“Oh, those solemn, heavy, silent, stupid dinners, with the massive plate and the dark oak wainscoting, and the servants gliding about like ghosts at a festival in Acheron! What a relief it would have been even to have had a clownish footman spill soup over one's dress, or ice-cream down one's back, or anything to break the monotony of the entertainment! But, no; there we sat, Aunt Horsingham remarking that the "weather was dull" and the "crops looking very unpromising;" Aunt Deborah with her eyes fixed on a portrait of the late Mr. David Jones as a boy, opposite which she invariably took her place, and on which, though representing an insignificant urchin in a high frill and blue jacket, she gazed intently during the whole repast; Cousin Amelia looking at herself in the silver dish-covers, and when those were removed relapsing into a state of irritable torpor; and as for poor me, all I could do was to think over the pleasures of the past season, and dwell rather more than I should otherwise have done on the image of Frank Lovell, and the very agreeable acquisition he would have been to such a party. And then the evenings were, if possible, worse than the dinners--work, work, work--mum, mum, mum--till tea. And after tea Aunt Horsingham would read to us, in her dry harsh voice, long passages from the _Spectator_, very excellent articles from the _Rambler_, highly interesting in their day no doubt, but which lose some of their point after an interval of nearly a century; or, worse than all, Pope's "Homer" or Cowper's "Task," running the lines into each other, so as to avoid what she called "the sing-song of the rhymes," till the poet's effusions sounded like the most extraordinary prose, cut into lengths, as we ladies should say, for no earthly purpose but to make nonsense of the whole thing. Her ladyship never went to bed till eleven; so there, having dined at half-past six to a minute, we were forced to sit three mortal hours and a half, swallowing yawns and repressing that inexplicable disorder termed the "fidgets" till the welcome bed-candles arrived. No wonder men drink and smoke and commit all sort of enormities to fill up those dreadful hours after dinner. I think if ever I take to tobacco it will be at Dangerfield.”
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
1555. INGREDIENTS.--To every pint of fruit-juice allow 1 pint of cream; sugar to taste. _Mode_.--Let the fruit be well ripened; pick it off the stalks, and put it into a large earthen pan. Stir it about with a wooden spoon, breaking it until it is well mashed; then, with the back of the spoon, rub it through a hair sieve. Sweeten it nicely with pounded sugar; whip the cream for a few minutes, add it to the fruit, and whisk the whole again for another 5 minutes. Put the mixture into the freezing-pot, and freeze in the same manner as directed for Ice Pudding, No. 1290, taking care to stir the cream, &c., two or three times, and to remove it from the sides of the vessel, that the mixture may be equally frozen and smooth. Ices are usually served in glasses, but if moulded, as they sometimes are for dessert, must have a small quantity of melted isinglass added to them, to enable them to keep their shape.
Sources: The passage is from G. J. (George John) Whyte-Melville, Kate Coventry: An Autobiography, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Beeton, The Book of Household Management of 1861, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — navy cloth, teapot stamp.