ArticlePDF Available

The English Savoury Course

September 2020
Global Food History 6(3)

DOI:10.1080/20549547.2020.1821423

Authors:

Technical University of Denmark

The savoury is a course that comes near the end of the meal, after the sweet but before what in Britain is called the dessert (which is usually fruit and nuts as opposed to pastries, puddings and the like which are part of the sweet course). Typically, savouries are salty, spicy or sharp. Cheese straws or ramekins, smoked fish, mushrooms, almost anything on toast are components of classic savouries. The article looks at why this is a peculiarly British preference, its origins in the later Victorian era and its gradual eclipse after the Second World War.

Content uploaded by Joshua Evans

Content may be subject to copyright.

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfgf20

Global Food History

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfgf20

The English Savoury Course

Paul Freedman & Joshua Evans

To cite this article: Paul Freedman & Joshua Evans (2020): The English Savoury Course, Global

Food History, DOI: 10.1080/20549547.2020.1821423

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2020.1821423

Published online: 23 Sep 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

The English Savoury Course

Paul Freedman

and Joshua Evans

Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA;

School of Geography and the Environment,

University of Oxford, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

ABSTRACT

The savoury is a course that comes near the end of the meal, after

the sweet but before what in Britain is called the dessert (which is

usually fruit and nuts as opposed to pastries, puddings and the like

which are part of the sweet course). Typically, savouries are salty,

spicy or sharp. Cheese straws or ramekins, smoked sh, mushrooms,

almost anything on toast are components of classic savouries. The

article looks at why this is a peculiarly British preference, its origins

in the later Victorian era and its gradual eclipse after the Second

World War.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 30 December 2019

Accepted 6 September 2020

KEYWORDS

Savoury; British Food;

Victorian cuisine; menus

The savoury is a small salty or piquant course served at the end of a meal. Savouries are

peculiarly English, never really popular even in Scotland, Wales or Ireland, let alone the

rest of the world. Classic examples are Scotch woodcock (scrambled eggs on toast spread

with anchovy paste), cheese puﬀs or fritters, devils on horseback (prunes or other dried

fruit wrapped in bacon) and angels on horseback (oysters wrapped in bacon). Many

savories are on toast (en croûte) or served as canapés (bread trimmed of crusts, toasted or

fried). Presented after what in Britain is called the sweet or pudding, the savoury marks

a contrasting conclusion.

Savouries were at the height of their popularity between about

1870 and the Second World War. After wartime privations and postwar austerity, they

experienced something of a silver age in the 1950s. The mid-1960s, the era of “Swinging

London,” Mary Quant and the early Beatles, saw the erosion of British food customs in

the context of a cosmopolitan rejection of stuﬀy tradition. Eventually this meant the near-

extinction of savouries. In what follows we undertake to describe the century of the

savoury’s growth, eﬄorescence and decline in terms of social as well as gastronomic

practices and fashions.

The savoury is important as a marker of English culinary distinction. Beginning as

a variation on the much older practice of mixing sweet and non-sweet dishes in a ﬁnal

course, it emerges in the mid-Victorian era as a paradoxical close to a dinner because it

comes after the sweet course, otherwise generally regarded as constituting the ﬁnale. As

with many seemingly age-old food traditions, the savoury is not of ancient lineage any

more than is ﬁsh-and-chips, both invented at the same relatively recent time.

It is also

signiﬁcant as an innovation that did not catch on internationally, unlike ﬁsh and chips,

afternoon tea or orange marmalade with breakfast toast. Every nation and society favors

CONTACT Paul Freedman paul.freedman@yale.edu Department of History, Yale University, New Haven, CT

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY

https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2020.1821423

certain foods that others reject. Despite the success of the United States in exporting all

manner of fast foods, Americans’ love of peanut butter is not widely shared. Few outside

of Canada and the United States care for maple syrup either. Such attachments become

deﬁant, slightly self-mocking badges of pride.

The savoury, however, was never a shared English habit or infatuation because it was

identiﬁed with the upper classes. Not exclusively the property of wealthy or aristocratic

households as it had a solid upper-middle class footing, but never adopted below the level

of the comfortably well-oﬀ. Without being exclusively masculine in the way that cigars or

port drinking were, the savoury was thought to appeal to men, oﬀsetting or complement-

ing the long-standing association of women and sweets. At dinners served at home,

women partook of savories, but these delicacies were associated particularly with male

societies such as London clubs. The savoury in England is thus a ubiquitous gastronomic

aﬀectation, but a somewhat elusive one that is worth looking at more closely, especially as

it is ignored in standard histories of British food.

Once having described how and why savouries appeared when they did, we will look at

their blossoming season as evidenced by cookbooks, both general and those devoted

speciﬁcally to savouries. The article will also consider restaurants, logically, but more

particularly several largely male settings: clubs, Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, Livery

Companies and legal societies (Inns of Court). We rely primarily on menus preserved by

such societies. Such documents have not been considered vital historical records and so

their haphazard retention depended on some thoughtful and meticulous archivist. For

a sense of the social context and common attitudes toward the peculiar course, we also

cite literary and journalistic mentions.

The Appeal of the Savoury

The savoury course was an English passion, but occasionally it turns up in elite Imperial

circles, especially in Canada, India and Australia, a reminder of home for colonial

governing elites. For formal occasions, the Toronto Club, the National Club (also in

Toronto) or the Melbourne Club might extend their service to include a savoury.

Canadian private households aspiring to a degree of pretension adopted this custom.

In Robertson Davies’s social comedy Tempest-Tost, set in the late 1940s in a Canadian

provincial town, Mrs. Bridgetower routinely serves soup, entrée, sweet and savoury,

adhering to the ceremonies and cuisine that prevailed before the First War when she

was newly married. Mrs. Bridgetower’s timid son Solly cautiously broaches the topic of

his participation in an amateur production of The Tempest over a meal of soup (unspe-

ciﬁed), pork tenderloin, ﬂoating island and ﬁnally prunes wrapped in fried bacon (i.e.

devils on horseback).

Savouries had a certain presence in British India, as can be seen from an extraordinary

book published in the 1880s by “Wyvern,” a pseudonym of Colonel Arthur Robert

Kenney-Herbert. His deceptively titled Culinary Jottings for Madras is in fact a long

series of recipes, including a chapter on savoury toasts. Wyvern considered savouries

a thrifty use of leftover food, useful when guests drop in unexpectedly, although pine-

apple toast and the like were appropriate for full dinners as savoury entremêts, an

anomalous non-sweet contribution to a ﬁnal course otherwise consisting of puddings

and pastries.

2P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

In the United States, even in Anglophile settings such as men’s clubs, a separate

savoury course was unknown. Americans encountering savories in England found

them curious, almost inexplicable.

In 1938, the wife of a visiting American professor

in Exeter, remarked dismissively that the savoury course could serve no purpose other

than giving more work for the maids of the household.

In France, the savoury was regarded as an example of execrable English taste. As

Agnes Jekyll remarked in one of her Kitchen Essays devoted to savories, the French

consider a supernumerary course following the sweet “barbarous, even immoral.”

Louis

Saulnier’s authoritative Répertoire de la Cuisine includes 52 savouries, but the author

recommends they be “radically suppressed,” saying they are included only because the

English and Americans remain faithful to them.

The eminent chef Jacques Pépin recalls

that working at the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris during the 1950s he often prepared

Welsh rarebit, marrow toasts and Scotch woodcock for the delectation of English guests.

During what we are calling its golden age, 1870–1940, the savoury became a culinary

form of distinction, but it had not been from time immemorial a separate course. What is

age-old is the presence of non-sweet as well as sugary dishes at the end of the meal. The

nineteenth-century innovation was, in separating out the former, thus creating a service

after the sweet, diminishing its size, recapitulating the hors d’oeuvre and providing

a spicy, sharp or salty – one might say an umami – taste.

It is not uncommon to follow up pastry or pudding with something that is not sweet,

cheese and crackers, for example. This preference is conventionally supposed to be a male

attribute, men being reputed to prefer strong-ﬂavored to sweet tastes which are (con-

ventionally) typiﬁed as female. The notion that women are particularly fond of sweets is

the oldest gendered idea of taste proclivities, antedating by centuries more modern

suppositions such as a female fondness for salads and light food generally.

It is doubtful

that men really are indiﬀerent to sweets, but even if this were to be the case, it would not

explain the particular evolution of savouries or their geographically limited popularity.

Perhaps it is best to see in the savoury a reﬁned form of gluttony, quite unnecessary,

even slightly perverse, but delightful for just that reason. A book about London’s

celebrated restaurant The Ivy notes that it still serves savouries, that they are not all

that popular, but certain customers like them for the “anchoring gravitas” they provide,

complementing the frivolity of the sweet.

Frivolity or gravitas, the key to the savoury’s

attraction would seem to be its sharp ﬂavor in contrast to sweets and to the smooth, bland

tastes of Victorian dining generally. After oysters, soup, ﬁsh, roast meat, entrées with

buttery sauces, game and a sweet course, the savoury had a piquant allure.

The beginning of the reign of this culinary oddity is chronologically clear even if its

raison d’être is not. The savoury can be discerned in embryo in the typical early-

nineteenth century ﬁnal-course juxtaposition of sweet pastries and puddings with

items such as vegetables, or macaroni. Starting around 1850, one or two non-sugary

dishes occasionally appear by themselves on the menu, below the sweet course. Although

they are not at this juncture listed under a speciﬁc rubric of “savoury,” this is the point of

origin.

In 1877, Mrs. de Salis published Savouries à la Mode, the ﬁrst cookbook devoted

exclusively to this innovation, responding, she said, to an obvious need, “savoury dishes

at the present time being so fashionable.”

By 1886, the author of Savouries and Sweets

Suitable for Luncheons and Dinners could deﬁne savories as the “piquant little dishes that

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 3

are now so universally served at dinner between ‘the sweets’ and ‘the dessert’.”

They

were taken for granted by the end of the century as seen in a passage in the 1897 novel

Phroso by Anthony Hope (more renowned as the author of The Prisoner of Zenda).

Dining at a restaurant, the narrator and a friend are surprised to see the former’s ﬁancée

and her mother enter, the young woman exclaiming when she recognizes them, “Why

how early you two have dined . . . you’re at the savoury aren’t you? We’ve only just

come.”

By 1925, the authors of The Gentle Art of Cookery could describe the savoury as

a British institution that had persevered over the recent troublesome times.

In 1935,

echoing Mrs. de Salis, Dorothy Allhusen remarked in a brief foreword to Unusual

Savouries that “in these cocktail days, when savouries are so much in demand, I feel

that another book devoted entirely to this subject may be welcome.”

The status of the

savoury was kept up at dinners Winston Churchill gave for Roosevelt and Stalin at the

Tehran Conference (1943), and for Truman and Stalin at the postwar Potsdam

Conference (1945). A gourmand attentive to symbolic overtones of meals, Churchill

provided cheese souﬄé and Scotch woodcock to conclude these dinners.

The savoury

was revived in the 1950s, and even now it persists in a few clubs and Oxford and

Cambridge colleges, although more often as an alternative to the sweet course rather

than to follow it.

The Gradual End to the Meal

The savoury course is one of several ways of drawing out the ﬁnal stages of a meal. The

pleasures of an elegant dinner, both gastronomic and conversational, encourage its

prolongation. Diners might remain at the table after the sweet was ﬁnished to partake

of nuts, fruit, cheese and dessert wines. Satiated, the company could relax the level of

formality, allowing unforced discussion and reﬂection.

Eating fruit and small sweet items to ﬁnish a meal is a venerable European tradition. In

the Old French romance Perceval, the hero is given a magniﬁcent repast at the mysterious

Grail Castle. The author, Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 1135-ca. 1185), one of the outstanding

literary ﬁgures of the Middle Ages, assures the reader that what was presented was

worthy of any king or emperor, although the only meat speciﬁed is peppered haunch of

venison cooked in its fat. At the end of the repast, Perceval and his host remain at the

table to converse, consuming dates, ﬁgs, pears and pomegranates along with nutmegs

(probably cut up and sugared), and medicinal digestifs such as gingerbread, syrup of

camphor, and spiced sweet wines.

Pre-modern meals included a ﬁnal course referred to as the issue or “ﬁnish,” usually

pastries, custards and fruit. Cookbooks diﬀer as to what extent savoury dishes mingle

with sweet ones in this last service. While the sixteenth-century Le Livre fort excellent de

cuysine oﬀers almost exclusively fruit, sweets and cheeses to conclude the meal, the

menus in the late-fourteenth century Le Ménagier de Paris feature issues of eels, capon

pies and venison interspersed with ﬂans, pastries and sweet wafers.

