Posted on 04/30/2007 2:40:57 PM PDT by mjp
When the BBC needed a man to eat and drink like an Edwardian gent, it sent for Times restaurant critic Giles Coren. Could he stomach it?
The Edwardian era, from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 to the expiration of her obese but happy son Edward VII (who announced her passing to friends at Osborne House with the words “Gentlemen, you may smoke”) from a not entirely surprising double heart attack in 1910, was the Golden Age not just of cricket, motoring, amateurism and one-piece swimsuits for chaps, but of eating.
Unlike his famously stay-at-home mum, Edward VII loved French food and loved eating out. Where he went, the more well-to-do of his admiring subjects followed, generating the first great restaurant boom, an explosion of new and exciting dishes, the arrival of the celebrity chef, and the birth, in the shape of the Pall Mall Gazette’s Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davis, of the restaurant critic.
There can have been no better time for a chap like me to be alive. So what an enormous stroke of luck that the BBC were looking for someone to send back to that very era — to live, dress, exercise, eat and drink like an Edwardian man of means — to find out what it did to his girth, his arteries, his inner organs, his digestion, his mood, his very soul. Some guinea pigs might have been daunted by the prospect of four whopping meals a day, rivers of grog and hardly any fruit, vegetables or water for an entire week. But not I.
I just couldn’t wait for them to Edwardian Supersize Me.
Expert View
Watching someone eat breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week while discussing their bowels, dressed up like the best man at Wayne Rooney’s wedding, is gastric torture AA Gill More Post a comment In advance of this week of quite possibly hazardous consumption, I was sent to Dr Richard Petty in Harley Street for a check-up, partly to get some “before” levels for the sake of comparison later, and partly to check, just check, that I would be able to handle it.
I was in bullish mood, assuming myself to be just about the healthiest example of a 37-year-old man you could possibly hope to encounter, proffering my arm to the nurse’s needle and saying to the director, “I’ve never had any sort of check-up before. Wouldn’t it be funny if I am in such bad shape that I can’t actually do the diet at all?” Hilarious. It turned out that my cholesterol was through the roof, my liver produces too much bile, and I have gout. Or if not gout exactly, then the very high level of uric acid in my blood that will lead me eventually to get gout. And all I can do to prevent it is to avoid offal, shellfish and alcohol — the very core elements of the Edwardian diet. As were the red meat, dairy products and fried food that Dr Petty says I must eschew for the sake of my heart.
Suddenly, I wasn’t so keen to go Edwardian. All my good mood, all my thrill at the prospect of the coming week, evaporated. At news like this a chap may not necessarily change his diet for ever, but it is a fair bet that he will consume nothing but fish and greens for at least the first week, before lapsing into his old ways.
But to go straight from the doctor’s to a gigantic breakfast and on into a week of 12-course dinners, riotous alcoholism and pork chops the size of tennis rackets was so counter-intuitive as to seem suicidal. For the first time in my life, and just when it all seemed to be coming together, I actually didn’t want to eat.
To get a sense of perspective, I asked the doctor if this experiment could actually kill me (I was feeling a bit dramatic). “Well,” he said, not pooh-poohing the notion with nearly enough vigour for my liking, “I wouldn’t do it for more than a week.”
DAY 1
Breakfast: Porridge, sardines, curried eggs, grilled cutlets, coffee, hot chocolate, bread, butter, honey.
The meal is served at the Edwardian house in Barnes in which I am residing with my co-presenter Sue Perkins, and is cooked, as all our meals here will be, by the great Sophie Grigson from a weekly menu taken from an Edwardian housekeeping book.
I go at it full tilt, using the age-old technique of “surprising my stomach” by getting as much as possible down before it realises I am full. I do myself proud and end by wiping my fifth cutlet in the remaining curry sauce from my eggs. Sue, a demi-semi-vegetarian, has not fared so well, going green halfway through her first sardine. We discuss briefly how income tax at the preposterously low rate of 5 per cent freed up plenty of cash for eating, but are interrupted by Sophie ringing the bell to announce lunch.
