The Book of Household Management by Mrs Beeton

Often and erroneously referred to as Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook, The Book of Household Management has a great deal more to it than just recipes. A portion of the book is set over to the duties of staff, including those responsible for the cellar:

2163. ...but the real duties of the butler are in the wine-cellar; there he should be competent to advise his master as to the price and quality of the wine to be laid in; "fine," bottle, cork, and seal it, and place it in the binns. Brewing, racking, and bottling malt liquors, belong to his office, as well as their distribution. These and other drinkables are brought from the cellar every day by his own hands, except where an under-butler is kept; and a careful entry of every bottle used, entered in the cellar-book; so that the book should always show the contents of the cellar.
2164. The office of butler is thus one of very great trust in a household. Here, as elsewhere, honesty is the best policy: the butler should make it his business to understand the proper treatment of the different wines under his charge, which he can easily do from the wine-merchant, and faithfully attend to it; his own reputation will soon compensate for the absence of bribes from unprincipled wine-merchants, if he serves a generous and hospitable master. Nothing spreads more rapidly in society than the reputation of a good wine-cellar, and all that is required is wines well chosen and well cared for; and this a little knowledge, carefully applied, will soon supply.
2165. The butler, we have said, has charge of the contents of the cellars, and it is his duty to keep them in a proper condition, to fine down wine in wood, bottle it off, and store it away in places suited to the sorts. Where wine comes into the cellar ready bottled, it is usual to return the same number of empty bottles; the butler has not, in this case, the same inducements to keep the bottles of the different sorts separated; but where the wine is bottled in the house, he will find his account, not only in keeping them separate, but in rinsing them well, and even washing them with clean water as soon as they are empty.
2166. There are various modes of fining wine: isinglass, gelatine, and gum Arabic are all used for the purpose. Whichever of these articles is used, the process is always the same. Supposing eggs (the cheapest) to be used,—Draw a gallon or so of the wine, and mix one quart of it with the whites of four eggs, by stirring it with a whisk; afterwards, when thoroughly mixed, pour it back into the cask through the bunghole, and stir up the whole cask, in a rotatory direction, with a clean split stick inserted through the bunghole. Having stirred it sufficiently, pour in the remainder of the wine drawn off, until the cask is full; then stir again, skimming off the bubbles that rise to the surface. When thoroughly mixed by stirring, close the bunghole, and leave it to stand for three or four days. This quantity of clarified wine will fine thirteen dozen of port or sherry. The other clearing ingredients are applied in the same manner, the material being cut into small pieces, and dissolved in the quart of wine, and the cask stirred in the same manner.
2167. To Bottle Wine.—Having thoroughly washed and dried the bottles, supposing they have been before used for the same kind of wine, provide corks, which will be improved by being slightly boiled, or at least steeped in hot water,—a wooden hammer or mallet, a bottling-boot, and a squeezer for the corks. Bore a hole in the lower part of the cask with a gimlet, receiving the liquid stream which follows in the bottle and filterer, which is placed in a tub or basin. This operation is best performed by two persons, one to draw the wine, the other to cork the bottles. The drawer is to see that the bottles are up to the mark, but not too full, the bottle being placed in a clean tub to prevent waste. The corking-boot is buckled by a strap to the knee, the bottle placed in it, and the cork, after being squeezed in the press, driven in by a flat wooden mallet.
2168. As the wine draws near to the bottom of the cask, a thick piece of muslin is placed in the strainer, to prevent the viscous grounds from passing into the bottle.
2169. Having carefully counted the bottles, they are stored away in their respective binns, a layer of sand or sawdust being placed under the first tier, and another over it; a second tier is laid over this, protected by a lath, the head of the second being laid to the bottom of the first; over this another bed of sawdust is laid, not too thick, another lath; and so on till the binn is filled.
2170. Wine so laid in will be ready for use according to its quality and age. Port wine, old in the wood, will be ready to drink in five or six months; but if it is a fruity wine, it will improve every year. Sherry, if of good quality, will be fit to drink as soon as the "sickness" (as its first condition after bottling is called) ceases, and will also improve; but the cellar must be kept at a perfectly steady temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, but about 55° or 60°, and absolutely free from draughts of cold air.

