“Shall we go through?” Christmas Plum Pudding Edition

the next installment in a series on proper dining

This week, I took a deeper dive than I ever have before into the mind and kitchen of Miss E. Neil.

And, at first, I was overwhelmed.

For those of you who don’t remember, Miss E. Neil was the author of a cookbook from the 1890s given to me by my grandmother. It’s full of everything from fascinating and often forgotten recipes to home remedies and advice for life.

I was looking for a recipe that did not involve, like in the case of her recipe for Mock-Turtle Soup, cleaning and washing a calf’s head, splitting it in two, and saving the brains.

I’m just not brave enough.

But should I delve into her breakfast recipe for “American Toast,” which upon further inspection was revealed to be a recipe for what we would now refer to as French Toast?

Too tame.

Or perhaps I should start with Potato Soup, which was touted as “suitable for a cold day.” But this recipe required that I “Get as many beef or ham bones as you can, and smash them into fragments. Add a little bit of lean ham to give flavor. Boil the bone and ham for two hours and a half at least.”

Where exactly does one get bones nowadays without taking them from the calf’s head after boiling it for several hours and saving the brains? Come to think of it, where would one even get the calf’s head?

I realized that I was jumping into a world far more different from my own than I had originally thought. The home cooks that were to glean from the lessons of Miss E. Neil were to emerge with knowledge that I imagine now only belongs to pupils of five-star French chefs cooking in a land that I picture to be brimming with calf’s heads and things like lard and graham flour.

The world of Miss E. Neil was a harsher world than my own. Stoves and ovens were things of great power and great pain. Cooking something meant that the range had to be kept at the same sustained temperature for hours at a time. And this meant that someone had to add wood and tend to the fire to keep the heat up. But be careful — if you added too much wood, the metal of the stove itself could melt! Go to market and buy only what’s in season to save money and minimize your chances of buying something rancid, but keep both eyes peeled, because, if you’re living in London, the fog, which we now call “smog,” is so thick from everyone’s stoves that you might walk straight into a wall and not even know it. This article on Victorian kitchens and homemaking gives a wonderful peek into the kitchens of old and even mentions a “Sherlock Holmes” story in which a character must light a match in broad daylight to read a note in the fogs of London.

Feeling cowardly and very much out of my depth, I closed the cookbook and sat back in defeat.

Then I remembered an episode of “The Great British Bakeoff.”