Oﬀering sweet and

savoury dishes simultaneously seems alien to us, although it is still a feature of the more

elaborate sort of afternoon tea at which scones and cakes are served alongside cucumber

sandwiches and potted shrimp. It is also typical of elaborate brunch buﬀets.

4P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

The invention of the savoury is connected with changes in what comes after the main

courses. English dining innovations of the Victorian era included dividing the sweet from

a succeeding “dessert” of fruit and nuts; drinking coﬀee after the sweet and dessert or

with the dessert; and a cheese course that might appear in the French manner before the

sweet, or after the table was cleared. The word “dessert,” derived from the French

deservir, originally meant simply to clear the table. In English (as opposed to

American) usage, dessert means small items served after the main sweet course of

pastries, puddings and the like. In an etiquette and household book of 1737 entitled

The Whole Duty of Women or An Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex, dessert appears after the

table is “well cleared,” the top tablecloth removed along with the leather lying between

the upper and lower table cloth, leaving only the latter. On that are placed fruit and

“sweetmeats,” both dried and in glasses.

Alternatively, all coverings could be removed

for dessert in order to show oﬀ the mahogany table.

Coﬀee was introduced into Britain in the seventeenth century and coﬀeehouses

became fashionable places to read the papers, converse, and exchange news.

As is well-

known, the ﬁrst joint stock company, the ﬁrst insurance partnership, Lloyds, and the

learned Royal Society were formed in London coﬀeehouses. By the nineteenth century,

but not much earlier, coﬀee was served at the end of meals. In the United States it became

common for coﬀee to accompany the sweet course (“dessert” in American usage), but in

upper-class Britain, as on the continent, coﬀee came after both the sweet and the

(English) dessert.

Serving cheese is an additional way to extend the meal. In nineteenth-century France,

cheese accompanied fruits and compotes for dessert. Only in the twentieth century did it

start to appear with or after salad but always before the sweet course.

Cheese is the

principal ingredient of many savouries – cheese fritters, Welsh rarebit, various forms of

cheese on toast, cheese straws and macaroni with cheese.

Yet another nineteenth-century facet of meal prolongation was dessert wine, espe-

cially port. In the eighteenth century, port had been a strong red wine comparable to

Burgundy and drunk all day long. Dr. Johnson claimed that he usually polished oﬀ

three bottles of port a day and much preferred it to Bordeaux wines – “claret is the

liquor for boys; port for men.”

By the mid-nineteenth century, port had been

transformed into a fortiﬁed sweet wine. Instead of being imbibed throughout the

meal, it was now reserved for after dinner, accompanied by nuts and small sweet

items or cheese, particularly Stilton. There was some grumbling about serving cheese

with port; that anything more assertive than walnuts did not merit a rare vintage. If you

were not going to take the port seriously, then an ordinary, non-vintage “cheese port”

would suﬃce.

In Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, the villainous lawyer

Mr. Tulkinghorn orders a meal from a nearby restaurant to be served in his chambers.

After dinner, he goes down to a cellar below Lincoln’s Inn Fields and selects a ﬁfty-year

old bottle of port to enjoy while sitting by an open window, observing the swirling,

gritty fog that permeates the entire novel.

In more convivial settings, the conventional conclusion to dining in company was for

the women to leave the table about ten minutes after dessert was brought in, allowing the

men to drink port, smoke cigars and converse in an unconstrained manner. After

a further ﬁfteen or twenty minutes, the host would suggest getting up from the table to

join the ladies in the drawing room. Both parties might already have been served coﬀee,

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 5

but if not, it was brought to the reassembled company in the drawing room.

The

custom of ladies withdrawing did not meet with universal approbation, the female author

of one etiquette book referring to the “dreary interregnum” during which the women

aimlessly talk about children while the men drink their wine.

Cheese course, coﬀee, port . . . these early-nineteenth century novelties created if not

a logical place for the savoury course, at least a series of events opening the way for it. The

key development for all forms of extending the meal, however, is the transition from

French to Russian service.

The former has dishes set out on the table before diners sit

down; the latter is the succession of courses familiar to us now. French service provided

only two or three courses in the sense of clearing the table and beginning again, but each

course displayed a large number of dishes, while Russian service allowed for a dozen or

more separate courses oﬀered one after the other. The last of the total of two or three

courses according to the French plan included sweet and non-sweet items placed on the

table at the same time. By contrast, the long sequence of Russian service, allowed space

for one or more sweet presentations and at least the possibility of an additional and

concluding savoury course on its own.

Russian service is less dazzling in its initial impression and requires more dining-room

staﬀ than French. An advantage over French style is that the food is more likely to be hot

because it is brought out after everyone is seated and in many stages. Because dishes were

presented by servants, Russian service avoided the sometimes unseemly scramble for the

diﬀerent foods set out all over the table. French service was simultaneously ostentatious,

convivial and disorderly, appropriate for the habits of the ancien regime. Russian service

was suited to the hegemony of the upper bourgeoisie as it was decorous, almost

lugubriously so.

The innovation was supposedly brought to France by Russians military oﬃcers and

diplomats during the post-Napoleonic allied occupation of Paris. Whatever its actual

origins, the new style was slowly adopted between 1820 and 1870. The best-known

English cookbook of the late nineteenth century, that of Mrs. Beeton (ﬁrst published in

1861), oﬀered dozens of model dinners intended still to be presented à la française. For

the largest, set for 18, she even diagrams where on the table the food served for each of

three courses should be placed. Two exceptional meals are designated à la Russe, one for

July and one for November, each consisting of 14 courses.

A standard late-nineteenth century menu at a moderately luxurious level consisted of

multiple courses in the Russian fashion. It might begin with oysters followed by hors

d’oeuvres, soup, ﬁsh, a relevé (or “joint”), roast meat, entrées (meaning a dish of cut-up

meat or ﬁsh with sauce), a game-birds course (sometimes, confusingly, entitled “roast”),

and then sweet entremêts (as the sweet course was called) and ﬁnally dessert consisting of

nuts and fruit. Cold dishes might be inserted somewhere during the repast and a sorbet

might appear after the entrées to cleanse the palate. Given such a proliferation of

successive courses and dishes, a separate savoury was an inconspicuous addition.

Russian service merely facilitates the savoury, however, rather than being a direct

cause, given that while the Russian model became universally adopted in Europe, the

savoury course was an English oddity.

6P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

The Transitional Phase, 1840-1877

Insofar as there is a single reason for the invention of the savoury, it probably has to do

with dividing into separate courses what previously in the era of French service had been

combined as sweet and non-sweet entremêts. Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943),

owner of a renowned eponymous restaurant still in St. James, cogently observed in

a cookbook of savouries and hors d’oeuvres: “Formerly entremets included sweets and

puddings, but also vegetables and dishes with mushrooms, bacon or cheese as their

basis.”

In 1846, Charles Francatelli’s The Modern Cook gives dozens of bills of fare grouped by

month. Francatelli, an Englishman born of Italian parents, was chef at Crockford’s Club

and brieﬂy to the Queen. The menus present a conservative, modiﬁed French service with

only two designated courses, although with de facto sub-courses within them. The

entremêts for a typical summer meal juxtapose sweet dishes such as German apricot

tarts or almond gauﬀres ﬁlled with strawberries and cream with stuﬀed cucumbers and

darne of salmon with Montpellier butter. For December, a suggested menu lists Bavarian

raspberry cream and Florentines with greengage jam alongside mushroom croûtes. Here

and in some other model menus, Francatelli’s non-sweet entremêts are identical to the

savories of the future, but in other cases they are things like spinach, new potatoes or

scalloped crayﬁsh that could appear elsewhere in a meal.

For some of her model menus, Mrs. Beeton imagines a third course mingling pastries

and puddings with game, fondue and other savoury dishes. She followed the example of

Francatelli in organizing menus by the time of year. Thus, a February dinner for 18

concluded with wild ducks, plovers, fondue, but accompanied by Nesselrode pudding,

jellies, and the small cheese tarts known as “Maids of Honour.” The last course for

a March repast, again for 18, mingled ducklings, guinea fowls, lobster salad, meringues,

orange jelly and Charlotte à la Parisienne.

Since these meals were presented according

to French service, we can imagine that an individual diner might limit himself or herself

to one kind of concluding dish, partaking of either fondue or Nesselrode pudding, but

not both.

Francatelli and Beeton oﬀered theoretical menus with some indication of the nascent

savoury. In the 1850s, before Mrs. Beeton and just a few years after Francatelli’s cook-

book, Catherine Dickens, wife of the celebrated writer, published some answers to the

question posed by the title, What Shall We Have for Dinner?

Writing as “Lady

Clutterbuck,” Mrs. Dickens oﬀered bills of fare for company ranging from two to

eighteen. While these amount to the same kind of idealized menus proposed by

Francatelli and Beeton, one can assume that Catherine Dickens served real meals as

recorded here.

At one of her dinners for two or three people, the third and ﬁnal course consisted of

just one dish, which could be sweet (cold mince pies; raspberry jam sandwiches) or

savoury (bloaters, macaroni, toasted cheese with watercress). The great man was fond of

small sharp things like toasted cheese or macaroni with cheese, and his wife’s menus

reﬂect his tastes.

For four or more people, Catherine Dickens’s dinners might put

savouries alongside sweets, as was conventional, but she also sometimes separates them.

A dinner for six or seven concludes with cold lemon pudding and bloaters served

simultaneously. One for eight to ten people, however, distinguishes sweets (Devonshire

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 7

cream, raspberry and currant tart and cabinet pudding) from a ﬁnal course, a savoury of

dressed crab.

Whether accompanying dessert or served alone, there are 31 savories in

Mrs. Dickens menus, although they are never described or entitled as such.

Another early example of an actual meal with a ﬁnal savoury course is a dinner given

in 1862 by Benjamin Disraeli for the Emperor Napoleon III. Following the Francatelli

and Beeton pattern, the ﬁnal entremêts consisted of sweets such as cherry cake and a vol-

au-vent with raspberries and currants, but also lobster salad. Below this on the menu, in

an unnamed category by itself, were Talmouses au Parmesan (a talmouse is a pastry like

a turnover).

Perhaps an anticlimax, certainly unheralded, but here in 1862 the savoury

had arrived.

The Golden Age of Savouries

From 1870 to 1940, savouries were ubiquitous and expected for gracious meals. The

compendium of Mrs. de Salis can be taken to indicate, as she says in the introduction,

that savouries were by that time fashionable, distinct as a course, and went under that

name.

Not all gourmands approved of the savoury. George Augustus Sala, a proliﬁc journal-

ist, food writer and clubman, denounced savouries for spoiling the taste of dessert.

Writing in 1885 he exclaimed: “How on earth can you enjoy the exquisite ﬂavor of

peaches and grapes and pineapples, or good sound British apples, when your tongue has

only a minute or two previously been excited by cayenne pepper or curry power, or some

other condiment used in confecting these confounded savouries?” He traced the

unseemly vogue for savouries to the eighteenth-century libertine habit of eating deviled

bones and toast in order to stimulate the desire for more wine. For the current civilized

age, in which moderation prevails, savouries have no appropriate place. Nevertheless,

because they are so popular with his friends, Sala reluctantly served them as he was

unwilling to lay down rules that others were unlikely to obey.

Interestingly, Sala blames the fashion for savouries on women: “I know perfectly well,

however, that when a lady has made up her mind to anything, that the thing has got to be

done; and so I have carefully selected some recipes for savouries.”

Sala is almost alone in

attributing to women the desire for savouries as the consensus has always been that it is

a quintessentially male preference.

Seventy-ﬁve years later, Rupert Croft-Cooke was as mystiﬁed as Sala by the popularity

of the savoury. Under the pen name Leo Bruce, Croft-Cooke was the author of

a moderately popular series of mystery stories in the gentleman-detective tradition of

Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey.

Despite what one might infer from the title, his

English Cooking: A New Approach (1960) is a defense of traditional cuisine against the

degraded modern version of English food. The lamented regression dates as far back as

the heavy meals of the late Victorians, but has been accelerated by such twentieth-century

developments as the decline in domestic service, foreign travel, television, mass produc-

tion and science.

