For supper tonight we had "Beef Pot Roast" à la The Joy of Cooking, served with mashed potatoes and swiss chard. Cooking the roast was an all-afternoon project, well-seasoned with apprehension. My pot roasts usually turn out tough and dry, so I gave up buying roasts a long time ago. But for some reason the grocery store was selling round roasts for the price of ground beef this week, too good a deal to pass up. I knew that if the roast turned out there would be at least two very happy people at my table. Wonder of wonders, it did turn out! And the whole table was happy...about the beef, anyway.
The moment I decided to serve swiss chard with the beef & potatoes, as I visualized the brown-white-green on the plate, it struck me that we'd be eating the despised second course from Virginia Woolf's dinner at Fernham College: "Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes..." And, thinking with taste fully engaged (the roast smelled lovely), I could savor more acutely than otherwise the irony that Woolf's idea of a plain, dull dinner was my idea of a special, comfortable dinner.
So I had to ask myself: What has transformed Woolf's "homely trinity" into our rare indulgence? It's not the ingredients themselves: we're both eating beef, greens and potatoes. Is it changed cultural connotations? Changes in the foods themselves? Different cooking methods? Maybe a bit of all three.
On the cultural front, I can't help wondering if Virginia Woolf was being a snob about the potatoes and greens (maybe the beef, too, if she preferred partridge). Both potatoes and greens, I've been learning, are historically associated with the poorest people. In the early modern period, greens were the diet of those who couldn't afford anything else. As David Gentilcore explains in Pomodoro!, salad was what starving Italians ate, foraged from outside their back door. When salad appeared on elite tables in the 16th C, it was meant to stimulate, not satisfy, the appetite. Potatoes apparently shared rather similar connotations in 19th C Britain, being associated with the poor papist Irish. Michael Pollan describes British distaste for this underground food of poverty to excellent effect in the final section of his book The Botany of Desire (2002). Boiled potatoes also figured in the "appalling diet" of George Orwell's Wigan miners in 1937, I noticed - which sits oddly with Michael Pollan's observation that just potatoes and milk can provide a nutritionally adequate diet.
I suspect changed cultural connotations might be the biggest factor in our altered appreciation of the "homely trinity," but there are some practical differences to consider as well. It's the same food, and yet it's not. Presumably the beef I bought at the grocery store yesterday is a far cry from "the rumps of cattle in a muddy market" that Virginia Woolf could imagine in 1928, now that we grow cattle just to eat them. I suppose even our potatoes and swiss chard are different from the "sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge" that Woolf's "women with string bags" bargained for on Monday mornings. Michael Pollan has fairly convinced me of that, though he and Virginia Woolf seem to disagree over the relative quality of 1920s market sprouts (great grandmother's food, you know...).
As for how the food was cooked, I would think Virginia Woolf could tell the difference between poor cooking and poor food. Still, changes in cooking methods might also account for her dislike of beef, potatoes and greens. If the beef was tough and stringy, if it wasn't bathed in glossy gravy like ours was; if the potatoes were overcooked and gummy (it happened once when I was a kid - a pot of mashed potatoes that didn't turn out - they were terrible!); if the greens were bitter, as swiss chard from my garden sometimes is, or cooked to a mush, or poorly washed...well, all those things would make the "the homely trinity" pretty disgusting and, yes, genius-annihilating.
This blog post may not be the fancy fiction that Virginia Woolf required sole, wine and partridges to compose, but it's been great fun to think creatively, on a supper of beef, greens and potatoes, about how tastes have changed.
