Entertaining Lady Roberts

Several pages from late spring 1897 are full of notes, recipes and menus intended for Lady Roberts. I’m not entirely sure who she was, but the timing seems right for her to have been the wife of Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Certainly the menus seem designed to impress, which suggests she was a person of some importance.

Dinner Lady Roberts, May 25/26 1897.
Hors d’oevre
Clear Soup. Tarragon Chervil / New Turnips
Puree Cucumber
Smoked Salmon strips, Carrot + Parsley Turnip
Whitebait
Sweetbreads
Soufflet of Foie gras
Haunch Lamb. Beans etc
Spring Chickens Watercress Asparagus
Jelly a la Russe (Champagne)
Brandy Snaps
Tartlets de Indes

18th June Clear Soup. Soles. Trout. Fillits Beef. Chicken Creams Cutlets. Ducks. Hare Cumberland Sauce. Cream straw ice. Whipped Jelly. Turkish Butters.

Dinner Lady Roberts June 23rd 1897, Barbellion
Clear Soup, Asparagus Puree
Fillets of Soles. Salmon. Cold Chicken Entree in Aspic
Rack of Lamb. Quails. Peaches in Jelly. Fruit in Saucepans
Hot Savoury.

Quails forced and sent to table in Casserole with good thick mushroom sauce Brown and truffles cut very thinly.

Sweetbreads larded with truffle and tongue braised laid along Croutons. served with a good White Sauce with Champignons & Olives.

Hors d’oevre
Make a tiny croustade of pastry very thin just large enough to hold a large stoned olive Pipe some savoury butter round it fill it with some butter coloured finish with a caper on the top

Google informs me that Barbellion was the pseudonym of Devon-born diarist Bruce Cummings, but I have no idea what it means in this context. Any ideas?

Bird’s Nests

Boil 5 eggs hard. Make a mixture with some fine breadcrumbs plenty of parsley, salt and pepper and yolks of eggs to bind it. Cover the eggs well with this mixture, flour them, roll in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them nicely brown then cut them in halves.

Pudding à la Royal, or Brown Bread Mould

3 oz of brown bread crumbs or college biscuits. 2 oz caster sugar, juice of one lemon or orange. 1 wine glass of sherry, brandy or curaçao. ¼ oz gelatin, ½ pint whipped cream. Melt the gelatine in a little water. Put the crumbs into a basin with the juices and wine and sugar. Add the gelatine and lastly the whipped cream. Put into a mould and when set turn out, fill the centre with any kind of jam, gooseberry, or cranberry, or fruit syrup may be poured around. This pudding is much better made with college biscuits (pounded).

It’s not the most difficult-to-imagine dessert in the notebooks, but perhaps the second. College biscuits seem to have vanished into the mists of time, the only reference I could find to them being “…[t]here were also ‘College Biscuits’ which all but the very hungry never touched – they could only be broken if dipped in tea”. At a guess, I’m going for something like either a ship’s biscuit or a hopefully a Bath Oliver (now, disappointingly, made under license by Jacobs).

Crab à la Audrey

Take all the meat from a fresh crab, a good sized one or two if small, the body only. A few breadcrumbs may be added if not sufficient. Put it into a mortar. Add some pepper, salt, oil and lemon juice and pound it all well together. Break away most of the inside of the shell. Wash it well and polish it. Then take the pounded mixture and make a bridge across the centre of the shell. Shred all the meat from the claws very fine and fill up each end of the shell with the meat. Lay a little parsley and coralline pepper on the bridge. Put some of the claws on a dish and lay the shell on them so it appears natural.

Modern version: It’s pretty much just a dressed crab – no separation of the white and brown meats here, just smash them all together. One imagines the polishing of the shell and the construction are everything. Delia has instructions on how to dress a British crab – they differ a bit from many of the US species, but a Dungeness Crab from the west coast is a pretty similar beast. Corraline pepper is still a bit of a mystery at present.