One might expect a writer with such a choleric, if humorous, take on postwar

barbarism to have been an advocate for the savoury as an endangered tradition, but,

in fact, Croft-Cooke considered it a folly. Against Mrs. Beeton’s assertion that such

dishes prepare the palate for the wines that come after dinner, Croft-Cooke notes that

8P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

on no account should port, sherry or Madeira be drunk after sampling piquant

ﬂavors.

During the years of the savoury’s popularity, such voices of dissent were ineﬀectively

crying in the wilderness. The individual savouries comprising the standard dossier did

not vary greatly once a certain ordering of canonical dishes was established by the 1880s.

It would be diﬃcult if not impossible to present a list of all the dishes placed at one time

or another under the savouries rubric. In 1877, Mrs. De Salis oﬀered 144 of them.

From

her recipes, however, one can categorize savouries according to what would become an

accepted taxonomy:

Cheese savouries (straws, ramekins, souﬄés)

Mushroom savouries (stuﬀed, au gratin, scallops)

Egg savouries (with curry, Parmesan, brown butter)

Shrimp and lobster savouries (gratins, creams)

Canapés and croûtes (anchovies, lobster, caviar, etc. served on fried or toasted bread)

By the opening of the Great War in 1914, savouries regularly appeared at formal

dinners, especially but by no means exclusively at clubs and other upper-class men’s

associations. Looking back from 1960, Rupert Croft-Cooke identiﬁed 15 “classic inter-

war” savouries:

Welsh rarebit

Scotch woodcock

Scrambled egg and anchovy

Soft herring roes (i.e. herring milt) on toast

Cheese fritters

Creamed prawns or haddock on toast

Anchovy toast

Minced kipper or bloater on toast

Mushrooms on toast

Macaroni cheese

Sardines on toast

Minced ham on toast

Cheese straws

Angels on horseback

Devils on horseback

As Croft-Coke was unenthusiastic about savouries, this list may represent more an

impression than careful consideration, but the repertoire is, nevertheless, compatible

with actual interwar compendia such as Boulestin and Adair’s Savouries and Hors

d’Oeuvre of 1932 and Dorothy Allhusen’s Unusual Savouries of 1935.

The latter, its

title notwithstanding, includes all the standard items as well as some creative ideas.

Savouries in Several Settings, 1870-1940

Savouries enjoyed a mild popularity in middle-class home cooking during the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The invaluable British Library newspaper data-

base shows that the word “savoury” was most often used simply to mean ﬂavorful, and

that even when a recipe was given for what was speciﬁed with an indeﬁnite article as

a savoury, it might be intended for tea or supper, as with a deviled ham savuory,

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 9

described in the Courier and Advertiser of Dundee as “a supper dish that is usually very

much appreciated by the menfolk.”

Haddock savoury is appropriate for supper or high

tea, according to the Press and Journal in Aberdeen during the war.

The true home of the savoury course was the upper-class male association. Dining at

private clubs and club-like institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges, City

livery companies and the London legal associations (Inns of Court) involved a range of

savouries that appealed to a largely or exclusively male membership.

London Clubs

Clustered around Pall Mall and St. James, the gentleman’s clubs reached the height of

their prestige from 1850 to 1914, the Victorian and Edwardian heyday of the British

Empire.

They were a cultural manifestation enabled by a powerful economy that

produced suﬃcient wealth for a substantial number of men to be exempt from working

at a paying job, or at least working very hard. Some of the oldest London clubs such as

Boodle’s, White’s and Brooks’s were aristocratic, but most clubs catered to urban gentle-

men rather than landed nobility.

From their beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a prime attraction

of clubs was that they oﬀered a sociable form of dining. Writing in 1866, the chronicler of

club life John Timbs quoted “our elegant essayist” [i.e. John Addison, writing in The

Spectator] as observing that “All celebrated clubs were founded upon eating and

drinking.”

The savoury course did not originate in the august West End clubs, but

found a stable place in these establishments, persisting beyond the time of its disappear-

ance from most other locales. In 1974, during the twilight of the savoury, Robin

McDouall in Clubland Cooking noted that “By tradition, clubs specialize in savouries”

such as Welsh rarebit, devils on horseback, angels on horseback, beignets soué (eggs and

Gruyère) and canapés Windsor (ham and mushrooms on toast-rounds).

McDouall was

Secretary of the Travelers Club, to this day an exclusively male association, and although

he did not speciﬁcally exclude women’s clubs, his assumption is that clubs are for men

and that their food is masculine.

Unenthusiastic about savouries, he regarded the

French custom of cheese before pudding as “more sensible,” but acknowledged that

any book about club food must have a chapter on savouries.

Clubs tend to be deliberately conservative, providing shelter from the demands of

modern life, from change in general and social change (including gastronomy) in

particular. As Anthony Lejeune observed:

A good club should be a refuge from the vulgarity of the outside

world, a reassuringly ﬁxed point, the echo of a more civilized

way of living, a place where . . . people still prefer a silver salt

cellar which doesn’t pour to a plastic one that does.

Similarly, Bernard Darwin remarked that “About clubs and their members there is

a static or immutable quality very soothing to the spirits.”

The survival of elegant dishes

such as game or savories, forgotten by the outside world, has provided similar assurance.

No one would claim that socially well-connected men represented the nation as

a whole, but club menus provide an accurate picture of elite dining and the durable, if

hardly immortal, forms of English taste. Clubs are more focused than restaurants on

a peculiar combination of ostentation and simplicity. Eschewing novelty, twentieth-

10 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

century favorites at Boodle’s, one of the most distinguished London clubs, read like

a catalog of almost comical upper-class taste: jugged hare, salmis of game, deviled

kidneys, curried beef, veal and ham pie, pheasant, grouse, woodcock, snipe and savouries

such as Welsh rarebit and beef marrow bones.

At clubs the halcyon days of the savoury began in the 1880s. Savage Club menus dating

from this decade show the beginning of the distinct savoury course. Founded in 1857 by

George Augustus Sala and his circle from the Crown Tavern in Drury Lane, the Savage

Club was popular with artists, writers and other self-identiﬁed “Bohemians.”

The club

moved around until 1888 when it established itself in Adelphi Terrace and embraced

haut bourgeois norms. For a meal in 1882, the second-to-last course of mixed entremêts

consisted of sweets: Maraschino jelly, vanilla cream, and apricot glacé, and savouries:

cheese straws and mushrooms à la Bordelaise. The very last service was of ices (crême au

café and eau d’orange). Two menus from 1888, however, specify a separate savoury

course: macaroni au gratin and anchovy toast, in both cases followed by what amounts

to a second savoury, cheese and celery. Anchovy toast followed by cheese and celery also

concludes an 1889 meal and another dinner from that same year ends with deviled

sardines on toast followed by cheese and salad.

From the 1890s to 1939, interrupted only by the stringencies of the Great War,

savouries were routine at London clubs. A savoury is included on almost every one of

300 menu cards for the Atheneum Club between 1891 and 1913. Although it had

a reputation for serving mediocre food, perhaps because its members were disproportio-

nately intellectuals who might be thought to be indiﬀerent to gastronomy, the Atheneum

oﬀered elaborate meals that look quite distinguished, at least on paper. For the period

1891 to 1897 there are forty menus with twenty-two diﬀerent savouries, including soft

roes on toast, cheese ramequins and several diﬀerent foie gras preparations. Fifty meals

are recorded on menu cards from 1904 to 1905 and among the ten kinds of savouries

mentioned, the most commonly served were croûtes à la Baron (beef marrow, grilled

mushrooms and bacon), and Parmesan cheese straws. For ﬁfty meals described from

1911 to 1913, the most common savories are croûtes à la Baron and barquettes à la Julie

(barquettes are boat-shaped pastry shells).

Unlike the Atheneum, the Reform Club, with its politically powerful members, was

famous for its gastronomic ﬁnesse, the legacy of its chef Alexis Soyer, who during the

early Victorian period, was (it is not too anachronistic to say) a celebrity. A run of 312

menus collected in scrapbooks gives a thorough impression of dining at the Reform Club

from 1904 to 1932.

Of the 132 menus in the ﬁrst series, 1904–1924, 130 include

savouries. In a second scrapbook, which runs from 1925–1932, approximately two-

thirds of the dinners recorded involved a savoury course. As is usual, the surviving

menus are all from special occasions, no one thinking it worthwhile to save menus for

ordinary meals served in the club “coﬀee room” (dining room). The occasions, however,

are generally not all that special – private dinners hosted by members rather than

elaborate celebrations.

A striking feature of the early-twentieth century Reform Club menus is how many

diﬀerent kinds of croûtes (savouries on toast) they display. No less than 46 species

appear, of which only a few, such as ﬁllet de kipper sur croûte or croûte Ivanhoe are

recognizable. The list reads like an exotic catalog, beﬁtting an artisanal perfume company

or an old-fashioned custom pipe tobacco blender. What were croûtes like Lyric,

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 11

Hongroise (with paprika?), Nizam (curried?), or Twickenham? An appendix to this

article gives the complete list.

The Garrick Club did not attempt so many variations on a theme, but did have the

distinction of elaborating its own “Garrick Savoury” which ﬁrst appears in 1905 in

a volume recording special dinners in honor of various notables. Parmesan straws, cheese

ramekins and smoked salmon canapés were also common.

A dinner given for the Lord

Chancellor in 1915 ended with cheese straws. Pace Croft-Cooke, here port was served

simultaneously with the savoury and before coﬀee.

Cheese savories seem to have been

favored at the Garrick, as with cheese tartlets, served after plum pudding at a 1923 dinner.

Exceptions include caviar in 1880 and herring on toast in 1890.

Oxford and Cambridge Colleges

The two ancient English universities are agglomerations of distinct colleges founded at

diﬀerent times from the thirteenth century on. These are not only residential units, but

also autonomous societies of faculty and students. Only in the second half of the nine-

teenth century were women’s colleges established, and it was not until 1949 that women

were given access to the previously all-male foundations. Today, not as many faculty

actually live in the colleges as in the past – fellows were not allowed to marry until well

into the nineteenth century – but they still take dinner in elegant and imposing settings.

Even the most distinguished colleges were not immune to the vicissitudes of English

cooking, including war and postwar rationing and the prevalence of rather unimaginative

meat and pudding dishes. The older colleges have always had remarkable wine cellars,

buying clarets and ports when they were young and inexpensive and keeping them in

good conditions for decades. Economic circumstances permitting, the food was lavish,

especially during feasts which marked traditional holidays but also speciﬁc commemora-

tion of donors or meals for alumni at a “gaudy,” or similar celebration accompanying

what in the United States would be called a reunion.

All Souls College, Oxford, is among the most privileged of the Oxbridge institutions.

The fellows are fully engaged in research and as there are no undergraduates, dinners are

exclusively for faculty and guests. The nature of the meal and number of courses has

varied according to how many fellows were dining on any given evening. The college’s

“menu books” survive in considerable number from 1875 on and it is possible to obtain

from them an idea of what was served at ordinary dinners as opposed to special

celebrations. The savoury as a separate course seems to have been ﬁrmly entrenched at

All Souls by 1880. Most of the dinners recorded from September 29 to October 10 in an

undated menu book (from the 1870s or 1880s) conclude with bloaters, a “savoury

omelette” or haddock.

St. John’s College, Cambridge, shows a similar picture of frequent but not required

savoury courses. Here as elsewhere, the menu cards are mostly for festive dinners. Both

a Commemoration lunch and dinner on May 6, 1886 ﬁnished with a savoury course of

herring (araingée de mer), and additionally at the dinner, a second savoury of plovers

eggs with shrimp.

It was a tradition to provide swan at solemn occasions, St. John’s

being the only institution besides the royal family allowed this privilege.

An elaborate

dinner just after Christmas in 1894 included cygnets with port sauce as a sixth course

(along with foie gras in aspic), followed by three sweets, and then a savoury of smoked

12 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

hake croûtes, and ﬁnally dessert. A 1901 dinner given by an alumni association (the

“Johnian Society”) presented nine courses, including sweet and dessert, but rather than

a savoury, the intervening course was cheese and salad. An “Irish Dinner” in 1906,

whose only Irish culinary element seems to be a Pouding à la St. Patrick, presented

Gruyère à la Pluton between the sweets and dessert.

Savoury course oﬀerings con-

tinued during the interwar period. At St. John’s we ﬁnd tuna à la Tosca in 1922, bonne

bouchés of lobster at a Johnian’s dinner in 1933, and caviar bonne bouchés at a regular

dinner that same year.

