I may be one of the few people who reads Jane Austen for the food. The writer’s 250th birthday, which falls this December, will of course call to mind Mr. Darcy’s brooding aloofness, Emma Woodhouse’s clueless snobbery and Anne Elliot’s silent devotion. But there is a small yet avid contingent who will be thinking of their meals.
Recipe: Roasted Chicken With Vinegared Grapes
By the time I turned 15 — the same age as hot-blooded Lydia Bennet — I had devoured all six Austen novels in quick succession, as transfixed by the spare descriptions of the food as by the wry tales of romance. Dinners, suppers, teatimes, picnics, breakfasts and balls are pivotal settings of Austen’s plot lines, though she rarely details what’s on the table. We catch glimpses of white soups and cold meats, sweetbreads and muffins but without the Balzacian vividness we food-obsessives crave.
Hold on, Jane, what was the texture of the thrice-baked apples that Miss Bates so enjoyed in “Emma”? The number and varieties of cakes in “Mansfield Park”? And just how were those “remarkably well done” partridges Mrs. Bennet serves to Mr. Darcy prepared so remarkably?
Austen’s contemporary readers would have known that the apples were melting soft, the cakes currant-studded and rose-scented and the partridges probably roasted with bacon. But as a hungry, romance-dazzled teen of the 1980s, I was dying for a bite. Tasting what the characters tasted, I was certain, would bring me closer to Austen’s heroines and their world. I begged my parents to choose England for our summer vacation so I could finally eat a Regency tea cake and fall wryly in love.
I arrived at our ivy-covered borrowed house in Hampstead Heath with “Pride and Prejudice” in my bag, preconceptions of Mr. Darcy in my head and a craving for partridge in my gut.
Darcy proved easier to locate than partridges. A likely boy indeed appeared at our door the very first evening — tall, dark-eyed, wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and who, as Austen would put it, “if not quite handsome was very near to it.” He was the neighbors’ eldest, awkwardly presenting a welcome bouquet from his parents and an open invitation to dinner. Was that a spark beneath the shyness? I was smitten.
My diffident Darcy was 16, a gentle boy trying to be Joe Strummer, with zero intention of enacting a comedy of manners or helping me hunt down tea cakes.
Undaunted, I went along with the act, smoking cigarettes with him in the park, listening to his Sex Pistols, Jam and Clash cassettes, and taking the Tube to Carnaby Street to buy my own motorcycle jacket. Maddeningly though, Punk Rock Darcy never made a move, and a proper tea cake was nowhere to be found.
A few days before our departure, my family dined with the Darcys, where we were greeted by the musky, meaty smell of roasting fowl. My partridge, at last!
“Partridge? Oh, we don’t much go in for that,” his mother corrected me good-naturedly. She pulled two bronze-skinned roasted chickens from the oven, serving them with a winy pan sauce with flecks of nutmeg and plump, pickled gooseberries — an old recipe from her mother, she said. It was like no chicken I’d ever tasted: crisp, herb-scented skin yielding to tender meat, brightened by sharp, vinegary fruit. It was, indeed, remarkably well done. I closed my eyes and imagined myself at Mrs. Bennet’s table.
‘A dinner plate is a mirror of the soul.’
Punk Darcy interrupted my daydream to whisper that we should sneak out for a walk together before dessert.
Though thrilled to be finally noticed, I was torn. My teenage hormones were raging. I had found the romance I came to England for — but it was on my plate.
In the few instances that Austen describes food in her novels, as Maggie Lane notes in her book “Jane Austen and Food,” she does so to “define character and illustrate moral worth.”
When Elizabeth Bennet tells the indolent Mr. Hurst that she prefers a plain dish to a ragout, it’s a concise judgment of his pretentious frippery. Heartbroken Marianne Dashwood’s refusal of all food, even dried cherries and sweet wine, displays her self-abnegating “addiction to the cult of sensibility.”
For Austen, a dinner plate is a mirror of the soul.
And such was mine that night. That crisp-skinned chicken helped me realize that food was my love language. And Punk Darcy wasn’t speaking it.
I declined his invitation and spent the rest of the evening drinking tea with Mrs. Punk Darcy, and learning the chicken recipe so I could take it home with me.
I’m still making a version of that chicken four decades later, though instead of gooseberries, I add roasted grapes and red onions, whose caramelized edges delightfully echo the chicken skin. And my teenager, also an Austen fan and the current owner of the Carnaby Street jacket, softly hums to the Clash while setting the family table for dinner.
Melissa Clark has been writing her column, A Good Appetite, for The Times’s Food section since 2007. She creates recipes for New York Times Cooking, makes videos and reports on food trends. She is the author of 45 cookbooks, and counting.
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