Picnic Crumbs

Anabel Loyd

Description

A gathering of picnics, packed lunches and provisions at home and abroad.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Polperro Heritage Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780957048126
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Picnic Crumbs
A Gathering of Picnics,
Packed Lunches and Provisions
At Home and Abroad
Anabel Loyd





© Anabel Loyd 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The right of Anabel Loyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-9570481-2-6
Published by
Polperro Heritage Press,
Clifton-upon-Teme, Worcestershire
WR6 6EN
United Kingdom
www.polperropress.co.uk
Printed in Great Britain by Orphans Press, Leominster United Kingdom





Contents
Foreword
Picnic Crumbs
Introduction
First Picnics
Equipment and Essentials
Boating Feasts and Follies
Picnics and Romance
Home, Work and Tradition
On Trains and Aeroplanes
Battles, Rations and Picnics in the Field
Abroad, and Travel Food
Agnes Jekyll, Hilda Leyel and other Cooks’ Excursions
Social Graces and Summer Seasons
Provisions
Royal and Imperial
Disasters, Discomforts and Emergency Rations
School Food
A Finale of Sandwiches and Filling Stuff
En Fin
Bibliography





Foreword
A h, the smell of it! Carcinogenic sausages being incinerated by Papa. Ah, the taste of it! Sand sandwiches with marmite and lettuce on the beach with Nanny. Ah, the grandeur of it! The sushi bars and cocktail mixologists in marquees now to be found at the ultimate picnic with bankers at the Fourth of June at Eton.
I am delighted that Anabel Loyd’s enchanting and erudite treatise on picnic heaven has no truck with the latter. The perfect picnic summons up everything delightful about the outdoors: sunburn, a blinding wind, discomfort and probably the dog being sick. This is why the picnic is indispensable to the idiosyncratic British psyche and was an Empire-building endeavour. When the Good Lord divided the loaves and the fishes I cannot imagine that He thought the divine result would be an eternal sardine sandwich. Anabel, while espousing the sardine con brio, really glows when she introduces us to the picnics of yore à la Edward VII at the opera. Glyndebourne, Garsington and the Grange picnic competitors please note lobster mayonnaise, plovers’ eggs, lamb cutlets, Parisian pastries and that “Gold plate was taken along as well to remind the King that it was a royal meal, even if it came from hampers”.
Queen Victoria seems to have been ruthless at demanding passing peasants to boil water for her kettle in their cottages, so she and John Brown could have a cuppa, but at least she plonked her little round self in the heather. King George V and Queen Mary sat on upright chairs on the shores of Loch Muick while a ghillie set forth in a rowing boat to net brown trout. Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, recalls that “We gathered up the sliver slithering fish in buckets and took them to the chef who, in full regalia, white cap and all, was ready with a hot fire.” The fish fry was then served by footmen and ‘Was delicious as anything that I have ever tasted”.
We know that our own dear Queen favours the burnt sausage but surely one of the many regrettable aspects of the decommissioning of the Royal Yacht Britannia is the loss of the picnic equipment list. During Her Majesty’s summer cruise the boatswain was responsible for the landing arrangements for picnics with the appropriate equipment which included two tents, ground sheets, a shovel, gas lamps, blankets and ‘Games (buckets, spades, balls)’. One feels rather more warmly towards Princess Margaret after discovering that her trips to the ballet or theatre would be followed by picnicky dinners: ‘a cold chicken with lovely salads’ or a ‘picnic with steaks’, details Anabel unearthed from Leo Groden’s My Royal Cookbook.
Indeed, her research has been formidable. For most of us our acquaintance with Elizabeth David consists of An Omelette and a Glass of Wine but Anabel has dug deep to find David’s description of the Maharajah of Jaipur’s picnic in 1937 consisting of cold curry of boar’s head (without the eyes) and a hamper of whisky.
I certainly can never resist the allure of P.G. Wodehouse and Anabel recalls young Bingo’s paean to a picnic in Jeeves and the Old School Chum: “There’s ham sandwiches,” he proceeded, a strange, soft light in his eyes, ‘and tongue sandwiches and potted meat sandwiches and game sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs and lobster and a cold chicken and sardines and a cake and a couple of bottles of Bollinger and some old brandy.” “It has the right ring,” Bertie said “And if we want a bite to eat after that, of course we can go to the pub.”
Picnic Crumbs is sprinkled with charming recipes – Coronation Chicken, Bloody Mary, Asparagus Rolls – that are balm to the soul, although I might pass on the udder sandwich. My personal picnic innovation is the wide-necked thermos – perfect for keeping new potatoes hot, buttery and minty to be eaten with Alderton ham marinaded in marmalade by Richard Craven-Smith-Milnes (available by post from Country Victuallers). What Anabel Loyd has achieved, with subtlety and gentle humour, is a chronicle of food fashion with a bracing whiff of the great outdoors. As the modern picnic sadly owes more to M&S, Prêt and the disposable barbecue than to Mrs David or Nanny, mistress of the egg sandwich, who does not long for curried boar’s head?
Victoria Mather London, May 2012