The fellows of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, seem to have been particularly

fond of savouries.

Most of the surviving menus are for feasts such as an annual dinner

in commemorating Stephen Perse (1548–1615), a benefactor of the College, or for

boating club events. A Boat Club Fours dinner in 1895 included Chantilly à la

Macédonie (fruit with whipped cream) followed by codﬁsh croûtes and then vanilla ice

cream. The dinner in June 1898 commemorating the 500

anniversary of the foundation,

oﬀered nothing, however, between a sweet of iced Nesselrode pudding and dessert.

A savoury of Parmesan cheese beignets comes after both sweet and dessert at

a celebratory dinner in 1900. The Perse Feast for 1911 ﬁnished with a spectacular

alternation of sweets and savouries: plum pudding with Camperdown sauce (brandy

butter, essentially), creamed chestnut purée, iced strawberry souﬄé, and then eggs stuﬀed

with brains, raspberry ice with pistachio sauce, and ﬁnally smoked salmon.

There seems to have been no let up at Caius during the interwar period: anchovies in

puﬀ pastry in 1923, ﬁsh toasts at the 1924 Annual Gathering, and Parmesan cheese straws

for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society dinner in 1930. The latter is interesting because,

unlike most festive dinners, the menu is relatively simple with only four courses before

the savoury.

Christ Church College, Oxford, has kept dinner menus for Gaudy celebrations from

1891 to the present.

The end of term Gaudy dinners almost always included a savoury

course: canapés à la Minime in 1891, anchovies with cream in 1897, Russian toast in 1907,

Parmesan cheese straws in 1919, and mushroom toast in 1927.

Finally, Trinity College, Cambridge, which has the distinction of preserving the largest

number of menus from any of the college archives we have examined, and many of them,

as with All Souls, for routine Hall dinners rather than special occasions. The Trinity

menus are particularly numerous for the decades between 1890 and 1930, replete with

what are by now mostly familiar savoury types: croûtes, canapés, Parmesan straws and

various cheese creations. The composition of croûtes à l’Alma Mater served in 1891 is

unknown to us, alas.

Livery Companies

Although in general the menus of the City of London livery companies resemble those of

other elite male associations, their treatment of the savoury is distinct as it appears less

frequently as a separate course and is more persistently incorporated into a single service

of entremêts that includes the usual sweets. Livery companies are the descendants of the

medieval guilds, association of crafts such as tailors and goldsmiths and retailers such as

ﬁshmongers and grocers. A few are still in charge of credentialing and training, but

especially for obsolete trades such as ﬂetchers (arrow-makers) or loriners (makers of

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 13

horse bridles, bits and spurs), they are social and charitable organizations. The loriners,

for example, are dedicated to the welfare of horses. Membership confers and proves high

social and professional status.

As part of their corporate life, livery companies for centuries have held large banquets

several times a year. These take place either at the Company’s hall, or for the less

privileged groups with no buildings of their own, at the premises of another. The only

halls to have survived both the Great Fire of 1666 and the German bombardment of

London in 1940–1944 are a portion of the Merchant Taylors’ ediﬁce and part of the

Apothecaries’. The large company dinners are catered events since unlike the other

institutions being discussed, the livery companies do not provide dining facilities for

ordinary days. Nevertheless, the menus for their catered dinners, which feature the full

members (livery) and guests, or smaller aﬀairs for the “court” (the inner circle; what

might be considered a board of directors), have features similar to those of clubs and

colleges, including furnishing savouries.

Livery companies were exclusively male societies until quite recently. As far back as

the late Middle Ages, there were occasional female associates who had inherited their

husband’s or father’s business, but the full participation of women only dates from the

last quarter of the twentieth century or the start of this one. 2005 is the date when women

were ﬁrst admitted to the livery of the Barbers’ Company, for example. A feature of the

cycle of company dinners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the Ladies’

Banquet to which wives of members of the livery were invited. In some cases, as with the

Loriners’ Company, the Ladies’ Banquet menus lack savouries while those for the court

or livery do present them. For the Stationers’ Company in the 1890s, however, all

dinners, including those for the ladies, involved a savoury course.

There are currently over 100 “worshipful companies,” as they are known, of which

twelve constitute an ancient prominent category.

Internally, they retain the pre-

modern hierarchy of freemen (roughly corresponding to apprentices), full members

of the livery, and an inner circle forming the Court of Assistants with a Master or

Warden at its head. Grand dinners are given for the election of new members of the

livery, for current members and for the Court. The preservation of menus is

haphazard, but for the companies whose records we have examined, they are fairly

numerous. The larger companies with their own buildings usually retain their

archives while others have deposited their records with the central London

Guildhall Library.

The Worshipful Company of Loriners has the most complete run of menus, from 1901

to 2005.

Not possessing a dining hall, they held their dinners at De Keyser’s Royal Hotel

restaurant until 1919 and then at Butchers’, Carpenters’ and Grocers’ Halls, and in the

1950s at Mansion House, the residence of the Lord Mayor of London. In the 1960s they

were hosted by the Vintners. The savouries served at the Loriner dinners were fairly

standard – roes on toast, croûtes and canapés, angels on horseback. Through the 1960s,

dinners almost always included a savoury. After 1970, the last course was converted to

cheese.

For the Goldsmiths and Clothworkers, we possess a substantial number of menus

from the second half of the nineteenth century that show the persistence of serving sweet

and savoury entremêts together. Thus, a Clothworkers’ dinner at Mansion House in 1884

oﬀered an entremêt course of seven sweet dishes along with deviled sardines, followed by

14 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

dessert. At the Company’s hall in 1875, terrine de foie gras accompanied seven sweets for

a course labeled entremêts and then a ﬁnal “remove” of Nesselrode pudding, iced souﬄés,

caviar and cheese fondue.

Occasionally in the years before the Great War, a savoury was

served at Clothworker dinners in what was becoming standard form, as a course by itself

between the sweet and dessert. For a dinner given to the Court and “friends” on May 6,

1896, croûtes à la moderne came after a ﬁnal remove of iced souﬄés, but the entremêts

that preceded them still featured plovers’ eggs along with fruit salad and cream, Maids of

Honor, and Maraschino jelly.

The quirky standard pattern for this Company, however,

was to have two ﬁnal courses of sweets, both with some savouries thrown in.

The Goldsmiths eschewed the separate savoury course even more ﬁrmly. A court

dinner on February 16, 1887 included entremêts of cream timbales, pineapple jellies, puit

d’amour à la Française (round pastry with a hollowed out stuﬀed center), and turban de

pêches à la crême (turban-shaped pastry with peaches and whipped cream). This was

succeeded by removes consisting of chocolate bombe, biscuits glazed with maraschino

liqueur, and Astrakhan caviar.

Even after 1918, the savoury does not seem well-

established for the Goldsmiths, although this is partly due to the scant materials dating

from the 1920s. A Goldsmith’s dinner in 1937 and an “amity dinner” combining

Goldsmiths and Fishmongers in 1938 have deviled chicken livers and chicken liver

brochettes respectively as stand-alone courses.

The Carpenters’ Company, like the Loriners’, has a long series of menus, beginning in

1903, but with a gap from 1939 to 1971.

The Carpenters’ dinners for the interwar period

routinely included savouries.

Inns of Court

A ﬁnal category of private societies that functioned until recently as male clubs is

constituted by the four Inns of Court, set up to train barristers and dating from the late

Middle Ages. England has two kinds of lawyers: solicitors and barristers. The former

deal with civil matters such as contracts and wills. Traditionally a solicitor collaborated

with (“instructed”) a barrister but once a matter reached the point of an impending

trial, only a barrister could appear to advocate for a client in court. The London Inns

of Court train all aspiring barristers for England and Wales, and barristers resident in

London sometimes still have their oﬃces (chambers) in buildings forming part of the

Inns’ grounds. Recent years have seen a loosening of the guild-like role of the Inns of

Court so that students earn some of their credentials elsewhere and the rites of

communal fellowship, including dinners, are no longer as important as they once

were.

Each of the four Inns of Court – Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, Middle Temple and Inner

Temple – forms what amounts to a campus with a chapel, dining hall, library and other

appurtenances, resembling an Oxford or Cambridge college without bedrooms. Students

dine with barristers and they are required to partake of a certain number of dinners in

Hall. Such occasions are considered important instruments of socialization because

barristers can act alternately for the prosecution and the defense and members of the

same Inns of Court will not infrequently oppose each other. Dining together creates

a common professional bond that is supposed to outweigh the circumstances of any

single trial.

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 15

Communal dining requirements have been substantially whittled down since 2000,

but nevertheless still stand as a mark of a learned fellowship. The dining halls are grand

neo-Gothic spaces modeled on Oxford and Cambridge colleges. As with the other

societies we have looked at, the surviving menus are mostly for particularly festive

dinners such as “Grand Days” described on a recent Inner Temple menu as “the most

prestigious event of the Inn’s calendar that requires White Tie and Decorations or Court

Dress.

The library, hall and treasury of the Inner Temple were demolished by German bombs

in 1941. The archive survived and its Grand Day menus go back to 1850. The menu for

that ﬁrst dinner, served à la française, is unusual in that it illustrates the placement of

dishes.

For the second course, for example, haunch of venison was put at the top,

bottom and middle of the table; two baskets each of plovers’ eggs, crayﬁsh, and prawns

were at either side of the table. The third service did not have any repeats but rather 19

separate plates. Sweet as well as savoury entremêts were placed near each diner so that

those at the bottom right-hand side could reach for glazed ham, turkey poults (young

turkeys) or chicken mayonnaise in aspic, but also meringues and nougat. In 1924 this by-

now old-fashioned mixture of ﬁnal courses was repeated at a dinner given for visitors

from the American Bar Association, cold lobster à la Muscovite along with bombe glacé à

la Comtesse Marie.

During the interwar years, Inner Temple dinners routinely included

sweet, savoury and dessert. After the restrictions of wartime and postwar, again in the

1950s and 1960s savouries were common, but seem to have gone out of fashion in the

1970s.

For Lincoln’s Inn, only fourteen menus have been retained, all from the early

twentieth century. Among this small number is an unusual menu for a routine dinner,

February 22, 1922, for which ham croûte was the savoury.

Croûtes of various sorts seem

to have been common, though delices de Camembert appears in 1909 and 1910. One

would like to know what was “croûte Lincoln’s Inn” which is mentioned only once, in

1925.

Restaurants

England was slow to develop a restaurant culture. During the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth

century, there were hundreds of places to consume food, but they had limited oﬀerings

and were not particularly elegant. The Epicure’s Almanack, published in 1815, lists about

650 locations to eat and drink in greater London: taverns, chop-houses, cook-shops, for

example.

Their menus were on the order of one reproduced in the Almanack for the

Telegraph Eating House near Leadenhall Market which features rump steak, boiled beef,

roast mutton, veal and pork, giblet soup and mock turtle soup.

While noble families and West End Clubs incorporated many attributes of French

cuisine and service, only in 1865 with the opening of the Café Royal on Regent Street was

there a public restaurant with a high level of cuisine and style to rival Paris or New York.

By the opening of the twentieth century, London ﬁnally had an array of restaurants, many

of them fancy in a raﬃsh way, appealing to a cosmopolitan, Bohemian element of the

monied sort – artists, writers, journalists and other habitués of nightlife.

Restaurants

responded to a louche acceptance of men entertaining women they were not, in fact,

married to. Restaurants were both more democratic and more ostentatious than clubs,

16 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

and their proliferation was seen as having something to do with a perceived decline of

club life.

One observer in 1909 lamented that men no longer dine at their clubs – “they

go out with their wives, or with the wives of others, to partake of the Restaurant Dinner.”

A more optimistic opinion held that the competition from restaurants had improved the

food served at clubs.

During the zenith of savories, when they were served routinely at clubs and formed

a regular feature of dinners at home, restaurants were less consistently enthusiastic and

diners did not consider the savoury necessary. Ordinary menus do not describe what

customers actually ordered, nevertheless, by 1900 a group of savouries is commonly listed

on restaurant bills of fare and features often in set dinners. The John Johnson Collection

at the Bodleian Library has a fairly extensive collection of late-nineteenth and early-

twentieth century restaurant menus. There are no savouries on two menus for the Savoy

Hotel (1896, 1897) nor for the Ritz (1911, 1914). These famed hotel restaurants, run by

Caesar Ritz and Auguste Escoﬃer, followed the French model. The Savoy menus have

a dessert course of fruit while the Ritz concludes with patisserie, but neither has any hint

of a savoury.

