All in a Don's Day (21 page)

At first sight, all this is much like posh ancient Roman cookery, where again things are not always what they seem. Think, for example, of the dinner party of Petronius' Trimalchio, where half of what the diners eat is not what it seems (quinces masquerading as sea urchins, for example). Or think of one of the signature recipes in Apicius' Roman cook book: ‘Casserole of Anchovy without Anchovy' (‘at table no one will recognise what they are eating' – and it's actually made of sea nettles and eggs).

But it isn't quite so simple. For while Trimalchio is showing off in an El Bulli type way, Apicius is trying to save money (sea nettles and eggs being, I imagine, cheaper in the Roman market place than bona fide anchovies). Which reminds us of the iron law of cookery, that (William Morris or no William Morris) the whole discipline from top to bottom is riddled with (or rests upon) attempts to turn things into something they are not: chicory into coffee, Quorn into bacon, nuts into cutlets, flour into bread. It's not just the rich turning soup into ravioli parcels: the poor try to make you think sea nettles are anchovy – and all of us prefer a crusty loaf to raw flour, water and yeast. What the El Bullis of this world are doing is only a development of the essentials of cookery (turning ‘the raw into the cooked'). So shouldn't I stop the moralising?

And indeed when you actually experience (i.e., eat) one of those really clever confections, it is actually rather exciting. It is easy enough to huff and puff in theory, but when I had a lemon mousse in Washington that looked for all the world like a soft-boiled egg, I was truly enchanted.

‘Truth to materials', I guess, doesn't have quite the role in cookery as it does in architecture.

Oh joy, I can finally be as pretentious as I like, knowing full well I′ll be outdone by El Bulli. Years ago, at La Côte St-Jacques in Joigny (Burgundy) – then a mere 2-star; now 3 stars – my partner and I had the waiters remove an elaborate flower arrangement from a nearby table as its perfume interfered with our tasting the foie gras. Thank heavens they obliged rather than holding the offending blooms under our noses.

JUDITH WEINGARTEN

Since the dawn of time, there have been only two truly great cookery books.

1. Edouard de Pomiane,
La cuisine en dix minutes
.

2. Caroline Blackwood and Anna Haycraft,
Darling, You Shouldn′t Have Gone To So Much Trouble
.

RICHARD BARON

A plea for Apicius: trying to cook meals from this is tremendously illuminating. Of course, the food will never be quite ′right′, but it may be delicious. The strangeness and complexity of flavours provide an immediate (and unexpected) awareness of the sophistication and irretrievably remote complexity of another world. (If you′re too squeamish for dormice or garum, try the dates: Apicius recipe no. 296)

JH

I am reminded of the British Library café. I felt rather shortchanged when ′avocado and celeriac remoulade with harissa
dressing on a white bloomer′ turned out to be a coleslaw sandwich.

LIZ C

If you want to explore Apicius'recipes, try C. Grocock and S. Grainger (eds)
, Apicius: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and English Translation
(Prospect Books, 2006)
.

11 August 2011

I haven't been to the Manuscripts Room of the University Library for a year of so (chance would be a fine thing). So I hadn't caught up with the new policing regime that I found when I showed up there this week: you now have to sign in on a separate admissions list, and you aren't allowed to take in even the small-size bags that are allowed into the rest of the Library; instead you have to leave it in a locker outside … and you end up having to get the key back (because, wisely maybe, they don't trust you to keep the key on your person) every time you want to get 25p to buy a new pencil, or whatever.

I'm sure that this is all very sensible, and a good way of protecting the collection. But it does have a nasty way of criminalising you, and of raising the uncomfortable possibility that you and every other reader in the room might be liable to snitch some precious document as soon as anyone's back might be turned. (I wonder how many people it pushes to crime, at the same time as it makes it harder for them.)

Anyway, I was not to be put off, as I was there on the search of more things about the history of the Fitzwilliam Museum. One thing I wanted to get to the bottom of was the celebrations in 1842 in honour of the new chancellor, the Duke of Northumberland, part of which took place in the Museum before the building had even been finished. Just how unfinished, I wondered.

One likely-looking document was catalogued as the description of the election and installation of about five new Chancellors over the course of the nineteenth century, a manuscript written by eager, obsessive and rather smart nineteenth-century bureaucrats, keen to pass on the proceedings to their successors.

It turned out not to have anything to help me about the state of the Fitzwilliam in 1842, but it had lots of juicy stuff about the election of 1847– which turned out to have quite a lot in common with the election we are to have in October.

As I vaguely recollected (but it was brought vividly to life by this carefully written account), the establishment candidate in 1847 was Prince Albert – but, against him, the awkward squad, largely based in St John's, put up a rival in the shape of the Earl of Powis (a truly awful Tory, MP for Ludlow and dyed-in-the-wool opponent of the 1832 Reform Act).

After a bit of a wobble the Prince did not actually withdraw and went through with a lively election, which offers a load of tips for the supporters of the rival candidates this time round … including organising committees, and specially chartered trains from London to bring the voters in. (One of the things that the Prince's opponents worried about was that he would try to Germanise the University – another was that the backdoor connection between University and crown was a bit unseemly.)

It appears to have been a spirited fight, with Albert winning comfortably but not by a huge majority. The anonymous bureaucrat of my document then lavishes his pen on the dinner held at the palace to celebrate the successful election (silver knives and forks for the first course, he insists, gold for the dessert). Apparently the Earl of Powis was invited but couldn't come.