Picnic Crumbs
A Gathering of Picnics, Packed Lunches and Provisions
at Home and Abroad
‘I can recall in vivid detail the sense of freedom, the anticipation of meals that would be different, the feeling of summer heat as I stretched on the grass. Never has the whirr of a mowing-machine been so suggestive of holiday freedom. Going away for a youngster can be a crescendo of pleasures. They merge in a succession of joys. There is an unconscious retransfiguration of things both trite and commonplace. Somehow I always associate such reactions with picnic days. Picnic baskets have a spell of their own. Hard-boiled eggs are hardly a delicacy, yet they taste differently when eaten in the open air, particularly when the salt is produced in a screw of newspaper. Nobody wishes to devour sandwiches for ever, but it is remarkable how delectable two smeary pieces of bread encasing unappetizing cold beef can become. The meal has almost sacramental significance. As a connoisseur once remarked, the essential quality of a picnic is the doing of perfectly normal things in an abnormal place or manner. It is that quality that appeals so strongly to youth, the mental picture of adults squatting in a circle round baskets and glasses and bottles.’
(Louis T. Stanley, The London Season )





T his book is for friends and family and especially for Heather, who taught me to make mayonnaise and made unsurpassable picnics; for Bobs, who took food very seriously, and for Mrs Macneil, who first allowed me to mess about in her kitchen.
I was inspired by two people who drew my attention to a contemporary gap in what I had thought to be an already crowded market. The first, a friend of my youngest daughter, eating her way through the home-made minced duck samosas, products of rather mixed Asian ancestry, that were part of a parents’ day picnic last year, said: ‘These are absolutely delicious, where did you get them?’ The other, my eldest daughter’s boyfriend, the artist Peter Haslam Fox, suggested a picnic book on the basis of my austerity family Christmas present, a small miscellany of Christmas snippets à la John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Cracker and called ‘Pudding Crumbs’. Fox thought that ‘Picnic Crumbs’ should be the next step and this latest effort is greatly improved by his whimsical and wonderful illustrations.







Introduction
‘“The war is no picnic”, someone will remark from time to time, and that phrase alone proves how high a place the picnic holds in man’s affection. It offers through the generations a quiet and rustic ideal, attainable only during spells of utter calm, snatched from the world’s restlessness and disillusion. Indeed a picnic resembles an essay in that its whole purpose is to afford pleasure; and it therefore seems appropriate that an essay, or part of one, should be dedicated to it ... Yet nobody I think, would pretend that it was other than an ugly word, picnic, verging on chit-chat or snip-snap ... It is, in fact, a busy, self-assertive, mediocre word that has sacrificed all dignity, but without attaining any compensatory sense of ease. Imagine the loss to us had Manet, for example, name his famous picture Le Pique-Nique instead of Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Again, to eat al fresco sounds much more delightful than to picnic – but then it does not possess quite the same significance; to eat out-of-doors is not enough, otherwise the every snack of every tramp would constitute a picnic ... No, it implies – though this shade of meaning is contained in no definition of the word to be found in a dictionary – that one has a home and eats out-of-doors by choice.’
(Osbert Sitwell, Picnics and Pavilions )






A book of picnics and picnic food is nothing new. There are manuals, the ‘essential picnic recipes’ with lists of foods for every outdoor occasion; volumes on picnics in art and literature, glossy with photographs an