What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro
attention than her other writing and have never been transcribed or published in full. But thanks to a few scholars, in particular Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, who scrutinized these jottings in the course of preparing their biography of Dorothy, we can start to guess what it was like for Dorothy to live in Whitwick. The version in her diary didn’t always match what she was telling friends in her letters.
Take the weather. “Five weeks have I been here, and not a single rainy day,” she announced to her close friend Jane Marshall right after Christmas. Yet the diary for her second week at Whitwick tells a different story: “A gloomy morning. Slight rain …” “Blustering dark morning—Light Rain …” “Dreary and damp …” “Very slight rain before church—gloomy only …” Or take the habit of vigorous walking that was still important to her. In Whitwick she headed out onto a bare, pitted terrain or followed a road busy with cartloads of coal. “It may be called a good country for walkers,” she told Jane brightly. In the letters she says little about her day-to-day activities; her diary, by contrast, tells us that much of her time went to housework. Cleaning went on constantly, for instance, because of the soot and coal dust in the area. Laundry, too, was more onerous. In the evenings she helped John with his sermons—apparently they were not very stirring—and rarely entertained visitors. But her letters say nothing of drudgery or tedium. Over and over she indicated that she had found the best possible place to be, and that was at John’s side. “I am more useful than I could be anywhere else.”
The blissful certainty that John needed her was the sun that greeted her each morning in Whitwick, no matter the weather. Dorothy’s rose-colored letters from Whitwick were not efforts to hide or disguise reality; on the contrary, they offered a picture closer to her emotional experience than the plain facts in the diary. Jotting down what she did each day reminded her of how she really lived. Then she closed the notebook and surrendered for a while to her heart, which was trying to reassemble Dove Cottage from the unpromising materials around her. But unlike the Grasmere Journal, her Whitwick diary says almost nothing about food, and the absence is noteworthy. No sacred moments over a basin of broth, no tears over a bitten apple. Only on a couple of occasions did something about a meal prompt Dorothy to jot down what they had eaten—and to do so in the diary, her outlet for truth telling.
John’s cook was a woman named Mary Dawson, who had worked for the Wordsworths back at Rydal Mount. Dorothy called her “an honest good creature, much attached to her Family,” but missing from this testimonial was any praise for Mary Dawson’s skill in the kitchen. In fact, she had worked chiefly as a maid until the Wordsworths, eager to replace a terrible Rydal Mount cook, moved Mary Dawson into the position. The family needed a talented cook just then, because Mary Wordsworth was recovering from an illness and could not be persuaded to eat. In order to tempt the invalid, Dorothy had asked Mary Dawson to prepare “all sorts of nice things”—a challenge evidently beyond her, because she, too, was soon replaced. But for John’s purposes, Mary Dawson appeared to be the perfect choice. He was living on a very small salary, and there would be no call for “nice things.” The virtue of Whitwick cuisine would be its economy. As Dorothy put it, “She will be a right frugal housekeeper.”
And so she was, which explains one of the most startling notes on food in any of Dorothy’s journals. She jotted it down on a frosty January day in Whitwick: “Dined on black puddings.”
That’s all she wrote, and it’s possible, of course, that I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps black pudding was a perfectly ordinary dinner for the Wordsworths, one that William, Mary, Dorothy, and the children had eaten happily for years; and on this particular January day Mary Dawson simply continued the tradition. But I don’t think so. Nothing about the nature of black pudding—and nothing about the Wordsworths—suggests that this was the case. I believe Dorothy found it extraordinary to dine on black pudding and that the few words she said about it said everything.
Dorothy made only two remarks about food in the Whitwick diary: this note about black pudding and an earlier note in which she mentioned Christmas dinner. Her birthday was December 25, so Christmas dinner was always doubly festive, and the family typically put her favorite dishes on the menu. This year the celebratory meal was simple but just right, and she scribbled it down: “Rabbit pie & plumb pudding.” She and William had dined constantly on savory meat pies when they were living together, and plum pudding was a holiday icon she had long relished. The Christmas menu, in other words, was a taste of her beloved past. Black pudding was the opposite: it was a taste of Whitwick.
Pretty much everything about black pudding signals that this menu originated not with Dorothy but with Mary Dawson—“our homely Westmoreland housemaid,” as Dorothy called her. It’s true that the Wordsworths ate plenty of pork in all forms, and for a time they even owned pigs. Yet black pudding never appeared anywhere else in Dorothy’s journals; it never showed up in her letters, and there’s no mention of it in the family’s recipe collections. A look at how the dish was made, and the class connotations that were packed into the casings along with the blood and oatmeal, may help to explain why.
Here’s a typical recipe, from Hannah Glasse’s authoritative kitchen bible, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, first published in 1747. Before killing your hog, she instructs, boil a peck of groats for half an hour. As soon as the hog is dead, collect two quarts of the warm blood and stir it constantly until it cools. Then stir in the groats and add salt, a mixture of cloves, mace, and nutmeg, and a few chopped herbs. The next day, clean the intestines of the hog and fill them with the blood mixture, adding an abundance of chopped fat as you go. “Fill the skins three parts full, tie the other end, and make your puddings what length you please; prick them with a pin, and put them into a kettle of boiling water. Boil them very softly an hour; then take them out, and lay them on clean straw.”
Plainly, there wasn’t much margin for error. The blood had to be fresh and warm or it would coagulate; the oats had to be fully cooked beforehand so they would be ready at the right moment; the intestines had to be scrubbed absolutely clean, and they couldn’t be overfilled or they might burst. As a vicarage cook, Mary Dawson wouldn’t have made her own black puddings; she would have purchased them, and we don’t know where. What we do know is that she was a penny-pinching housekeeper with no instinct for good food—a terrible combination of character traits for someone buying this particular product. Provenance was key. Like all sausages, a black pudding of unknown origin was suspect by definition. The cookbook author Mary Radcliffe, writing in 1823, advised her readers that they could safely eat the ones offered by respectable farmers and country gentlemen, but not the ones for sale in the butcher shops of London. These, she cautioned, were “so ill manufactured … as to form a food by no means very inviting.”
Cheap and ubiquitous, with a phallic shape irresistible to humorists, black puddings often appeared in the popular press as the favorite food of petty criminals, rascals, serving wenches, fools, and assorted lowlifes. “Merry Andrew,” the archetypal eighteenth-century buffoon, carried a black pudding, and “Moggy,” a dunce of a girl who couldn’t answer the simplest questions of the catechism, angrily pulled a black pudding out of her dress and smacked the parson in the face with it. But by the early nineteenth century more dignified sources were also acknowledging the lowly class standing of black pudding. The author of a Victorian-era glossary of North Country words and expressions called the dish a “savoury and piquant delicacy” but added that it was mostly seen “among the common people of the North.” At the large breakfasts set out for upper-class families,