By Jacob van Etten
It’s January 2009, the Darwin storm breaks loose. A taste of things to come is the publication of a revived and illustrated version of Emma Darwin’s recipe notebook. When authors Dusha Bateson and Weslie Janeway heard about the booklet in the Cambridge University Library they were “very concerned they wouldn’t be able to get a book out of it.” Yet they tried out every recipe and converted dust into gold by publishing them in a colourful cookbook.
Weslie Janeway says:
One of the things that is very clear is that people ate much more seasonally then – although we see the beginnings of modern food supply. For example, they married in 1839, and the railroads were being built. And it began to be possible to have fish away from the coast. Rice was arriving from the rice plantations in America. Basically, they had root vegetables all winter.
The recipe for boiling rice is in Charles Darwin’s own hand.