The fashionable but less ﬁrmly Francophile Café Royal replicated private, club and

college menus in presenting savouries as a recognizable although unnamed category.

Under the heading of entremêts in a 1900 bill of fare, we ﬁnd puddings, meringues,

souﬄés and compote, and these are followed by fromages, listing nine kinds of cheese.

Below a line but without a separate heading are seven de facto savories, rendered in

a combination of English and French

Ivanhoe Toast

Petit Canapé à la Café Royal

Fondues au Parmesan

Canapé Mirabeau

Souﬄé Fromage

Champignons et Moëlle sur Toast (mushrooms and marrow on toast)

Laitance sur Toast (soft roes on toast)

The Hotel Cecil in 1898 oﬀered entremêts and then ice creams. Savories followed

under the heading “Bonnes-Bouches,” all but one being canapés

Canapé de Jambon à l’Indienne (ham, probably with curry and chutney)

Canapé Cecil (the hotel’s specialty)

Canapé Mirabeau

Canapé Ivanhoe

Canapé Diane

Canapé Bressanne

Canapé de crevettes au curry

Tartelette à la Moëlle (marrow tartelette)

Canapé de Caviar

Very useful in evaluating actual meals, as opposed to menu listings, is a guide to

London restaurants put out in 1899 and 1901 by Lieutenant-Colonel Nathaniel

Newnham-Davis. The second edition of 1901 describes dinners at 44 restaurants,

including a Jewish establishment and several raﬃsh eateries in Soho, but mostly

elegant restaurants and hotel dining rooms. The Colonel, usually accompanied by

a female companion, describes each meal, gives his opinion on the courses, often

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 17

consults with the maître d’hôtel and sometimes provides recipes furnished by the

chefs, including Escoﬃer himself for the Ritz and Carlton. Newnham-Davis never

explicitly mentions savouries in his texts. Only nine of his restaurant dinners include

a savoury; most end with a sweet, dessert or “friandises.” At Prince’s Hall in

Piccadilly a hypothetical elaborate dinner (not the more modest one actually con-

sumed by Newnham-Davis) would ﬁnish with an ice (“La glace Leda”), a basket of

friandises, canapés Diane, and dessert. Soft roes as a souﬄé were featured savories at

Verrey’s in Regent Street and on toast at Dieudonné’s on Ryder Street, St. James. The

Cecil oﬀered canapé Juliette, The Berkeley Hotel, croustade Victoria, the East Room

of the Criterion near Piccadilly Circus diablotins à la Joinville, the Walsingham

House, also in Piccadilly, a paprika souﬄé, and the Freemason’s Tavern lists cheese

fondue.

Another dossier of real restaurant meals is oﬀered by records of a group of twelve

gentlemen who formed “The Seasons’ Club” in 1885. This was a dining society, a club

within a club, as all its members already belonged to the Garrick Club.

The twelve

Seasons’ Club men took the signs of the zodiac as their sobriquets and in the minutes of

the society they are referred to as Capricorn, Gemini, Virgo etc. Occasionally they had

their dinners at the Garrick, but more often at a restaurant in London or its environs. The

minutes of the association record dinners from 1885 to 1903.

The Seasons’ Club dinners show a range of conclusions to the meal similar to

what Newnham-Davis presents. For a dinner at the Garrick toward the end of 1885,

a roast course of pheasant was followed by entremêts: a macedonia of fruit and

lobster au gratin. In early 1886 at the Café Royal, a nine-course meal was more

drawn out: the roast (woodcock), salad, two sweets (fruit timbales with Kirsch and

vanilla soués glacis), cheese and dessert. Most common at restaurants was

a concluding sweet course that might or might not include a non-sweet item,

followed by dessert. A savoury was included at the Tilbury Hotel in Essex where

the Seasons’ company in 1887 partook of a modest sweet course of Champagne jelly

followed by ham toasts, deviled sardines and then dessert. A year later, at the Royal

Forest Hotel in Epping Forest, Champagne jelly was accompanied by fruit tarts and

fancy pastry and then dessert was laid without any intervening savoury. Cheese and

salad came between the sweet and dessert at the Sun Hotel, Kingston-on-Thames, in

the summer of 1888, but at the Café Royal that autumn, chocolate mousse was

succeeded by soft roes on toast and cheese before the concluding dessert. Savouries

were therefore well-represented at the Seasons’ Club dinners – ham, mushrooms or

smoked salmon on toast, deviled herring roes, chicken livers – but not inevitable.

Postwar Revival

Here we enter the post-classical period in the history of the savoury. Tragedy at Law,

a murder mystery by Cyril Hare, takes place in late 1939 during the so-called “phony war,”

before the German Blitzkrieg rolled over Europe. What is described as a “substantial” four-

course lunch ends with a savoury.

War rationing put an end to most luxury dining and

with limitations on how many courses could be served, the savoury was virtually elimi-

nated. Exceptionally, boat race dinners at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, included

savories between 1941 and 1945 – egg and anchovy croûtes, egg and kipper croûtes and

18 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

stuﬀed tomatoes are some examples.

At the National Liberal Club, an inner group

formed at the beginning of 1941 during the German aerial bombardment of London

called themselves the “Dog and Duck Circle” and managed a canapé Yorkshire to

conclude their second dinner in February, 1941. Their tenth dinner in December 1941,

oﬀered a ﬁnal-course choice of (unspeciﬁed) sweet or savoury. The Circle continued to

meet after the war ended and savouries were revived beginning in 1951.

It would be logical for the savoury to have persisted during the war as a consolation for

eliminating the sweet course because sugar was stringently controlled. There is no real

evidence that this actually happened, however, except for the clear intention demon-

strated at the visit to St. Catharine’s in October, 1940, of Lord Woolton, the powerful and

energetic Minister for Food. Luncheon was supposed to show how hitherto unexploited

food resources might be mobilized. Whale casserole was served because whale meat was

a by-product of the already-established whale-oil industry. Root forage crops were made

into a vegetable curry, and a sauté of kidney and blood similarly constituted an under-

utilized, theoretically edible option. According to an account of the meal, the reason for

oﬀering a savoury of Scotch woodcock, using powdered eggs, was to suggest alternatives

to the sweet course in order to avoid using sugar.

Another demonstration meal, this time showing oﬀ dehydrated ingredients, was

provided at King’s College, Cambridge in 1943 by the chairman of the Food

Investigation Board. According to a report in the Scottish newspaper, the Dundee

Courier and Advertiser, the meal consisted of shepherd’s pie with gravy made from

dehydrated meat, accompanied by vegetables (potatoes, carrots, cabbage), followed by

stewed reconstituted fruit with custard, and a savoury of dehydrated kipper on toast. As

with Lord Woolton’s lunch, the sweet was sacriﬁced because sugar was severely

rationed.

Slow recovery from the devastation of war and the end of American Lend-Lease

subsidies meant that the food situation in the late 1940s was even worse than during

the war itself.

100

At the end of 1945, the only meat available in the House of Commons

dining room was whale or seal steak, “both disgusting” according Aidan Crawley, a Labor

MP. In 1947, even potatoes, bread and dried eggs were on the ration.

101

We have seen almost no examples of savouries served between 1945 and 1950. Almost

none – an exception is a St. Catharine’s College Commemoration Dinner (in honor of

past benefactors) on November 25, 1946 consisting of clear turtle soup, lobster mayon-

naise, roast pheasant (with chipped potatoes and cauliﬂower), a savarin of raspberries,

and croûte Bana (made with bananas?). From 1947–1949 no savouries are listed for this

annual event. In 1950, cheese straws made an appearance, and savouries were served

regularly through the 1960s.

102

The Jesus College (Cambridge) Boat Club also managed

to provide a savoury for its race dinners both during and after the war: from sardines à la

Parmesan in 1941 to hake croûtes and sardine beignets in 1946.

103

The livery companies restored savories in the early 1950s, so, for example, the

Goldsmiths’ Livery Dinner in March, 1952, ended with Croûtes rajah (ham purée with

curry, covered with chutney) and the savoury became common over the course of the

1950s. At least two-thirds of Goldsmiths’ livery and court dinners from 1951–1959

include a savoury, most often devils on horseback.

104

The Barbers’ Company was late in adopting the savoury course. Its nineteenth-century

menus have only sweet dishes at the end of the meal and this continued up to the mid-

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 19

twentieth century. The ﬁrst savouries served at Barbers’ Company aﬀairs seem to date

from 1960, just when they were starting to fade from many other institutions. On that

occasion, angels on horseback closed out a dinner. Most of the 1960s savouries were

cheese souﬄés and small quiches Lorraines. After a meal in 1970 that concluded with

quiche, the savoury went out of fashion, partially replaced by Stilton and celery.

105

The clubs too experienced a slow recuperation after the war. Even Boodle’s, one of the

most distinguished London clubs, was not immune from privation. Chef Victor

Ceserani, second chef and then head chef at Boodle’s from 1946 to 1950, recalled

donations of game and ﬁsh made by generous club members with extensive country

properties. On the premises the resourceful kitchen staﬀ learned to smoke salmon of up

to 14 lbs. and cut up venison carcasses, marinating the haunches in red wine and frying or

grilling the steaks. During a particularly diﬃcult period for procuring food, Ceserani

accepted a beaver on oﬀer from one of his meat suppliers. Pot-roasted and stuﬀed with

herbs and onions, it was presented at luncheon. Two members ate it without comment,

one rejected it angrily, preferring an “escalope” he assumed was veal but was in fact

thawed imported rabbit. The leftover beaver was minced and made into rissoles for the

staﬀ.

106

Elaborate dinners had been restored at Boodles by 1949, perhaps without very much in

the way of meat, but consisting of many courses, plenty of ﬁsh and such typical pre-war

hors d’oeuvres as gulls’ eggs, cod’s roe and potted shrimps. Savouries were once again

routine and included deviled soft roes, Scotch woodcock, anchovies on toast, and Madras

tartelettes.

107

By the late 1950s, however, savouries seem to have become less common at

this particular club. Occasionally egg savouries, deviled kidneys, marrow bones or Welsh

rarebit made cameo appearances, but even at the dinner in 1962 commemorating the

200

anniversary of the club, nothing was served after vanilla ice bombe with hot cherry

sauce. There were cheese straws, but they accompanied the soup.

108

Menus for festive dinners at Christ Church, Oxford, show a longer postwar persistence

of the savoury than at Boodle’s, at least for grand dinners such as Gaudies or the annual

Censer’s dinner (the oﬃce of censer resembling that of a dean elsewhere). The 1946

Gaudy was, not surprisingly, meager – clear turtle soup, roast chicken with peas and new

potatoes, meringues with whipped cream – but there was also a savoury of small salmon

pastries. For 1947 the menu lists a tomato hors d’oeuvre and a ﬁsh course of salmon trout

meunière in addition to more-or-less the same turtle soup, chicken and meringue lineup.

The savoury was mushroom croûtes. The 1953 Gaudy was marked by six courses,

including salmon and saddle of mutton, ending with fried Parmesan pastries (aigrettes

de Parmesan). Thereafter Censer’s dinners and Gaudies include savouries such as mush-

room croûtes, cauliﬂower au gratin, tartines and cassolettes. The savoury seems to have

faded away in the mid-1970s. Christ Church attempted unsuccessfully to revive the

course in the late 1980s.

109

The Queen’s 2003 Jubilee was marked with an elaborate

sweet that combined mint mousse with cherries Jubilee, but no savoury.

110

As with Christ Church, Hertford College, Oxford, was consistent in oﬀering savouries

on its Gaudy menus until the late 1970s. From 1950 until 1973, champignons Bordelaise

was nearly required as a savoury for the Gaudy dinners (most often following fraises

Romaines or gâteau Hertford). A range of savouries, however, typiﬁed normal dinners,

including various croûtes, deviled lobster, cheese items, and something referred to as

“gondolas of haddock.”

111

20 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

Post-Postwar

In Muriel Spark’s novel A Far Cry from Kensington, the narrator Mrs. Hawkins recalls at

some distance her life in 1954, including a dinner at the Savoy concluding with “those

small oblongs of toast with oysters, anchovies and other involvements, called angels on

horseback, which were then more commonly served at the end of a meal than they are

now.”

