"The Bloomsbury Cookbook"

Virginia Woolf, 1917. Photo by Ottoline Morrell. National Portrait Gallery.
Perhaps the most famous member of Bloomsbury.

What did the famous men and women of the Bloomsbury group eat? In The Bloomsbury Cookbook, author Jans Ondaatje Rolls used letters, memoirs, kitchen notebooks, interviews, and many other published and archived writings by the members of the group and by their cooks to answer this question. With every recipe, the author includes fascinating historic detail from the writings and art of the group. We learn how Virginia Woolf might walk into town to buy a chicken, we hear how they gardened or even hunted game, and there's occasional analysis of how Virginia Woolf used food imagery in her innovative writing.

The Bloomsbury Cookbook covers the Bloomsbury activities from the late 19th century until 1956 when the few survivors had their last meeting, and extends with a few notes about the group's grandchildren. Much to my liking: the many recipes in the book are mainly from the notes of the subjects or from contemporary cookbooks -- some handwritten recipes are reproduced as illustrations in the book.

To get a feel for the level of wonderful detail in the book, let's look at a single passage about the meals at Charleston, home of Vanessa and Clive Bell, in the 1930s:

"Anne Olivier Bell recalled that 'lunch on the whole was usually ham or some salads and bread and cheese and possibly some beer.' But a letter from Angelica Garnet reveals a more varied lunchtime diet: on Sundays, heavenly aromas of roast Southdown mutton, sirloin or ham wafted through the house and mingled with the sweet smell of hot apple pie, treacle tart, roly-poly pudding, spotted dog or queen of pudding. On Mondays, they ate the leftovers from the Sunday roast (always carved by Vanessa) together with a mixed salad (usually dressed by Duncan [Grant]), baked potatoes and pickled walnuts. On Tuesdays, there was fish -- haddock or cod -- and on Wednesdays, lamb or mutton. Grace [the cook] made a shepherd's pie on Thursdays. On Fridays, she made sausages and, on Saturdays, her half-day off, it was eggs and bacon. Harveys beer, or water, was available to drink, and a freshly brewed pot of strong coffee was always enjoed at the table at the end of each midday meal." (The Bloomsbury Cookbook, p. 272-273) 

Evidently the Boomsburys loved food and made it an important part of their very active life socializing and discussing the art, literature, and culture of the day, as shown in this and many passages in the book. For me, the illustrations, which appear on almost every page, are even more exciting than the recipes. Several of the Bloomsbury participants were highly recognized artists, such as Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, and Vanessa Bell, and all of them painted still lifes and other food scenes. Here are two of my favorites:

Dora Carrington, "The Servant Girl," 1917. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 99.

Vanessa Bell, "The Kitchen," 1943. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 173.

In the early days of the twentieth century, their upper-class and upper-middle-class way of life included cooks and housemaids who cooked their meals, did the grocery shopping, and more importantly did the heavy lifting such as carrying coal and pumping water for kitchens without modern conveniences. After the first World War, kitchens improved but social changes made it less likely to have many servants. (Another book on the topic is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, which treats this topic in even more detail: blogged here: Virginia Woolf's Kitchen.)

By organizing the book chronologically, Rolls manages to introduce the core Bloomsburys who met at Cambridge University around the turn of the twentieth century, and then to introduce the many other great writers, artists, and so on who were part of the group. The Cambridge students were all men: the Stephen brothers, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, and several others. The Stephen brothers introduced their fellow-students to their sisters (always said to be stunningly beautiful): Virginia and Vanessa, later known as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. If you have read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, you know that she very much regretted and resented that she had not been given the opportunity to study at Cambridge, but that's the way it was.

Duncan Grant, "Helen Anrep in the Dining Room at Charleston," 1945. The Bloomsbury Cookbook p. 339.

I loved reading this cookbook, including in many cases reading through the recipes -- though I haven't tried any of them so I can't speak to their usefulness. I feel as if I could really sense the presence of those cooks 100 years ago or so, in their maybe-inadequate kitchens, working on delicious meals. I've been a fan of Bloomsbury for a very long time, and I love the way that the core members challenged so many of the stodgy moral and intellectual constraints of Victorian England and broke out into a new way of living, including -- to some extent -- their meals. Note: my fellow-blogger and Bloomsbury fan Sherry did try recipes from the book. See this post: Chocolate Angelique.

As a very young woman, Virginia Woolf tested middle-class norms when she roomed with men who were not her relatives, having moved to the Bloomsbury area of London that gave the group its name. She and her sister violated many of the strictures of Victorian life and sexual mores. Virginia also baked bread, an activity she loved, as well as founding a publishing company where she set the type herself: both things that maybe a woman of her social class wouldn't have done a generation earlier. This book covers the social revolutions of the twentieth century in an absolutely wonderful way -- and it's totally readable!

A page from the book.

To conclude, here's a very apt quote from Dorothy Parker about the lives that are documented in this book: the Bloomsburys “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”

Book review © 2020 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

Photos credited to their sources.