'Side dishes for the Christmas Table': The product of the kitchen and fruit garden, December-
The modern return to seasonal eating throws into sharp relief the variety of food available to us in any given month; reading Hannah's manual (Art of Cookery) throws into even sharper relief the variety of native fruits and vegetables now lost to us in Britain through both neglect and intensive agriculture. Just in case anyone thought the people of the 18thC sat shivering throughout the winter, gnawing on a frozen turnip and praying for the thaw, I give you Hannah's entry for the fruits and vegetables that made good eating during December:
Many sorts of cabbages and savoys, spinach, and some cauliflowers in the conservatory, and artichokes in sand. Roots we have as in the last month (carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, skirrets, scorzonera, horse-radish, potatoes, onions, garlick, shalots, rocumbole, sellery). Small herbs on the hot-beds for salads, also mint, tarragon and cabbage-lettuce preserved under glasses; chervil, sellery, and endive blanched (meaning forced I think). Sage, thyme, savoury, beet-leaves, tops of young beets, parsley, sorrel, spinach, leeks, and sweet marjoram, marigold-flowers, and mint dried. Asparagus on the hot-bed, and cucumbers on the plants sown in July and August, and plenty of pears and apples (also left from November were bullaces, medlars, arbutas, walnuts, hazel-nuts, and chestnuts).
The available fruit varieties include: Some grapes, the Kentish, russet, golden, French, kirton and Dutch pippins, John apples, winter queenings, the marigold and Harvey apples, pom-water, golden-dorset, renneting, love's pearmain, and the winter pearmain; winter burgomot, winter-boncretien, winter mask, winter Norwich, and great furrein pears.
And not a sprout in sight. The sheer variety here prompts me to add a note about London's supply of fresh fruit and vegetables; Kent is widely thought of as 'the Garden of England' and there's quite a lot of truth in this, certainly for London's supply of all those wonderful-sounding apples and grapes, but Fulham was London's hot-house, explaining a lot about its infrastructure today. Fulham's transport links are notoriously rubbish for somewhere so close to central London, but this is in no small part down to its role as London's local market garden, where family businesses held relatively large plots of land with greenhouses and nurseries, supplying nearby Covent Garden daily. In the Victorian period, when the pressure for land became intolerable, those families made a fortune selling up their five or ten acres to the new 'speculating builders' who put up the rows of terraced houses still standing today. Because the development happened so rapidly, there was no time for a natural transport structure to evolve, which is still the case almost two centuries later, particularly on a Friday night.