112

The point of inﬂection between “then” and “now” was the 1960s. Outside the

conservative milieux of clubs and colleges, the savoury started its eclipse during this

decade. It crops up in various times and places – served on the Mauretania, one of the

great Cunard ocean-liners, in 1962; at the Ivy restaurant in the 1960s, at the Hawes Inn

near Edinburgh in the late 1960s, and at the Hotel Miramar in Bournemouth in the early

1970s.

113

What ended the era of the savoury was not postwar dearth but rather overall prosper-

ity and the internationalization of British eating preferences beginning in the late-1950s.

In the decades after 1960, sophisticated dining was Continental, particularly

Mediterranean. Elizabeth David, author of several inﬂuential Mediterranean cookbooks,

oﬀered a brightly sunlit world of fresh, light and seasonal joie de vivre and she vigorously

opposed what was regarded as indigestible British food that combined frugal artiﬁciality

with excessive meat, fat and sugar. The fact that the food of the Age of Austerity

(1945–1953) had been skimpy and stodgy, and the slowness of the economic recovery

meant that what was eaten in the UK tout court became to be identiﬁed permanently with

canned soup, frozen gâteau, dollops of Marmite or HP Sauce, and by cheery but not very

inviting terms such as “fry up.” Culinary mediocrity imposed by indiﬀerence, forgetful-

ness and tasteless aﬄuence rather than by penury was what writers such as Croft-Cooke

aimed to combat by restoring the real food traditions of Britain. In addition to Croft-

Cooke’s English Cooking: A New Approach, an American writer Audrey Alley Gorton

wrote, also in 1960, a book with the spirited title In Defense of British Cooking. Unlike

Croft-Cooke, she was quite happy with savouries, considering them perfectly appropriate

for her campaign and she provided recipes for 13 classic savouries, from caviar pancakes

to cod’s roe on toast.

114

A few institutions either retained or successfully revived the savoury course in the

twenty-ﬁrst century. Menus for the Carpenter’s Company end in 1939 but appear again

in the archives beginning in 1971. They show that savouries were common until some-

time the mid-1980s. They still occasionally turn up, though strangely enough before

rather than after the sweet: wild mushroom tartlet for a 2015 Livery Dinner, Scotch

woodcock for another Livery dinner three years later.

115

The celebrated London restau-

rant St. John always has Welsh rarebit on its menu, listed speciﬁcally as a savoury.

Wilton’s, a venerable seafood restaurant, lists ﬁve savouries (and suggests a claret or

Burgundy to go with them).

116

Among colleges, St. John’s, Cambridge, has resisted the decline of savouries more

successfully than most. A May 26, 1995 routine dinner was quite simple – onion soup,

emincé of venison with new potatoes and carrots, and steeped fruits in a jar with natural

yogurt, with devils on horseback to conclude. St. John’s still serves savouries approxi-

mately once a week. Recently ordinary dinners have included devils on horseback, canapé

Cadogan (oysters and spinach with sauce Mornay), canapé Ivanhoe (puréed haddock and

mushroom) and Welsh rarebit.

117

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 21

Magdalene College, Cambridge is not quite as devoted to savouries at ordinary dinner

as St. John’s, but its regular feasts in honor of St. Mary Magdalene show an extraordinary

consistency in the presence of a savoury course from 1946 to the present.

118

St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, favorite savouries include buck rarebit (Welsh rarebit

with a fried egg, in this case quail eggs are used), smoked haddock and mushroom

croustade and Galmorgan sausage, a vegetarian sausage involving cheese, leeks and

breadcrumbs.

119

London clubs such as White’s and the Oxford and Cambridge Club oﬀer at least

occasional croûtes, canapés, Scotch woodcock, angels and devils on horseback and Welsh

rarebit.

120

The Oxford and Cambridge Club menu, however, ﬁnds it necessary to explain

what goes into the savouries so they are not assumed to be completely familiar items. The

National Liberal Club menu still lists Welsh rarebit and Scotch woodcock along with

a cheese selection under the heading of savouries.

121

Perhaps the Company of Brewers, one of the London livery companies, is the most

constant upholder of the savoury. While its archives do not preserve many early menus,

there are over 30 menus for important dinners between 1994 and 2019 that feature

various canapés, rarebit and devils on horseback.

122

As demonstrated by the institutions just mentioned, the savoury still clings to life as

a familiar gastronomic item even if one not commonly consumed, very much on the

order of pot roast, baked pork and beans or apple pie in the United States. Savouries are

not an ancient English tradition and their popularity in the century or so after 1860 was

encouraged by a class hierarchy as well as gender segregation. Restaurants and home

cooks oﬀered savouries, at least occasionally, but it would be appropriate to say they were

cherished by male (or largely-male) associations of the sort we have examined, clubs,

colleges, livery companies, inns of court.

That the savoury does survive is not just due to archaism or absent-mindedness

because one has the sense that the savoury has been revived rather than simply being

carried over unchanged from an earlier era. A series of beloved if slightly comic English

culinary quirks have re-appeared, sometimes only brieﬂy, as by-products of an eﬀort to

restore insular traditions of dining in an era both of homogenization of global tastes

(pizza and tacos everywhere) and of seasonal and local cuisine. Thus school-food, jellied

eels, high-end afternoon tea have all received media attention and, to the degree that

savories have been rediscovered, they form part of a half-remembered, half-invented

tradition, something more important than might at ﬁrst appear since such ideas of

previous distinction and greatness form the background for political movements of

surprising vigor (e.g. Brexit), surprising at least to those whose lives center around

Thai restaurants, exotic vacations, ﬁnance careers, for example.

A revival of English culinary traditions has been spearheaded by famed chefs such as

Heston Blumenthal at his restaurants The Fat Duck and Dinner. At St. John, Fergus

Henderson has made the rediscovery of British distinctiveness part of a nose-to-tail ethos

of using all the animal parts. While the savoury is not so venerable that it would have

been familiar to Shakespeare or Richard Lionheart, it would beneﬁt from overall recon-

sideration of the actual delights of maligned English culinary traditions.

22 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

Notes on contributors

Paul Freedman is a professor in the History Department at Yale University. His ﬁelds are the

Middle Ages and the history of food. He is the author of Ten Restaurants That Changed America

(2016) and American Cuisine and How It Got This Way (2019).

Joshua Evans is a Ph.D. student in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University

of Oxford. He received his B.A. from Yale University and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of

Science from the University of Cambridge. For four years Josh worked for the Nordic Food Lab in

Denmark. His doctoral research involves fermentation and innovation at three restaurants in

Copenhagen. It is entitled “Endless Convivial Experiments: Domestication and the

Microbiogeography of Hybrid Fermentation Practices.”

Notes

1. We use the English term “sweet” rather than the American “dessert” because dessert had

a particular signiﬁcance in Britain. After the sweet course, which might include pudding,

pastry, jellies and the like, a dessert consisted of fruit and perhaps nuts, but at any rate, not

elaborate confections. If there was a savoury course, it usually came after the sweet and

before the dessert.

2. Walton, Fish and Chips.

3. Davies, Tempest Tost, 38–42.

4. Kenney-Herbert, Culinary Jottings for Madras, 222–33; 410, 413, 419, 474.

5. It seems impossible to ﬁgure out where the Merchant’s Club was located. The menu is held

by the New York Public Library and is number 34157 on the website “What’s on the Menu”

created by the Library. The Waldorf Astoria menu is number 35305.

6. Halsey, With Malice Toward Some, 26.

7. Jekyll, Kitchen Essays, 226. Originally published 1922.

8. Gringoire and Saulnier, Le Répertoire de la cuisine, xiv, 239–240.

9. Communication from Chef Pépin, July 15, 2020.

10. Woloson, Reﬁned Tastes, 90. See also Freedman, Ten Restaurants That Changed America,

101–06.

11. Gill, The Ivy, 196.

12. Salis, Savories à la Mode, vi.

13. The author was Mary L. Allen, known as Macaire Allen, Savories and Sweets, prefatory note, ii.

14. Hope, Phroso, 6.

15. Lloyd and Hartley, The Gentle Art of Cookery.

16. Allhusen, Unusual Savories, vii.

17. Stelzer, Dinner with Churchill, 103, 138.

18. de Troyes, Le conte du Graal (Perceval), 373 c, 3568–59; 373d, 3309–3330.

19. Flandrin, Arranging the Meal, 70.

20. Quinzo, Dessert, 78.

21. Broomﬁeld, Food and Cooking, 108.

22. On sociability and the coﬀeehouse, Cowan, The Social Life of Coee.

23. Flandrin, Arranging the Meal, 88–89.

24. Bradford, The Englishman’s Wine, 43, 56–57. On how port became identiﬁed as “the

Englishman’s wine” as against claret, Luddington, The Politics of Wine in Britain, 144–62.

25. Todd, Port, 83: “Cheese (of not too bolshevist a nature) prepares the palate, but cheese is too

violent a preparation for a ﬁne old Port. Very sweet things and highly seasoned things are

out of place.” The identiﬁcation of vintage port and distinctions among diﬀerent years

started in the mid-nineteenth century.

26. Dickens, Bleak House, chapter 22.

27. Broomﬁeld, Food and Cooking in Victorian England, p. 131; Thompson, Food and Feeding,

152–53.

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 23

28. A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen, 376.

29. Kaufman, “Structuring the Meal,” 123–133; Broomﬁeld, Food and Cooking in Victorian

England, 100–21. The impact of the shift on speciﬁcally English restaurants is described in

Burnett, England Eats Out, 142–44.

30. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 953, 955.

31. Boulestin and Adair, Savories and Hors d’Oeuvre.

32. Francatelli, The Modern Cook, 481, 498.

33. Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 914, 918.

34. Dickens, What Shall We Have for Dinner? Reprinted with an important introduction in

Rossi-Wilcox, Dinner for Dickens. See also Cox, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain. In

1858, Charles Dickens separated from his wife, the occasion of considerable rancor and not

a little scandal.

35. Rossi-Wilcox, “Saucing the Dish,” 372–74.

36. What Shall We Have for Dinner? 1, 18, 27, 37.

37. Freeman, Mutton and Oysters, 190.

38. Sala, The Thorough Good Cook, 42.

39. Ibid., 43–44.

40. Perkins, “Rupert Croft-Cooke,” 35–59.

41. Croft-Cooke, English Cooking, 24–25, 189. And yet, Ricket and Thomas, The Gentleman’s

Table Guide, 59, 65 calls for port to be served with angels on horseback, cheese fritters and

deviled ﬁnnan haddock.

42. Salis, Savories à la Mode.

43. Croft-Cooke, English Cooking, 90.

44. Boulestin and Adair, Savories and Hors d’Oeuvre; Allhusen, Unusual Savories.

45. “Devilled Ham Savoury,” 11. British Library Database.

46. “Two Savoury Dishes for Supper or High Tea,” 6. British Library Database.

47. On the history of these establishments, Black, A Room of His Own; Milne-Smith, London

Clubland, 25–27; Darwin, British Clubs; Nevill, London Clubs; Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s

Clubs of London.

48. Timbs, Club Life of London, 1.

49. McDouall, Clubland Cooking, 151.

50. Ibid., 86.

51. Lejeune, Gentlemen’s Clubs of London, 19.

52. Darwin, British Clubs, 13.

53. Mann, “Boodle’s Food,” 158–59, 214–18.

54. There are several explanations for how the Savage Club came to have that name, the most

probable of which is that it was to honor the disreputable poet Richard Savage (1697–1743),

object of a famed biography by Samuel Johnson. His exploits included imprisonment for

debt and killing a man in a drunken altercation. Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London,

251; and Halliday, Savage-Club Papers, ix–x.

55. WL, John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, Savage Club, Boxes 1, 2 and 3.

56. ACL, Menu Cards, vol. 1 (1891–1897), vol. 3 (1904–1905), vol. 7, 1911–1913. Heartfelt thanks to

Jennie Protani, Archivist of the Atheneum. On food at the Atheneum, Cowell, The Atheneum Club,

91–101.

57. RCA, Scrapbook, 1904–1924; Scrapbook 1925–1932. These include menus as well as other

material connected with dinners and events. We are grateful to Dr. Peter M. Urbach,

Archivist, and the Librarian, Simon Blundell, who showed us these and other materials

relating to the Reform Club.

58. GCL, Special Dinners, 1905–1908.

59. GCL, Scrap Book, 1888–1944.

60. GCL, Single Menus.

61. CL, Menu Books 1875–1878, 1879, 1882–1884, 1884–1885, 1894–1895, 1895–1898. We are

grateful to Dr Norma Aubertin-Potter, Clerk to the Archives of All Souls for her advice and

assistance.

