Literary Eats #4: Anatole, from P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves Novels

One of Wodehouse's finest.

One of the most delightful characters in the Jeeves novels is the luminous gastronomic MacGuffin Anatole, a highly strung ‘God of the gastric juices’ whose creations are dangled as bait in front of Bertie by the ever-manipulative Aunt Dahlia whenever she wants a service rendered. Conversely, sometimes she promises that never another bite of Anatole’s delectable dinners will cross Bertie’s lips if he fails her, as in this gem from Right Ho, Jeeves (1922):

‘You will do it, young Bertie, or never darken my doors again. And you know what that means. No more of Anatole’s dinners for you.’

            A strong shudder shook me. She was alluding to her chef, that superb artist. A monarch of his profession, unsurpassed – nay, unequalled – at dishing up the raw material so that it melted in the mouth of the ultimate consumer, Anatole had always been a magnet that drew me to Brinkley Court with my tongue hanging out. Many of my happiest moments had been those which I had spent champing this great man’s roasts and ragouts, and the prospect of being barred from digging into them in the future was a numbing one.

Anatole is Aunt Dahlia’s prize posession, stolen by her from Mrs Bingo Little (née Rosie M. Banks) in an attempt to soothe her husband Tom Travers, a martyr to stomach complaints. Somehow Anatole manages, with the aid of rich French food, to keep Tom humming along nicely and even to put him in a sufficient mood to bail out Dahlia’s pet project, the magazine Milady’s Boudoir (or, as Tom calls it, Madame’s Nightshirt), once in a while.

Despite Anatole’s need for constant soothing lest he succumb to his nerves and flee Brinkley Court to pastures new, he takes on the challenge of English cuisine with aplomb. In doing so he clearly fulfils an Edwardian British food fantasy: that it be French (at that time believed the most advanced cuisine in the world), but not too French: to wit., the roasts mentioned above, and the steak and kidney pie Tuppy Glossop steals from the larder, also in Right Ho, Jeeves. As Tuppy says,

the thing that I admire so enormously about Anatole is that, though a Frenchman, he does not, like so many of these chefs, confine himself exclusively to French dishes, but is always willing and ready to weigh in with some good old simple English fare such as this steak-and-kidney pie to which I have alluded.

Witness the unexpected British inclusions in the valedictory meal Bertie plans for himself in The Code of the Woosters (1938) after getting out of a prospective stay in chokey:

Caviar frais

Cantaloup

Consommé aux pommes d’amour

Sylphides à la crème d’écrivisses

Mignonette de poulet petit Duc

Points d’aspereges à la Mistiguette

Suprême de foie gras au champagne

Neige aux perles des Alpes

Nonnettes de la Maditerranée au fenoil

Selle d’agneau au laitues à la Greque

Timbale de ris de veau Toulousiane

Salade d’endive et de celeri

Le plum pudding

L’étoile du Berger

Benedictins blancs

Bombe Nero

Friandises

Daiblotins

Fruits

Courgette Central

It’s that time of year when I begin to suffer from a surfeit of courgettes, having discovered several years ago that they cannot be beaten in terms of the amount of yield you get for the work you need to put in: essentially, sticking one seed, price approx. 25p, into a small pot of damp compost, and then planting it into the ground four or so weeks later and ignoring it, means around 25 courgettes plus flowers if you wish. I’m a lazy gardener who doesn’t like to nurture things (my view is that if they can’t be bothered, neither can I), but I get a giant courgette harvest every year: vegetables well out of proportion to my own effort, inducing a pleasant feeling that I’ve somehow gamed the system.

Alan Davidson resolutely uses the name zucchini rather than courgette in his Oxford Companion to Food, explaining, entirely reasonably, that it was the Italians who first bred these small marrows and that until the 1920s the French referred to them as courgettes d’Italie; it therefore makes little sense that we’ve adopted the French name instead of the Italian one (incidentally, it means ‘little gourd’, just as zucchini does in Italy). The first reference to courgettes in the OED dates from 1932, which seems fairly astonishing when you think how easy it is to grow courgettes in the UK, but then, I suppose they would have been considered just small vegetable marrows, which certainly were eaten (I remember my grandmother cooking marrows in a cheese sauce, or stuffing them with mince).

Mrs Beeton prefers to boil vegetable marrows, which I feel would give a rather watery result, especially since they are even pulpier than courgettes, but the Victorians were not keen on crisp vegetables and no doubt they were to contemporary tastes. She suggest serving boiled marrows with melted butter or white sauce, but does give one rather nice-sounding recipe for egg and breadcrumbing and then frying slices of marrow. She has this to say about the family:

THE VEGETABLE MARROW.—This vegetable is now extensively used, and belongs to the Cucurbits. It is the C. ovifera of science, and, like the melon, gourd, cucumber, and squash, is widely diffused in the tropical or warmer regions of the globe.

The downside of hitting the courgette jackpot in the garden is that by the end of the summer you do get a bit fed up of them, but I’ve found that they also work well if you grate and drain them, mix with a grated onion and garlic, then bake in a cheese sauce with a handful or two of parboiled rice thrown in to soak up the juices. It makes a lovely main course.

Salmagundi

I was delighted the other day to come across a new and distinctly odd food term: salmagundi. What could it be, I hear you ask? According to the OED it’s ‘a dish composed of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs, onions with oil and condiments’ – a sort of salady mixture, in other words. (Solomon Gundy in Jamaica is similarly a fishy pickle.) The first recorded use of the term is from 1674 and identifies it as ‘a dish of meat made of cold Turky and other ingredients’. What first interested me about the word – quite apart from the pleasure to be had from pronouncing it – is its resemblance to the nineteenth-century nursery rhyme figure Solomon Grundy:

Solomon Grundy

Born on a Monday

Christened on Tuesday

Married on Wednesday

Took ill on Thursday

Grew worse on Friday

Died on Saturday

Buried on Sunday.


That was the end

Of Solomon Grundy.

And indeed the OED confirms that the variants of 'salmagundi' include Solomon Gundy and Solomon Grundy, as well as salmagondi, salamongundy and salad-magundy (the last of which must be a sort of ‘backwards corruption’ in which the word has been adapted back to fit what people think it ought to be, rather than its actual origin). Etymologically ‘salmagundi’ comes from the French salmigondis, which, it is suggested, comes either from salami conditi (pickled salami) or Old French salemine (salted food) + condir (to season), and means mixture – what we might call a hodge-podge, or dog’s dinner.

Is Solomon Grundy related to salmagundy because his eventful week is such a mixture of different things? Or is it simply that the word 'salmagundy' is so fun to say that the sounds evolved into a character?