Lunch: Sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin, rolled ox tongue.
Good stuff, this. Toast all mulched with kidney fat and blood, macaroni good and rich, tongue gigantic and purple. It is exactly what Dr Petty wants me to avoid.
Afternoon tea: Fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, butter.
High tea was invented by the Edwardians to stave off hunger during the endless minutes between lunch and dinner. Everything is very brown.
Dinner: Oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, vanilla soufflé.
Oysters, the gouty man’s nemesis. I swallow eight in my patties. I carve the goose, as the man of the house always did, and find that it is not easy in the stiff-fronted shirt I am wearing with my white tie, nor can I properly incline my neck to observe my work, what with the 3in-high stiff separate collar I am wearing, and thus very nearly lose a thumb. Sue says that I can shut up until I have worn a corset. Apparently her spleen and kidneys have already been forced up into her ribcage (a recognised problem of the Edwardian lady) and her stomach, contained in a waist now narrowed to the width of a toddler’s thigh, is no longer allowing ingress of food.
And so to bed. But up again an hour later for a midnight snack of roast chicken and Madeira. King Edward always took a roast chicken to bed with him, so it seems only right. Alas, after my chicken, I do not get back to sleep. I have consumed 5,000 calories in a single day, well over Dr Petty’s recommendation of 1,800, and toss and turn and rumble until dawn.
DAY 2
Breakfast at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand: Smoked haddock, scrambled eggs, kippers, cold cuts, one roast pheasant, fruit, bacon, sausages, devilled kidneys, scones and kedgeree.
I feel good walking in to Simpson’s in my impeccable morning dress and top hat, but after scoffing a fair portion of everything I spend the rest of the day wishing I was dead. This was the sort of breakfast available in country houses all over England and died out only with the decline in domestic staff and the introduction of cereal from America. In short, we gave it all up for Frosties.
Lunch at Rules, Covent Garden: Oysters, foie gras terrine, roast cod with asparagus, mutton hotpot, pink Yorkshire rhubarb and clotted cream.
A stonking meal in a stonking restaurant. But alas, Sue and I are being taught the chew-chew diet, or Fletcherism, the dieting system devised by Horace Fletcher which compelled diners to bow their heads and chew each mouthful for one minute, until it had liquefied and could be simply absorbed by the mouth. After each minute’s chew is up, a bell is rung and one is allowed to swallow. We look ridiculous, and it makes the food taste revolting, but it does result in my eating less. Or perhaps that was because I have had 2,500 calories at breakfast and haven’t poo’d in two days.
Dinner party at home with several guests, including Roy Hattersley: Melon glacé, mock turtle soup, sole au gratin, crab and asparagus mousse in aspic, boiled mutton with caper sauce, quail pudding, punch romaine.
Awesome. Mock turtle soup was made with a calf’s head to imitate the gorgeous gelatinous quality of turtle meat and now all I want is the real thing. Quail pudding was a cheeky little dish, too — each bird wrapped in thinly sliced fillet steak before getting its suet crust.
We drink lots of champagne, as they did back then, and also a lot of hock (liebfraumilch, really) and youngish claret. Then, when Roy has gone, we have a food fight.
A society hostess would have thrown at least two parties a week like this for up to 20 guests. Ours was for eight and would have cost £24, or £2,000 in today’s money.
DAY 3
Breakfast: The usual, plus a nice fat Cuban cigar. King Edward, in his final illness, took his doctor’s advice and promised to limit himself to two cigars before breakfast.
Lunch: Simpson’s Chophouse on Cornhill. Beloved of Thackeray, Dickens and Newnham-Davis himself (who reviewed it on one occasion when he had been caught out in the evening in morning dress and dared not be seen in his club improperly attired for the hour). It’s been here since 1757 and I eat with some very old fellows. Have steak and kidney pudding with a giant sausage, then a huge pork chop and then stewed cheese served fizzling in a little tin tray with toasted bread triangles on the side. Also lots of claret.