24 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

62. SJCL, Menu Cards, Box 1.

63. From the college’s newsletter, The St. Johnian. We acknowledge with gratitude the assistance

of Tracy Deakin, Archivist of St. John’s. The late Dr. P. A. Linehan, Fellow of St. John’s

College, introduced us and showed us an in-house note on the breeding and disposal of

College swans. The right was last exercised in 1986, apparently.

64. SJCL, Menu Cards, Box 1.

65. SJCL, the 1922 menu from Menu Cards Box 1 (which ends 1924) and the 1933 cards from

Box 2.

66. CGA and CCA, Menus. We are grateful to Paul Aste, a student and archival intern at Caius,

who located the menus described in what follows.

67. CCCA. Thanks to Judith Curthoys, Archivist of Christ Church, for her help. The menus are

kept in a section that includes Gaudy and other festive dinners.

68. TCA, menu from December 7, 1891. Again we thank Paul Aste who undertook work in the

Trinity College collections for us.

69. We owe to Professor James Carley of York University in Ontario the connection to the

Barbers’ Company and through them to the other companies discussed in this section.

Victoria West, the Barbers’ Company Archivist, contacted other companies’ archives on our

behalf and we are indebted to her. We thank the Clothworkers’ Archivist Hannah Dunmow,

Deborah Roberts at the Goldsmiths’ Library, and Julie Tancell at Carpenters’.

70. On the London livery companies, Hazlitt, Livery Companies.

71. Loriners’ menus are in GUL, MS 33903, boxes 1 − 9. The “Dinner Book” of the Stationers for

the period 1878–1912 is available through the Library Print Culture site,

http://www.literaryprintculture.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Images/TSC_1_F_05_04_

01_01/2. Actual menus, tipped into what are otherwise lists of those who attended and

seating plans, run only from 1894–1898 and there are thirteen of them.

72. These are, in order of precedence: Mercers (general dealers in textiles), Grocers (originally

sellers of spices), Drapers (wool cloth merchants and manufacturers), Fishmongers,

Goldsmiths (including silversmithing and money-changing), Skinners (furriers),

Merchant Taylors, Haberdashers (dealers in ﬁne textiles such as silk), Salters (salt mer-

chants), Ironmongers, Vintners, Clothmakers.

73. GUL, MS 33903.

74. WCCA, Menus Box 1, 1859–1874, Box 2, 1875–1886.

75. WCCA, Entertainments Book, 1889–1918 (with tipped-in menus).

76. WCGL, Entertainments 1851–1903.

77. WCGL, Entertainments 1937–1951.

78. WCCAA, Programmes/Menus, Box F/PM/1, Box F/PM/3 and recent uncatalogued menus.

79. WCITA, uncatalogued recent menus, November 6, 2018. Our sincere thanks to Celia

Pilkington, archivist of the Inner Temple, for permission to look at the Society’s menus

and for arranging them for us.

80. WCITA, EVE/27/1, June 3, 1850.

81. WCITA, EVE/28/1, July 22, 1924.

82. WCLIL, Romain Collection: Menus and Related Items, Box III, item 26 c. We are grateful to

Dunstan Speight, Librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, and Megan Dunmall, Archivist, for their help

with these menus.

83. WCLIL, G1B (Dinner to members of the International Law Association, August 3, 1910);

Library, Romain Collection, Box III, 22 (dinner given by the Chancery Bar Lodge of the

Freemasons, July 13, 1909); Box II, 36 (Grand Day, Michaelmas Term, November 18, 1925).

84. Rylance, The Epicure’s Almanack.

85. Ibid., 32.

86. On night life generally, see Walkowitz, Nights Out, 92–143 describes the owners and patrons

of two early twentieth-century Soho Italian restaurants, but says nothing about the food.

The same can be said about Salvoni, Elena, an account of the author’s career at Café Bleu,

Bianchi’s and L’Escargot.

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 25

87. A point particularly emphasized by Assael, The London Restaurant, 190–93, and Milne-

Smith, London Clubland, 164. For the Victorian and Edwardian restaurant, in addition to

Assael, Burnett, England Eats Out, 66–102, 151–67.

88. Burnett, England Eats Out, 144; Nevill, London Clubs, 294.

89. WL, John Johnson Collection, Hotel and Restaurant Menus, Box 2.

90. Ibid. 1.

91. Ibid. 1.

92. Newnham-Davis, Dinners and Diners, 70. 125, 158, 202, 206, 308, 324, 346, 351. On this

gastronome, see Broomﬁeld, “Soldier of the Fork,” 46–54.

93. On the impetus to form even more select associations within existing clubs, Black, A Room

of His Own, 53 (the Fox Club formed of members of Brooks’s); p. 55 (the Press Gang within

the Reform).

94. GCL, Club Records 1830–1903, 2006MT-256r (in three volumes).

95. Hare, Tragedy at Law, 22. The menu was ﬁlet of sole, lamb cutlets, sweet pancakes and an

“untranslatable savoury,” meaning that it could not be rendered into French as the other

dishes were.

96. SCCA, U/S/6/5, a total of seven menus from June 7, 1941 to March 4, 1944. Thanks to Colin

Higgins, Archivist of St. Catharine’s and to Professor Nora Berend, Fellow of St. Catharine’s.

97. GLL, Dog and Duck Circle Papers. Many thanks to David Langshaw, a member of the

National Liberal Club, for his help with our research.

98. SCCA, COLL/4/Misc, 7–8.

99. “Dehydrated Kipper as Luncheon Savoury,” 3. Accessed via British Library Newspapers database.

100. The American government abruptly stopped Lend-Lease when the newly-elected Labor

government announced a program of nationalizing large sectors of the economy such as

coal and railroads. On food in the postwar period, Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 93–128;

296–324; Cooper, “Snoeck Piquante,” 33–54. A survey of the “hungry novels” of the era is

given by Freeman, “Remembrance of Luncheons Past,” 23–24.

101. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 105, 246–47, 293.

102. SCCA, COLL/4/Commemoration of Benefactors.

103. JCA, J. C. B. C menus June 7, June 3, 1941, June 15, 1944, November 2, 1946, 1946. The

particularly grim year 1947 saw no savoury served at the Lent Races dinner, March 1, 1947.

Thanks to Paul Aste who examined the Jesus College Archive for us.

104. GOL, Entertainments 1952–1959.

105. WCBA, uncatalogued menus.

106. Ceserani, Catering for Life, 57, 63.

107. BCA, menu collection. Thanks to Andrew Phillips, Boodle’s Club Secretary, for permission

to consult the library and to Jay Stiefel of Philadelphia who introduced us.

108. BCA, menus, Bi-Centenary Dinner, January 31, 1962.

109. Information kindly provided by Professor Carolyne Larrington, now of St. John’s College,

Oxford.

110. CCA, Gaudy and Censer’s dinner menus; Banquet menus.

111. HCA, menus.

112. Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington, 60.

113. Mauretania, August 8, 1962, New York Public Library, Rare Books Division, digitized as nypl.org/

menu_pages/54355; Ivy restaurant, Bodleian Library, John Johnson Collection, Hotel and

Restaurant Menus Box 2; Hawes Inn, New York Public Library nypl.org/menu_pages/44690. At

both the Ivy and Hawes Inn, prices are in pounds, shillings and pence so before 1971 when the

currency became digital, eliminating the shilling. Two Miramar menus, dated December 12, 1971,

and August 27, 1972, feature soft roes on toast and Welsh rarebit respectively. We thank Carolyn

Steele, whose family owned the hotel, for these menus.

114. Gorton, In Defense of British Cooking, 80–85.

115. WCCAA, Programmes/Menus, Box F/PM/1 and recent uncatalogued menus.

116. A menu for June, 2019, lists Welsh rarebit, Scotch woodcock, angels on horseback, soft

herring roes (i.e. milt) on toast, and anchovies on toast.

26 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

117. We thank Mr. W. A. Brogan, kitchen manager at St. John’s, referred by Dr. P. A. Linehan.

118. MCA, E/A/3 Box 1, folder 5 Pepys Dinner 1905–1993; Box 3, folder 8 St. Mary Magdalene

Feast 1935–2018. We are indebted to Christina Stankey, a Yale graduate who then studied at

Magdalene, for looking this up for us.

119. Thanks to St. Catherine’s chef Tim Kelsey for this information.

120. We are grateful to Trevor Gulliver, co-founder of St. John, for information on the restau-

rant. On White’s, Prince, “White’s Gentleman’s’ Club Reveal,” Josh Evans obtained ﬁrst-

hand the information from the Oxford and Cambridge Club.

121. Luncheon menu, May 28, 2019.

122. We thank Hannah Dunmow, archivist of the Worshipful Company of Brewers, for furnish-

ing us with a savories list.

Bibliography

Archival sources

Athenaeum Club Library, (ACL), London, United Kingdom.

Boodle’s Club Archives (BCA), London, United Kingdom.

Caius College Archive (CCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Christ Church College Archive (CCCA), Oxford, United Kingdom.

Codrington Library (CL), Oxford, United Kingdom.

Garrick Club Library (GCL), London, United Kingdom.

Gladstone Library (GLL), London, United Kingdom.

Goldsmith’s Library (GOL), London, United Kingdom.

Gonville College Archive (GCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Guildhall Library (GUL), London, United Kingdom.

Hertford College Archive (HCA), Oxford, United Kingdom.

Jesus College Archive (JCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Magdalene College Archives (MCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

New York Public Library (NYPL), New York, United States.

Reform Club Archive (RCA), London, United Kingdom.

St. Catharine’s College Archive (SCCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

St. John’s College Library (SJCL), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Trinity College Archive (TCA), Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Weston Library (WL), Oxford, United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Barbers’ Archive (WCBA), London, United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Brewers (WCB), London, United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Carpenters’ Archive (WCCAA), London, United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Clothworkers’ Archive (WCCA), London, United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths’ Library, London (WCGL), United Kingdom.

Worshipful Company of Lincoln’s Inn, Library (WCLIL), London, United Kingdom

Worshipful Society of the Inner Temple Archive (WCITA), London, United Kingdom.

Bibliography

Published Sources

The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Carleton, 1864.

Allen, Macaire. Savouries and Sweets Suitable for Luncheons and Dinners. London: J. S. Virtue and

Co., Ltd., 1886.

Allhusen, Dorothy. Unusual Savouries. London: Chapman & Hall, 1935.

Assael, Brenda. The London Restaurant, 1840-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Beeton, Isabella. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. London: S. O. Beeton, 1861.

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 27

Black, Barbara. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Athens,

Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012.

Boulestin, X.M., and A.H. Adair Savouries and Hors d’Oeuvre: One-Hundred-and-Twenty-Seven

Ways of Preparing. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932.

Bradford, Sarah. The Englishman’s Wine: The Story of Port. London: Macmillan St Martin’s, 1969.

Broomﬁeld, Andrea. Food and Cooking in Victorian England. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2007.

Broomﬁeld, Andrea. “Soldier of the Fork: How Nathaniel Newnham-Davis Democratized Dining.”

Gastronomica 12, no. 4 (Winter, 2012): 46–54. 10.1525/GFC.2012.12.4.46

Burnett, John. England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England from 1830 to the

Present. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004.

Ceserani, Victor. Catering for Life: The Autobiography of Victor Ceserani. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.

Cooper, Susan. “Snoeck Piquante: The Trials and Tribulations of the British Housewife.” In The Age

of Austerity, ed. Michael Sissons and Philip French, 33–53. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963.

Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coee: The Emergence of the British Coeehouse. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2005.

Cowell, Frank Richard. The Athenaeum Club and Social Life in London, 1824-1974. London:

Heinemann, 1975.

Cox, Helen. Mr. And Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain at Home. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1980.

Croft-Cooke, Rupert. English Cooking: A New Approach. London: W. H. Allen, 1960.

Darwin, Bernard. British Clubs. London: William Collins 1943.

Davies, Roberston. Tempest Tost. Toronto: Penguin, 1980.

de Salis, Harriet, and Anne Bainbridge. Savouries À La Mode. London: Longmans Green and Co., 1877.

de Troyes, Chrétien. Le conte du Graal (Perceval). Paris: Gallimard, 2010.

“Dehydrated Kipper as Luncheon Savoury.” Courier and Advertiser. October 9, 1943.

“Devilled Ham Savoury.” Courier and Advertiser. October 2, 1935.

