Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer Pudding? Thomas Marks

This section, on beverages, opens with a detour to the Stuart courtier-philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby, with David arguing that Digby's posthumously published collection of recipes, first printed in 1669, has been unjustly maligned owing to its surfeit of mead-based concoctions. 'Were the forbidding blocks of print divided up ... into verse form,' she writes, 'it would be seen that like all the best recipes, these are runes, litanies, something even of magic spells.' She then breaks up Digby's formula for one such brew, White Metheglin, into thirty-eight lines of free verse, the Carolean cocktail recipe revived as found poem: 'when it is but blood-warm/Put in as much of the best honey/As will make the Liquor/bear an Egg the breadth of six pence above the water.’

David's invocation of magic gestures to the residual belief that poetry, with the incantational qualities of its rhythms and repetitions, might possess an animistic force capable of charming or transforming what it addresses —in other words, that poetry makes something happen. In this context, a poem might be said to resemble a recipe, at least in so far as the enigmatic words of a spell, like a list of ingredients and cooking processes, are a set of optimistic instructions. Sorcery and the saucepan come together, remember, in the most famous literary recipe of them all: 'Double, double, toil and trouble;/Fire burn, and cauldron bubble./Fillet of a fenny snake,/In the cauldron boil and bake’.

Beyond this, David's versification of Digby's recipe is suggestive of the scholarly direction that her writing had begun to take by 1970, when Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen appeared. She increasingly believed that the 'quaint and uncertain rules by which our ancestors cooked' would reveal their good sense through careful study and attention; the White Metheglin poem is a way of framing that belief. If the books that had made her name, from A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) to French Provincial Cooking (1960), were a type of travel writing, those that came later — on bread and ices — recorded voyages that David had taken in libraries, including her own. To study her handwritten notes on the historical cookery books that she collected (and would eventually bequeath to the Warburg Institute) is to recognise her sensitivity to their diction and design — to the evolving forms and formats, that is, of recipes in print.

Still, David's versified recipe can't help but come across as a party trick on the page. This is indicative, I think, of how the long connection between cookery and poetry had, by the 20th century, largely been forgotten. 'The table has always set the tone for the lyre,' wrote the French epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, evoking traditions of poetry in praise of food and wine and of reciting it to accompany consumption. But beyond providing diversion to diners, poetry has sometimes also given directions to chefs. In classical Arabic literature, there are many such poems. In one example, the Abbasid poet-prince Ibrahim Ibn al-Mandi offers a recipe for narjissiya (`narcissus dish'): an egg broken on braised meat should look 'like eyes,/Like shining stars of the firmament/Or round narcissus flowers'. There are also recipe poems that survive from the ancient world, such as the Hedypatheia of Archestratos of Gela, a catalogue of the finest ingredients to be found in late classical Greece: 'For in Sikyon, my friend, you get the head of a conger eel ... Then sprinkle it with herbs and stew it for a long time in brine.'

Food is kin to comedy, at least when it is abundant, so it is little wonder that many recipe poems reach for humour to season their practical intent. When the verse rhymes, comedy is often generated, advertently or not, by the need to find rhyme words that do not botch the cooking instructions. A recipe poem for bread and butter pudding attributed to Jane Austen's mother, for example, lays down some indeterminate guidance early in one stanza (`[Adcl] more savory things if well chosen') to facilitate the necessary precision of its final line (`Of Eggs ... put in half a dozen'). Sydney Smith's `Recipe for a Winter Salad', much reprinted since its first publication in the 1850s, announces its wit in the bathetic pleading of its opening (`To make this condiment, your poet begs/The pounded yellow of two hard-boiled eggs') as well as through the mock-lyricism of its commands: 'Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl/ And, half-suspected, animate the whole.'

That Smith should emphasis 'the whole' hints at another affinity between a recipe and a poem. Both are rigorous little systems that promise, in their different ways, to add up to more than the sum of their parts. Margaret Cavendish made much of this in poems such as 'A Posset for Nature's Breakfast' and 'A Tart' (both 1653), in which culinary processes become metaphysical conceits that reimagine the world as one vast kitchen. I think Elizabeth David realised it too, albeit in a whimsical mode, in what is probably the only other recipe poem that she wrote. In 1977, for the seventieth birthday of her first publisher John Lehmann, she sent him a free-verse rendition of her instructions for scrambled eggs (the poem is quoted at length in Artemis Cooper's biography of David). No dish could be more apt for free verse: here is food that has lost any semblance of form but somehow holds together through the muddle.

BOOKENDS p64 Literary Review [March 2022]