Which all makes you wonder about how the victory of one of our four candidates – Lord Sainsbury, the Mill Road grocer, Brian Blessed and Michael Mansfield – might be celebrated in October. Not so extravagantly, I guess, but I'll let you know.

They were right about the Prince Consort: he did interfere, at least on one occasion I know of. In 1860 he pushed for the appointment of Charles Kingsley as Regius Professor of History – largely on the basis of his historical novels, and against the wishes of the academic historians.

MARION DIAMOND

Don′t feel criminalised. These sound like sensible and usual precautions around rare materials. Years ago, when a graduate student at Cambridge, I wished to use a very rare Chaucer MS. I won′t say which college it belonged to. I was left alone with it and could have eaten a three-course meal on top of it or removed some choice pages. When I finished, I looked for someone to give it to. I wandered aimlessly around the college and finally the porter telephoned someone, of importance I supposed, and I turned it over. I still shudder when I think of this carelessness.

ERIKA

14 August 2011

Even if you haven't read Adam Hochschild's
King Leopold's Ghost
, it's hard not to have picked up the point that Belgian rule in the Congo was terrible even by the usual standards of European colonialism in Africa. That said, I've always had a soft spot for the Royal Museum of Central Africa, just outside Brussels. (and it has an honoured place on of my list of favourite but little-known museums).

I first visited this museum (in Tervuren, a quick tram ride from central Brussels) almost ten years ago, with the daughter when she was doing a school project on the Congo. Then it was in its pristine state: it was a museum of itself, ‘celebrating' the Belgian ‘achievement' against the African ‘savages'. Pride of place went to the statues in the front hall, large gilded
personifications of kindly Belgium bringing peace, prosperity and civilisation to the grateful Congolese – but the early nineteenth-century display of colonial memorabilia told a similar story. Stanley emerged as almost as much of a hero as Leopold, and the Heart of Darkness was nowhere to be seen.

A few years later we went again, and things were on the move – for the worse, I couldn't help feeling. There were glimpses of post-colonial political correctness appearing in the galleries, which, understandable as they were, were so against the grain of the collection and its display (the whole thing had been put together under the auspices of Leopold himself, for heaven's sake) that they risked looking faintly silly. They were in fact a bit like the new wave at the Natural History Museum in London, with its pious little notices about how we wouldn't hunt and stuff wild animals these days. It seemed to me that it would have just been better to leave the whole thing as it was and let us see what the colonial vision was like straight, and allow us to make our own minds up.

Anyway, I went back (with the husband and the son) this weekend and was prepared for the worst: I fully expected computer screens and interactive push buttons … ‘The Belgian intervention in the Congo was: (a) good or (b) bad)', with a serious computerised ticking off to anyone stupid enough to press button (a).

Actually, it turned out to be a nice surprise. For quite a lot of the early twentieth-century display had been rather carefully, and self-awarely, restored. True, this was mostly in the natural history parts of the museum (despite the difficulties South Kensington seems to have, it is actually rather easier to come to terms with the colonial treatment of elephants than the colonial treatment of human beings). But even in the historical sections, a good deal of the post-colonial
points were being made by adding sharp twenty-first-century responses to the traditional displays. There was, for example, a great photographic exhibition contrasting pictures taken in the Congo under Belgian rule with pictures taken now. In fact, this was part of a project that tried to gather contemporary Congolese reactions to old colonial photos – something the daughter is currently wanting to do in South Sudan.

All the same, the most dramatic impact in the museum is still the front hall, with those gilded statues of Belgian beneficence to the benighted natives (even if some of them are now awkwardly – or conveniently – hidden behind the coat lockers). What strikes me, looking at these, is not the fact that some of the Belgian administration (and for ‘Belgian' you could read ‘British') must have been well aware that paternalism was a convenient cover for exploitation. I am sure that was sometimes the case; but more often the Belgian bourgeoisie must have turned up to this Museum and genuinely felt that it was a testament to their country's good works.

Which is to say that the interesting historical question (and one that the decor of the Brussels Museum raises emphatically) is not whether colonialism/empire was good or bad; but how we can start to understand how it seemed morally good to so many ordinary, decent Western people? Self-interest isn't a good enough answer. But there is an unimaginable leap of historical empathy here.

Those were the thoughts on the tram back to the hotel, where we caught up with the new David Starkey row, which was not entirely unconnected. If I have got the story right, Starkey was in trouble for saying (in one of those postriots post-mortems) that if you heard the Tottenham MP David Lammy on the radio you would think he was white.
Starkey seems to have thought this somehow to Lammy's (or the country's) discredit, whereas I felt that it was probably something to celebrate that you couldn't tell a black from a white voice on Radio 4 (or alternatively that, as always in Britain, it was class not race that was audible).

Lammy was, to start with, pretty restrained in his reply, but eventually came out with words to the effect of ‘Starkey should stick to sounding off about the Tudors'. The objections to this were obvious. Starkey might be a rather undistinguished example of the genre – but the Brussels Museum makes the powerful case that we DO need historians thinking and speaking about exactly these issues of race and ideology.

Mary, I think your post invites this question: just how much nasty drivel does somebody have to speak before the focus of your response shifts from ‘nobody should tell a historian to shut up' to ‘historians shouldn't talk nonsense′ (nonsense with potential consequences)?

RICHARD