Day 5 Regency Romance?

I have just watched Emma

Emma, now out on DVD, Director: Autumn de Wilde, Screenwriter: Eleanor Catton.

I have just watched Emma. I had been rather reluctant to try it partly out of stinginess, because Sky wanted nearly sixteen quid for it, and partly because all the reviews commented on its use of nudity. (Nudity? Emma? Surely, not!) I imagined it would be like the dreadful, raunchy version of Mansfield Park. Anyway, Sky halved its price and it was raining, so I succumbed.

I loved it. I loved the way it looked. I loved the way the characters actually seemed to inhabit the great houses, moving around them naturally and behaving as one does at home.

I loved the fact that Harriet was not just a passive foil for Emma, but a bouncy, jolly girl -  which made Robert Martin’s devotion to her completely plausible.

I especially loved the fact  that Emma wasn’t really very nice. She was snobby, manipulative and a bitch, aspects of her character played down in most dramatisations that I have seen, but which are firmly there in the book. She is also charming and capable of learning from her mistakes. In other words, she is a fully rounded character.

Initially I thought Johnny Flynn was too young to play Mr Knightley, then I looked him up on Google and he is thirty-seven, which is about right, and thirteen or fourteen years older than Anya Taylor-Joy, which, again is about right. Another instance of growing old – everyone under fifty looks too young, oh dear!

The nudity that excited so many critics was Johnny Flynn’s and very nice it was too, but it lasted barely a minute (I didn’t time it, but it seemed very short, too short!) It was not gratuitous but one of the factors that made you feel that you were glimpsing into their lives.

The story was told not in a long flow of narrative, but in a series of brief, sometimes fleeting, scenes that were visually very beautiful. In some ways it was like watching a nature documentary where the camera visits the wild life scene regularly enough for us to grasp what is going on, but is, in fact, showing life in a series of vignettes. I can understand some people not liking this, but it worked well for me. It sharpened the narrative conveying a lot of information succinctly, without the danger of becoming laboured and over long. There is a scene where Harriet and her friends are playing a game which ends with Harriet face down in a cake. The camera pulls away from Harriet and we see that Emma, formal and poised, has entered the room. Everything you need to know about the characters and their social relationship is in that shot.

There were recurrent visual set pieces – the Parlour boarders from Mrs Goddard’s school, red caped and bonneted, trotting around the village, perfectly co-ordinated in time to the background music.

It is very well cast. Miranda Hart excels herself playing Miss Bates. Miss Bates is rarely allowed to shine as a character, being used merely as a plot device to show Emma’s development from spoilt child to maturity. In the book, she is much more than that. Yes, she is a comic character, but we are aware of her circumstances and the difficulties of her life from the start, so that when Emma is rude we understand exactly what a solecism it is. Miranda Hart is given full rein to make Miss Bates plausible. We see how lonely she is, how she tries to take pleasure from the smallest things and  how desperately she wants to be friends with Emma. At Box Hill, her reaction to Emma’s rudeness – brave smile covering misery and hurt and the conviction that she must have done something to deserve Emma’s behaviour, make Knightley’s anger the only possible response.

Another character, usually a cipher, hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse, is made suddenly human by Bill Nighy in a very short, silent, snapshot of a scene with Emma after her return from Box Hill.

I enjoyed both the Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Beckinsale versions of Emma, but they were always  - versions of Emma. This film, even though it remains very close to the original text, is not a ‘version’ of anything. It flies by itself, as an independent creation. It is Emma.

Food

Syllabub

Syllabub is the go-to pudding for all historical novelists. So what is it?

According to Felicity Cloake, syllabub is a 17th-century dessert that takes its name from the dry white wines of Sillery in the Champagne region of France, and from the Elizabethan slang for fizz, ‘bub’.

Gary Rhodes claims that Charles II kept cows in St James’s Park in case he fancied a syllabub while out riding. Apparently the recipe was to milk the cow straight into a pot of brandy. There are recipes for a kind of pudding made like this, but food historian Ivan Day discovered that it:

“produces a result that differs radically from 20th-century expectations of what a syllabub should be. Although a bubbly froth initially forms on the top of the liquid, this quickly subsides and the mixture separates into a creamy whey below a floating mass of clotted, stringy curd, of a kind more likely to grace a baby’s bib than a regal banqueting table. Unless your syllabub cow is extremely well groomed, the congealing milk will also be garnished here and there with cow hairs and the odd speck of bovine dandruff, a most unappetising prospect, at least to our modern eyes.”

Ivan Day’s essay on syllabub is fascinating. You can find it here: https://www.historicfood.com/Syllabubs%20Essay.pdf

In 1768 John Wesley used the phrase ‘whipped syllabub’ as an insult when describing English literature in comparison to the works of the Greeks and Romans. In other words English Lit is just froth when compared to the classics. Hmmm.

 

Whatever!!!

Here is the recipe:

Serves 4-6

·      200ml medium dry riesling

·      5 tbsp honey or caster sugar

·      1 unwaxed lemon, zested and juiced

·      3 tbsp brandy

·      300ml whipping cream

·      3 egg whites

 1.     Warm the wine and stir in the honey until it has just dissolved. Finely grate in the lemon zest and leave to cool completely, then stir in the brandy and lemon juice.

2.     Tip the boozy mixture into a large bowl and slowly pour in the cream, whisking furiously, until it thickens to very soft peaks. ‘Slowly’ is the important word here, too fast and the mixture will curdle. Taste and adjust flavourings as necessary.

3.     In a clean bowl, whisk the egg whites to soft peaks, then fold gently through the cream mixture.

4.     Divide between glasses and chill for two to three hours. It will keep a day or two in the fridge. It will separate, but at this stage that doesn’t matter. You will have a creamy mixture floating on boozy whey. If you allow it to curdle earlier you get cottage cheese sitting in a puddle of booze. You can play around with this pudding by altering the flavourings. Try a liqueur instead of the brandy. Try an apricot brandy and decorate with slivers of apricot.

Today’s painting:

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Gainsborough

This was painted in 1750, some sixty years before Emma was published but the class structure of society was not vastly different. In Pride and Prejudice, the Bingleys look down on Mr Gardiner, who, although cultured and rich, derives his money from trade not the land.

The sitters are Robert Andrews and his wife Frances. Andrews, although apparently a member of the landed gentry, came from trade. Most of the family fortune came from owning ships and trading with the colonies. His father bought him an estate, and in 1748 arranged a suitable marriage with Frances Carter. He was twenty-three and she was fifteen. Frances brought a lot of money to the marriage which allowed Andrews to buy even more land. In the two years after his marriage he had increased his landholdings to 3000 acres. This painting, shows the couple in a landscape which they own. It is Andrews saying “Look at me and all that I own!” They are landed gentry with a vengeance.

Painting portraits was Gainsborough’s bread and butter. It was where the money was, but he didn’t enjoy it particularly. His great love was painting landscapes. So it was lucky that in this case his client was equally keen for him to paint the fields.