Jane Austen Ate
sentimental crumbs and historical recipes for the author's 250th birthday
“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.”
Today is Jane Austen’s 250th birthday and I thought the best way to honor her would be with a scandalous confession that might cast me from Janeite society followed by a survey of some of the work I’ve done with the Regency-era food and drink of which the author was so fond.
The truth I’ve never publicly acknowledged is that I hated Austen when I first met her. I was forced to read Pride and Prejudice in 9th grade English and the teacher did not like me at all (we have since reconciled). I asked too many questions and was, if memory serves, a precocious, talkative know-it-all who didn’t think women’s literature, let alone a text dealing with domestic dribble, deserved a moment of my very short attention span. (The irony in my complete and utter misunderstanding of Austen’s work is not lost on me.) I was obsessed with Poe and fantasy horror and considered myself mature enough to know when a book was beneath me. I finished that year glad to be rid of Austen and her ribbon-trimmed ilk. That following summer, my mother handed me a tiny cloth-bound copy of Northanger Abbey (Austen’s only gothic satire and one of her earliest works) because “the heroine has the same name as you!” she said excitedly. I read it, begrudgingly at first, but then I realized—to much embarrassment—that I loved it. I loved Catherine for all our shared faults; she and I possessed the same overactive imagination and both needed to learn quite a bit about how to correctly read social situations. I was bewitched body and soul and I (to quote the 2005 Pride and Prejudice) loved, loved, loved, Austen.
A few years later, I was on my way to being an Austen scholar. During my undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, I studied under the great Austen devotee Janine Barchas (whom I now get to call colleague and friend, but I still refuse to call her by her first name). I studied Austen for a summer at Oxford, helped Barchas with some of her Austen book research (my first taste of the publishing industry), and returned two years later to complete primary research for my undergraduate thesis on-location at the Chawton House Library and the Hampshire County Records Office. I took my grandmother with me and rode the bus from our inn in Winchester to Chawton everyday, walking across the fields in my bright red wellies pretending I was Lizzie Bennet defiantly showing up muddied on purpose.
While at Chawton, I worked with the then-unpublished Knight Family Cookbook, taking copious notes and pictures before it was ever slated to be digitized (I now have a published copy!). One of my personal greatest academic achievements was getting to share those notes with one of the foremost experts on Austen, Jocelyn Harris. Through my thesis “‘finding food for a rambling fancy:’ Gastronomic Gentility and Symbolism in Jane Austen’s Texts,” I combined my two loves of Austen and food studies, incorporating literary analysis, archival records from Austen’s era, 18th and 19th century cookbook manuscripts, and numerous food puns that my advisors lovingly overlooked. I loved Austen and while I also ardently loved the world of food, studying her allowed me to see all the ways in which I could study food through a critical lens, too. You might consider me overly sentimental, but I feel incredibly indebted to Austen for taking me to new places, helping me see things differently in the world and in myself, and—perhaps most importantly—holding my hand as I realized that I was very wrong about so many things.
Overtime, I’ve moved further and further away from Austen professionally—though I’m always keen to utilize deep-cut references to Mr. Woodhouse’s orthorexic concerns over other people’s cake intake or how a pail of blue-tinted milk gave Fanny Price the ick—nevertheless, the Regency era remains one of my areas of food studies expertise. Here and there, I’ve had the great fortune to talk and teach about Austen and the role food and drink played in her world and in her works.
After you’ve completed your favorite rereads (Persuasion cancelled chapters) and your rewatches (the awkward yearning of Northanger Abbey 2007 is *chef’s kiss*), I kindly ask you to indulge me in some of my favorite Austen-inspired food history moments:
Read my review of Martha Lloyd’s Household Book: The Original Manuscript from Jane Austen’s Kitchen by Julienne Gehrer in association with Jane Austen’s House and and the Bodleian Library.
Make Salmagundi—a dealer’s choice composed salad made of vegetables, eggs, and meats. Pair it with a martini and it’s practically a Regency-era girl dinner. See my TikTok below:
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Listen to my guest episode of Femidish where I talk about Jane Austen, gendered labor, and the sociopolitical climate of 2020.
Watch my “Eating with Jane Austen” episode of the Staying Home with Jane Austen series that dives into the author’s personal food history and how it influenced her writing.
Make Austen-inspired dishes using my historically adapted recipes including berry cordial, ratafia biscuits, and jaune mange.
Take a tour of a US (North Carolina!) tea nursery and pick out a tea-plant with me, for research!
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Happy birthday, Austen. In your honor, I shall “eat ice and drink French wine” (i.e. leftovers and whatever’s in the fridge) and “be above vulgar economy” as best as I am able. I really hope we get to write a book together someday.
Some of my favorite Austen bibliography:
Barchas, Janine. 2012. Matters of Fact in Jane Austen. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Black, Maggie and Deirdre Le Faye. 1995. The Jane Austen Cookbook. British Museum Press.
Brodey, Inger S. B. 2024. Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dow, Gilian. 2014. The Knight Family Cookbook. Chawton House Press.
Lane, Maggie. 1995. Jane Austen and Food. Bloomsbury Academic.
Looser, Devoney. 2017. Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane. St. Martin’s Press.
Obsessed, this is all so lovely 😍
I will definitely have to check out the books you recommended.