Simpson’s opened its doors to women only in 1916, and since I’m living in 1907, I’ve left Sue behind. The chaps and I discuss the good old days, when men were men and the sort of women who made trouble about it were generally chained to railings somewhere out of earshot.
Dinner:More of the same, to be honest. And when I get a little queasy I am invited to prepare a famous Edwardian remedy for indigestion called “beef tea”, which I make by putting two teaspoons of mashed beef into a jam jar with three teaspoons of cold water, and leaving in a warm place to macerate. Then I strain and drink. And after that it all comes, as it were, rushing back.
Days 4, 5, and 6 roll on much the same. I gradually recover the ability to sleep and poo, so crucial to the enjoyment of life, and generally adjust to the Edwardian life. We have gigantic picnics of lobster and foie gras on Hampstead Heath; Sue takes me to a vegetarian restaurant. They were very popular at the time, being the only places that women could eat unaccompanied, and were thus a hotbed of suffragette sedition.
Finally, we come to the last supper, a dinner cooked for us by the head chef at The Savoy, recreating, to the molecule, an original nine-course banquet served there on the evening of January 14, 1905.
In full evening formal wear, starched to the eyeballs and with my corseted consort, Sue, at my side, along with six other guests including the great Anton Mosimann, I eat:
1 Beluga Caviar and native and rock oysters — £1,000 worth.
2 Pot au feu Henry IV — the shoulder, shank, rib and tail of beef braised all day and served in their broth with a blob of béarnaise.
3 Sole cardinale and whitebait, which was meant to be an either/or.
4 Chicken d’Albufera, in which the roasted bird is served in a sauce of boiled cream, triply-reduced, with mushrooms and black truffles and quenelles of veal tongue and chicken.
5 Saddle of lamb with spring vegetables and parsley potatoes.
6 Pressed Rouen ducklings, in which four birds killed specially for us in France are roasted and their bones and organs crushed in a solid silver duck press before our eyes, the resultant juice then reduced at the boil in a silver dish to produce a sauce for the meat which Sue called “slightly bummy duck’s blood”.
7 Asparagus hollandaise, which the Edwardians loved as a predessert but is apparently murderous for the gouty. 8 Peach Melba served in a hand-carved ice-swan as big as a ten-year-old child. 9 Canapés à la Diane, which, I confess, I cannot remember.
I imagine Vita Sackville-West must have recently eaten a meal a bit like that when she wrote in The Edwardians : “Those meals! Those endless, extravagant meals, in which they all indulged all year round! Sebastian wondered how their constitutions and their figures could stand it; then he remembered that in the summer they went as a matter of course to Homburg or Marienbad, to get rid of the accumulated excess, and then returned to start on another year’s course of rich living. Really there was very little difference, especially, between Marienbad and the vomitorium of the Romans.”
As for Dr Petty, he was not amused. He found that although I had put on only a pound in weight, my body fat had increased by an extraordinary 10 per cent over the week, with corresponding declines in muscle mass and water content. My haematology showed excess blood urea due to an excess of protein and dangerous signs of dehydration from the excess booze and lack of water. And my cholesterol, from an already worrying 5.8 (modern quacks like to see a result below 4) had in seven days skyrocketed to 6.6! On a diet like that, he reckoned, a chap with my heredity would do well to live till he was 42.
With a prognosis of that nature, and after a week like that, you might have thought I’d be desperate to get my mouth round a bit of salad and a bottle of water. And, in a way, I was. But the thing is, I had got rather used to my Edwardian way of life: the great clothes, the staggering food, the not having anything much to do, and I was reluctant to let it go. If it really were 1910, I think I would very probably have carried on with it, and hang the death sentence. After all, in four years’ time I’d be on the Western Front, running at the German guns.
