growl of an empty stomach quite often breaks the silence of the Reading Room. It doesn’t help that the Library is riddled with food. Up on the fourth floor, in Fiction, Kim begs a fried cake and a bowl of rice and curry for his lama; in Biography, Colette is matching a pink wine with a green melon; while in Topography’s basement home, Patrick Leigh Fermor feasts like an ogre on a sizzling joint of roast lamb. Of the million books in the Library’s collections, very few can be without some reference to food. This isn’t much of an insight. Food is a universal subject; we all have to eat. But within the entire collection there are a large number of books (more than 1,400 titles)
Illustration from Alexis Soyer’s The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846). 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
that deal specifically with food. To read down the list of the separate food shelfmarks is to go back to a Victorian system of classification and a sensibility that described food and drink as a commodity rather than a pleasure. The list – Beer, Cheese, Cocoa, Coffee, Fruit, Drink, Hops, Salt, Sugar, Tea, Vegetarianism, Vines and Wine – has the unfortunate side effect of reading like a recipe for indigestion. When passing through the stacks in Science & Miscellaneous towards the Food section, one must banish all thoughts of the way food is generally presented in modern books, newspapers and magazines. If they work on the senses like a surfeit of luridly iced cupcakes, then the Library’s collection, like a water biscuit with a slice of good cheese, offers a less obvious but no less enjoyable pleasure. Anyone looking for the latest glossy, photo-heavy tome by any of our current celebrity chefs will be disappointed. The characters represented in this collection are all from the past (and a good deal more colourful). The celebrated Victorian chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58), was also a writer, inventor, campaigner and entrepreneur. In his Culinary Campaign (1857), Soyer describes his efforts to improve the British Army’s food during the Crimean War (1853–6). Soyer was a technical innovator, designing state-of-the-art kitchens with watercooled refrigeration at the Reform Club, and inventing a portable ‘magic stove’ . He was also a compassionate man of action. As well as going to the Crimea, he ran a soup kitchen in Dublin during the Irish famine that fed thousands. He also lost a fortune opening an ill-judged culinary theme park named the Universal Symposium of All Nations, on the site now occupied by the Royal Albert Hall. The Library has his Pantropheon, or, History of food, and its preparation, from the earliest ages of the world (1853) and The Gastronomic Regenerator: A simplified and entirely new system of cookery (1846). Devotees of pared-down seasonal cookery should search out the recipes of the original Evening Standard chef, Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943). Boulestin was an unpretentious French cookery writer who sought, in his witty, unpatronising way, to help English men and women achieve the ‘excellence, simplicity and cheapness’ of French bourgeois cookery. Writing in the 1920s, Boulestin appealed to everyone from society hostesses to
