The Private Dining Room

Where the best stories in a Victorian dictionary of dining ended up.

E. S. Dallas wrote this alphabet of the table in 1877 and could not resist a digression. The digressions are the best part — here are the strangest, each linking to the entry it belongs to.

The most admirable use of anise-seed in England, this book reports without further comment, is in simulating the odour of a fox.Read it: Anise-Seed
William Banting invented dieting as we know it and published the numbers: in fifty-two weeks he went from 202 lbs to 150 — fifty-two pounds in fifty-two weeks — on beef, mutton, kidneys and dry toast, with tea taken without milk or sugar.Read it: Banting
The almond is “the most versatile and the most poetical” of fruits, and also contains hydrocyanic acid, the most rapid poison known. Stranger still, Dallas notes, the almond is a peach and a nectarine at the same time.Read it: Almond
Two hundred years ago a macédoine was not a medley of anything. It meant the parsley of Macedon — the herb the English called Alexanders, which fell out of use when the Italians made celery fashionable.Read it: Aldrich
Dean Aldrich's five reasons a man should drink: good wine, a friend, being dry, lest you should be by-and-by — or any other reason why.Read it: Aldrich
An “alderman's walk” is the long incision down a haunch of mutton or venison where the most delicate slices are found. The alderman knew where to cut.Read it: Alderman's Walk & Allspice
Carême's reply when the Regent complained that everything sent to table was too tempting to resist: “Sir, my business is to provoke your appetite; it is not for me to regulate it.”Read it: Appetite
The redstreak apple, the one Sir Isaac Newton loved and England's favourite in the seventeenth century, was dying out as Dallas wrote — not because it failed, but simply because it was no longer sufficiently prized.Read it: Appetite
Carême built pastry as architecture, and some of his structures were still standing in the storerooms of the Tuileries — “if they were not burnt in 1871.”Read it: Apricot
Apricot and precocious are the same word: the last two syllables of the fruit are the first two of the adjective, and they mean the same thing — early.Read it: Apricot
Loudon declared, without any exception whatever, that the asparagus beds of Mortlake and Deptford were the most extensive in the world.Read it: Asparagus
The Earl of Sandwich gave his name to a food and, Dallas notes drily, that is all he gave. Badminton, seat of the Duke of Beaufort, at least calls up claret cup — without the sugar and the curaçoa.Read it: Bacon
Cleopatra bet Antony she could spend ten million sestertii on a single supper, and settled the wager by dissolving one of the two finest pearls in the world and drinking it.Read it: Cleopatra's Supper
The monks of the Grande Chartreuse took two million francs a year from their liqueur — an order founded by Saint Bruno expressly to out-austere the Benedictines, in the most desolate spot he could find in the mountains of Dauphiné.Read it: Chartreuse
The Château de Chambord, built by Francis I and the setting of some of the most famous scenes in French history, is now best known worldwide for one detail of cookery first practised in its kitchen.Read it: Chambord
A French judge to Laplace the astronomer: the discovery of a new dish is a more interesting event than the discovery of a star, “for we have always stars enough” — and the sciences will not be properly honoured until a cook sits in the first class of the Institute.Read it: Contise
Calipash is a corruption of carapace and means only the green fat of the turtle's upper shell; calipee is the yellow fat below. The green fat, we are warned, is never to be approached in a frivolous spirit.Read it: Calipash and Calipee
A carbonade was originally “a rasher on the coals” — scored first, so the fire reached further in and the pepper and salt could penetrate. In France it decayed into a stew.Read it: Carbonade
Wynkyn de Worde printed The Booke of Kervinge in 1508, and its vocabulary still explains dish names that centuries of corruption have since disguised.Read it: Carving
Cassis of Dijon carries so little alcohol it would not “upset the equilibrium of a fly” — and was taxed at 2s. 4d. a bottle, more than neat brandy at 1s. 9d.Read it: Carving
Celery began as wild smallage and was educated into a vegetable by Italian gardeners in the mid-1600s. Its name is Greek for parsley — and celeri-ac absurdly bolts the Latin name onto the Greek one.Read it: Caviare
Beauvilliers opened in 1782 and effectively invented the restaurant as it now exists — elegant room, laid tables, waiters properly dressed, serious cellar — then wrote the two-volume manual in 1814.Read it: Beauvilliers
On the becafico, the small bird Italians ate whole: “if the becafico were only as big as a pheasant it would be worth an acre of land.”Read it: Becafico
Windsor beans are called Windsor beans for the plainest possible reason: Dutch gardeners first grew them at Windsor.Read it: Bay Leaf
The Albert Pudding's mould was lined with citron, orange peel and angelica in geometrical figures “worthy of the South Kensington school of design” — a school the Prince himself had fostered. The pudding was designed to flatter its namesake's taste in art.Read it: Albert Pudding
Of the batter puddings — batter, hasty, and Yorkshire — Dallas will commend only the Yorkshire.Read it: Batter