Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
Indian curry is an extraordinarily popular genre of food, visible not only in the shape of curry houses across the world but also as take-aways, frozen curry meals and curry powders sold in grocers’ stores. But what is the history of the Indian curry? Was it Indian to begin with or a colonial imposition evolving from a simplified and over-generalized understanding of local food cultures? This essay traces the history of Indian curry as we know it today and the
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It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by the Internet, that one way to cope with Covid is to bake banana bread. From social media to Stanley Tucci’s recent diary of quarantine cooking in The Atlantic to the New York Times’ “At Home” section, Americans are hearing at least one persistent and unified message about Covid-19: we should all be cooking. Or baking. Preferably bread. At first glance, the reasons behind the uptick in home cooking seem obvious. Shopping
Read moreRosalind White is a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at gender and emotions in the science and literature of the nineteenth century. She is part of the Techne doctoral training partnership which is funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council and is assistant director of the Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway. Her research traces how natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture and charts a more intimate, personal
Read moreRachel Duffield (Norfolk Museums’ Live Interpretation Officer) Life as an interpretation officer at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse working with more than 10,000 Norfolk schoolchildren a year is never dull. I spend most of my time in costume inhabiting a Victorian wash-house, farm kitchen or workhouse schoolroom, teaching students about rural domestic life 150 years ago. Now I am preparing for a bigger challenge: living the workhouse diets of more than 100 years ago for three whole weeks. From 26 April, I’ll
Read moreor rather How Britain Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Processed Meat Helen Williams is Ph.D. student in the School of English, Drama, American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis explores the representation of medicine and middle-class healthcare in the novels of Wilkie Collins, reading his texts alongside contemporary layperson writings on medicine. Her postgraduate profile is available to view here. Whilst the origins of the recent horsemeat scandal are still uncertain, with some press reports
Read moreThank you to everyone who submitted a post to the JVC Comic Relief Bake Off. We were really pleased with the response and hope that you have enjoyed reading about people’s endeavours in the kitchen as much as we have. All of the bakes looked scrummy and very Victorian! You can read more about our challenge here. We have compiled all of posts, together with some old posts, here in what we would like to call the JVC Comic Relief
Read moreRuth Livesey As you can see here, any hope of winning the JVC bake off on the grounds of elegance and finesse were pretty much a goner from the moment I decided to bake a cottage loaf. I had been thinking of cooking something much more fin de siècle: I had fantasies of glistening absinthe-soaked madeleines or gold-flaked pets-de-nonne. But for a movement so interested in taste, there is surprisingly little actual eating taking place in the literature of the
Read moreI love cake. I love tea. I love Victorian history… So, when Helen Rogers, my LJMU colleague and editor of Journal of Victorian Culture, suggested a Victorian tea party for Comic Relief I was excited. Not only would I have an excuse to bake, but it would also be a great way to get students to think about the Victorians in an exciting and different way. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t nervous. Would anybody bake? Would anybody attend? I
Read moreLucinda Matthews-Jones (LJMU) JVC Online readers will know that this isn’t the first time I’ve turned to the Victorians for baking inspiration. However, in the past, I’ve tended to focus on Mrs Beeton and her rather gaudy fare. For this challenge, I decided I would leave Mrs B to one side. Perhaps it was the Welsh dragon on the opening page of Cre-Fydd’s Family Fare: The Young Housewife’s Daily Assistant on all matters relating to cookery and housekeeping that tempted
Read moreJessica Hindes Trawling through recipes for the JVC Bake Off, my eye was caught by a mysterious recipe in the Lady’s Own Cookery Book reading simply ‘Hedgehog’. As a long-time connoisseur of the hedgehog cake (my Mum baked one for my first birthday party in 1986), the prospect of a Victorian variant on this much-loved dessert was profoundly appealing. Unfortunately, the Lady’s Own recipe was not. Instructions for a kind of eggy, almondy paste, cooked on the stove-top until ‘stiff
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