Dickens, Catherine (“Lady Clutterbuck”). What Shall We Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by

Numerous Bill of Fare for from Two to Eighteen Persons. 2d ed. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1856.

Dickens, Charles, Bleak House. London: Edward Arnold, 1974.

Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France. . Translated by Julie

E. Johnson and Antonio Roder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Francatelli, Charles Elmé. The Modern Cook, A Practical Guide to the Culinary Art in All Its

Branches. London: R. Bentley, 1846.

Freedman, Paul. Ten Restaurants That Changed America. New York: Liveright, 2016.

Freeman, Laura. “Remembrance of Luncheons Past: The Hungry Novels of the Post-War Period in

Britain.” Times Literary Supplement. February 18, 2019.

Freeman, Sarah. Mutton and Oysters: The Victorians and Their Food. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989.

Gill, A.A. The Ivy: The Restaurant and Its Recipes. London: Holder and Stoughton, 1997.

Gorton, Audrey Alley. In Defense of British Cooking: 200 Wonderful Recipes that Prove the English

CAN Cook. Brattleboro: Stephen Greene Press, 1960.

Th, Gringoire, and L. Saulnier Le Répertoire de la cuisine. 3d ed. Paris: Maison Allard, 1923.

Halliday, Andrew. Savage-Club Papers. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867.

Halsey, Margaret. With Malice Toward Some. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1938.

Hare, Cyril. Tragedy at Law. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Hazlitt, William Carew. Livery Companies of the City of London: Their Origins, Character,

Development and Social and Political Importance. London: Sonnenschein and Co., 1892.

Hope, Anthony. Phroso. London: Methuen, 1897.

Jekyll, Agnes. Kitchen Essays. London: Persephone Books, 2008.

Kaufman, Cathy K. “Structuring the Meal: The Revolution of Service À La Russe.” In Proceedings

of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2001, edited by Harlan Walker, 123–133. Totnes:

Prospect Books, 2002.

Kenney-Herbert, Colonel, and Arthur Robert (“Wyvern”). Culinary Jottings for Madras or

A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo-Indian Exiles. 5th ed. Madras:

Higginbotham, 1885; reprinted Totnes: Prospect Books, 1994.

Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain, 1945-1951. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

28 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

Lejeune, Anthony. The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London. New York: Mayﬂower Books, 1979.

Lloyd, C. F., and Olga Hartley. The Gentle Art of Cookery. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1925.

Luddington, Charles. The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History. London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2013.

Mann, David. “Boodle’s Food.” In Boodle’s: Celebrating 250 Years, edited by Marcus Binney and

David Mann, 158–159. London: Boodle’s, 2012.

McDouall, Robin. Clubland Cooking. London: Phaidon, 1974.

Milne-Smith, Amy. London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian

Britain. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Nevill, Ralph. London Clubs: Their History and Treasures. London: Chatto and Windus, 1911.

Newnham-Davis, Lieutenant-Colonel [Nathaniel]. Dinners and Diners: Where and How to Dine in

London. 2d ed. London: Grant Richards, 1901.

Perkins, Blake. “Rupert Croft-Cooke: Detective Stories and the Defence of English Foodways.”

Petits Propos Culinaires 106 (2016): 35–59.

Prince, Rose. “White’s Gentleman’s Club Reveal.” Daily Telegraph. October 24, 2008. https://www/

telegraph.cp.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/3346195/White’s-gentlemans-club-reveal-what-men-

really-like-to-eat.html.

Quinzo, Jeri. Dessert: A Tale of Happy Endings. London: Reaktion, 2018.

Ricket, E., and C. Thomas The Gentleman’s Table Guide. London: Wall, 1871.

Rossi-Wilcox, Susan M. “Saucing the Dish of Authenticity: Mrs. Charles Dickens’s Menus and Her

Husband’s Writings.” In Authenticity in the Kitchen: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on

Food and Cookery 2005, edited by Richard Hosking, 172–174. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2006.

Rossi-Wilcox, Susan M. Dinner for Dickens: The Culinary History of Mrs. Charles Dickens’s Menu

Books Including a Transcript of ‘What Shall We Have for Dinner’ by Lady Maria Clutterbuck.

Totnes: Prospect Books, 2005.

Rylance, Ralph. The Epicure’s Almanack: Eating and Drinking in Regency London: The Original

1815 Guidebook. Edited by Janet Ing Freeman. London: British Library, 2002.

Sala, George Augustus. The Thorough Good Cook: A Series of Chats on the Culinary Art and Nine

Hundred Recipes. London: Cassell and Co., 1885.

Salvoni, Elena. Elena: A Life in Soho. London: Quartet Books, 1990.

Spark, Muriel. A Far Cry from Kensington. New York: Avon, 1990.

Stelzer, Cita. Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table. London: Short Books,

2011.

St John’s College. The St. Johnian. 2013. https://johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk/news/blog/secret-st-johns-

december-2013.

Thompson, Henry. Food and Feeding. 8th ed. London: F. Warne and Co., 1894.

Timbs, John. Club Life of London with Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coee-Houses and Taverns of the

Metropolis. London: R. Bentley, 1866.

Todd, William J. Port: How to Buy, Serve and Drink It. London: Jonathan Cape, 1926.

“Two Savoury Dishes for Supper or High Tea.” Press and Journal. May 30, 1940.

Walkowitz, Judith. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London. New Haven: Yale University Press,

2012.

Walton, John K. Fish and Chips and the British Working Class, 1870-1940. Leicester: University of

Leicester Press, 1992.

Woloson, Wendy A. Reﬁned Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century

America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

GLOBAL FOOD HISTORY 29

Appendix. Croûtes Served at the Reform Club, 1904 – 1932

Africaine

Alexandra

Alexandre le Grand

Amazone

Baron

Blanc et noir

Bleu claire

Champignon sur croûte

Colchester

Domonicain (sic)

Eduard VII

Escossaise

Fillet de kipper

Forestière

Hongroise

Indienne

Ivanhoe

Josephine

Khartoum

Laitances sur croûte

Laitances, champignons sur croûte

Lyric

Maintenon

Menagére

Merluche (hake)

Menelik

Moderne

Murrurundi

Muscovite

Nelson

Nizam

Olga

Oxford

Panurge

Prince de Galles

Princesse

Reform

Regence

Riga

Rossini

Sefton

Souvaroﬀ

Tolstoy

Twickenham

Unité

Victoria

30 P. FREEDMAN AND J. EVANS

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History

Book

Jan 2007

Andrea Broomfield

Nine recipes serve as entry points for detailing the history of food production, cooking, and diet throughout Queen Victoria's reign in England. More than that, however, Broomfield offers an introduction to the world of everyday dining, food preparation, and nutrition during one of the most interesting periods of English history. Food procurement, kitchen duties, and dining conventions were almost always dictated by one's socioeconomic status and one's gender, but questions still remain. Who was most likely to dine out? Who was most likely to be in charge of the family flatware and fine china? Who washed the dishes? Who could afford a fine piece of meat once a week, once a month, or never? How much did one's profession dictate which meal times were observed and when? All these questions and more are answered in this illuminating history of food and cooking in Victorian England.

Rupert Croft-Cooke: Detective Stories and the Defence of English Foodways

Article

Sep 2016

Blake Perkins

In 1960 a curious book appeared, called English Cooking: A New Approach. The book was a brave and forlorn effort to rehabilitate traditional British cuisine. The timing was not ideal. By then, the days of rationing were forgotten and the influence of Elizabeth David, among other blights, had relegated British food to untouchable status. This articles puts English Cooking into historical context and discusses the attempts of other writers to preserve English foodways, noting Rupert Croft-Cooke's own opinions of their efforts while also providing a biographical account of Croft-Crooke's extraordinary life.

The London Restaurant, 1840-1914

Book

Aug 2018

B. Assael

This is the first scholarly treatment of the history of public eating in London in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The quotidian nature of eating out during the working day or evening should not be allowed to obscure the significance of the restaurant (defined broadly, to encompass not merely the prestigious West End restaurant, but also the modest refreshment room, and even the street cart) as a critical component in the creation of modern metropolitan culture. The story of the London restaurant between the 1840s and the First World War serves as an exemplary site for mapping the expansion of commercial leisure, the increasing significance of the service sector, the introduction of technology, the democratization of the public sphere, changing gender roles, and the impact of immigration. The London Restaurant incorporates the notion of 'gastro-cosmopolitanism' to highlight the existence of a diverse culture in London in this period that requires us to think, not merely beyond the nation, but beyond empire. The restaurant also had an important role in contemporary debates about public health and the (sometimes conflicting, but no less often complementary) prerogatives of commerce, moral improvement, and liberal governance. The London Restaurant considers the restaurant as a business and a place of employment, as well as an important site for the emergence of new forms of metropolitan experience and identity. While focused on London, it illustrates the complex ways in which cultural and commercial forces were intertwined in modern Britain, and demonstrates the rewards of writing histories which recognize the interplay between broad, global forces and highly localized spaces.

London clubland: A cultural history of gender and class in late Victorian Britain

Book

Nov 2011

Amy Milne-Smith

This work is the first to study the gentlemen's clubs that were an important feature of the Late Victorian landscape, and the first to discover the secret history of clubmen and their world, placing them at centre stage, detailing how clubland dramatically shaped 19th and early 20th-century ideas about gender, power, class, and the city.

The politics of wine in Britain: A new cultural history

Book

Jan 2016

Charles Ludington

A unique look at the meaning of the taste for wine in Britain, from the establishment of a Commonwealth in 1649 to the Commercial Treaty between Britain and France in 1860 - this book provides an extraordinary window into the politics and culture of England and Scotland just as they were becoming the powerful British state.

Refined tastes: Sugar, confectionery, and consumers in nineteenth-century America

Article

Jan 1999

Wendy Adair Woloson

In nineteenth-century America refined sugar changed from being a rare substance enjoyed by the rich and coveted by the poor at the beginning of the century to a common commodity within the reach of everyone by century's end. Looking at how refined sugar reached consumers in the form of confectionery—penny candies, ice cream, chocolates and bonbons, ornamental sugar, and homemade candies and desserts—tells us as much about how Americans incorporated new commodities into their lives as it does about the democratization of sugar itself. In effect, Americans animated the commodities appearing in the marketplace, endowing them with human-like qualities that eventually linked specific products with specific consumers. At the same time, people came to define themselves more through the material objects they associated with, blurring the line between animate and inanimate. Although refined sugar itself could be considered a generic good, the cultural products made from it—confections—were highly differentiated and gained “appropriate” consuming audiences. Further, as refined sugar became cheaper and more readily available, it shifted from being a symbol of male economic prowess to a substance associated with women and children. Looking at refined sugar in nineteenth-century America as a case study helps to reveal some of the meaning-making processes that determine people's relationships to the material universe around them.

A room of his own: A literary-cultural study of victorian clubland

Book

Jan 2012

B. Black

In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen's clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as "clubland" in Victorian London-the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London? Distinctly British, how did these single-sex clubs help fashion men, foster a culture of manliness, and assist in the project of nation-building? What can elite male affiliative culture tell us about nineteenth-century Britishness? A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain's military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens's and Thackeray's acrimonious Garrick Club Affair. It takes us to Richard Burton's curious Cannibal Club and Winston Churchill's The Other Club; it goes underground to consider Uranian desire and Oscar Wilde's clubbing and resurfaces to examine the problematics of belonging in Trollope's novels. The trespass of French socialist Flora Tristan, who cross-dressed her way into the clubs of Pall Mall, provides a brief interlude. London's clubland-this all-important room of his own-comes to life as Barbara Black explores the literary representations of clubland and the important social and cultural work that this urban site enacts. Our present-day culture of connectivity owes much to nineteenth-century sociability and Victorian networks; clubland reveals to us our own enduring desire to belong, to construct imagined communities, and to affiliate with like-minded comrades.

Nights out: Life in cosmopolitan London

Article

Jan 2012

Judith Walkowitz

London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its old buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be "outside" the nation. Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

A Far Cry from Kensington

Article

Jan 1989

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse

Article

Oct 2007

The English Savoury Course

Abstract

Recommended publications

Menus from the Lotos Club in New York City

‘Afterwards to see a Cinema show’: The diary of a London cinema-goer in 1915

Les grands cercles et la sociabilité des élites mondiales (l'état du monde 2017)

Doyle’s Diogenes Club: a Delightful Oddity Screening a Metatextual Clue