Edwardian Supersize Me, BBC Four, 9pm, Monday. Part of The Edwardians — the Birth of Now
A RECIPE FOR AN EARLY GRAVE
The human body does not adapt to this level of excess. If Giles were to continue eating this type of food in such quantities he would gain weight rapidly, placing a strain on his organs, including his liver, heart and gall bladder. With his already raised cholesterol, enduring the Edwardian diet for longer than a week would lead to a rapid worsening of his health. Giles was eating 122g of fat a day (32g more than the advised upper limit), of which 56g was saturated. A man should limit his intake to no more than 30g of saturated fat. Eating such amounts of saturated fat and gaining weight would raise his risk of heart disease.
Gout is controlled largely by drug therapy today, but dietary restriction of foods rich in purines, which increase uric acid in the blood, is reasonable advice. Noshing on liver, heart, sweetbreads, anchovies and the like would make full-blown gout likely. With his low levels of vitamin C and fibre Giles could also expect problems with constipation and his digestion, as well as potentially weakening his immune system.
Amanda Ursell
Well, I was okay until I got to the rolled ox tongue.
I don’t even want to know how they roll it.
Absolutley excellent post, but I think I’ll skip dinner.
I can roll MY tongue. Maybe oxen can roll theirs, too.
**Freeper Kitchen Ping**
Heeeeey, I bet you’re on to something there! Good answer.
Why am I getting this image of the “Mr. Creosote” skit from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life”?
“Give me another bucket!”
“Would you like a wafer thin mint, Sir?”
LOL! Yes, there certainly is more to life that just eating...
bump
Champagne at every meal sounds like the best part, to me. All those meats make me feel a little unwell just reading about it!
(We had the Chickpea Dish with Noodles for supper :-).
Whoa!
“Good stuff, this. Toast all mulched with kidney fat and blood, macaroni good and rich, tongue gigantic and purple.”
Good Gawd!
COCONUT ROCKS
1 lb. grated coconut
1 1/2 - 2 lbs of sugar
chopped cashew (optional)
6 ozs. milk
a few drops of colouring
1/2 teasp. of vanilla
a pinch of ground cardomoms (optional)
Chocolate Icing:
2 tablesps. of cocoa powder
1 1/2 tablesp. of sugar
1 oz. of milk
1/2 teasp. rose water
Method:
Boil sugar and milk together. Add grated coconut, and cook until the mixture comes off the sides of the pan. Add chopped cashew, vanilla, cardomom powder and colouring. When done spread it on a greased board. Before it gets hard quickly put the cocoa powder, milk and sugar in another small pan on medium heat and keep stirring till it gets slightly thick. Add rose water. Take it off the heat and pour it on the prepared coconut mixture. Cut into squares before it gets hard.
The chocolate layer will really look nice on light pink or light green coconut rocks.
Come, now Diana, don’t go getting queasy on us!!!!
I don’t believe would much care for an Edqardian kitchen (or the size of the meals) but I sure would like to be on your ping list!!!!
The “weirdest” things I’ve ever eaten are:
Alligator (like lobster; Yum!)
Snake (caught that one myself in LA on a training course; man, I HATE the Swamplands!)
Chocolate Covered Insects (on a dare; crunchy chocolate, basically)
Raw fish, freshly caught, with lime & salt (fishing in Mexico) which was terrific, since I also like Sushi. :)
My Grandma Anita would eat anything that wouldn’t eat her first, LOL! (She loved Tongue and Tripe.) No, thank you!
Starting from the bottom of your list:
Tongue I will eat, in fact I have one in the freezer I plan to eat this weekend. Ixnay on the tripe - no way.
I love sushi and sashimi!
Ixnay on the chocolaye insects.
Never tried snake, but hubby says it tastes like chicken and now whenever he eats chicken he says it tastes like snake :)
Alligator is simply MAHAVELOUS DAHLINK!!! I love gator.
The weirdest thing I think I have ever eaten was starfish. I was 7 years old and we were at some ritzy resort in Chile.
This was a delightful read. What a h00t!
Thank you for the post & the ping.
Are you ready for an “Edwardian Supersize Me”.
This is a fun read when you find the time.:)
Burp! I feel bloated just reading about that edwardian chow
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