She also explains the correct way of opening wine and champagne:

2192. In opening wine, let it be done quietly, and without shaking the bottle; if crusted, let it be inclined to the crusted side, and decanted while in that position. In opening champagne, it is not necessary to discharge it with a pop; properly cooled, the cork is easily extracted without an explosion; when the cork is out, the mouth of the bottle should be wiped with the napkin over the footman's arm.

Now you won’t find any of that in Nigella...

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

In the alternate universe of Carey’s 2010 novel, Olivier de Garmont is a thinly disguised cipher of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political thinker who travelled to the USA in the nineteenth century and wrote Democracy in America after his observations there. In this version of events, Olivier is accompanied by a frustrated artist called Parrot, who has the misfortune to end up working as the former’s servant.

Carey flits between the two narrators – cynical, world weary Parrot and cosseted, naïve Olivier – although it could be argued that the whole text is in fact written by Parrot, who acts as Olivier’s secretary in an effort to hide the fact of the noble’s atrocious handwriting.

In his travels across the US, Olivier meets and falls in love with Amelia Godefroy, the daughter of a prison owner in Connecticut. Smitten, he allows himself to be taken on a tour of the south by his prospective father-in-law, a journey that does not bode well for his already parlous health.

After several weeks on the road, they make it as far as South Carolina, where their guest house boasts a wine list of some providence:

I forget the name of our hotel except it was considered the best place in Charleston. Godefroy had written to secure our lodging while we were still in Georgia. What he wrote, I do not know, but clearly an impression had been made, for although we arrived late at night we were greeted with much bowing and scraping and a boy was sent to the chef with an order to keep the fires alive. The landlord then held us under close engagement – I presumed to cover any likely delay in the kitchen – so by the time we were seated at table we knew he had purchased the cellar of the late Thomas Jefferson and had himself driven all the way to Monticello to collect his loot, sleeping beneath his carriage on return as he feared he would be robbed of his treasure by bandits or oenophiles or worse. Who knows how much he paid for his fifty cases? More, certainly, than he could afford, for we had been but a moment in the dining room – a place of extraordinary pretension – when hew as looming over us ready to discuss his carte de vin.

It’s the perfect opportunity for Olivier to indulge in a touch of wine snobbery:

He presented us each with his wine list explaining, ha-ha, that it would have been a good deal longer if my countryman Lafayette had not had such pleasure from it. I thought him tedious. Godefroy raised an apologetic eyebrow as the man happily recounted how the late president had died impoverished, and he had managed to get a great bargain from the estate. “The prices, monsieur,” the landlord said to me, “will gratify you, I am sure.” Grave-robbing to one side, the list saddened me, for it was not what you would expect in the cellar of a head of state. There was a Bergasse, a wine mixed together in some cellar in Marseille which was labelled claret in the English manner, also some Blanquette de Limoux, a great deal of Minervois and Languedoc. Only a Beune Grèves Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus seemed to rise above the ordinary.

Clearly the evening has not got off to a good start, and when Olivier finally leaves America, he has failed to secure Godefroy’s daughter’s hand in marriage...

The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

I complained last week of having read a run of dud books, but this brilliant debut proved a glorious exception. I picked it up on a whim when passing the recommended titles pile in the local library and was hooked from the off.

Dissolute Glasgow auctioneer Rilke gets a lucky break when he’s offered the contents of a big house for clearance. It’s easy money, the furniture and nick-nacks are of high quality and he’s bound to make a tidy sum in fees. The elderly lady who has hired him is clearing the house for her recently deceased brother. She only asks that Rilke will be discreet. Of course he will...

Up in the old boy’s bedroom Rilke finds a hatch into an attic. With keys for the whole building, he makes his way up the ladder:

I was standing in a long, thin room, perhaps half the length of the house. Bare floorboards, clean for an attic. The ceiling began midway up the walls, angling to a peak. Three small windows that would let in a little light during the day. Along the right-hand wall were racks of metal shelving holding tidily stacked cardboard boxes. The left wall was covered in waist-high, dark oak bookcases, books neatly arranged. In the centre were a plain office desk and a chair, to their left a high-backed armchair, comfortable but scruffy, inherited from some other room, beside it a bottle of malt, Lagavulin. Dead man’s drink. I unscrewed the cap and inhaled a quick scent of iodine and peat which caught the back of my throat. It was the good stuff, right enough. There was no cup so I too the end of my shirt and rubbed it along the mouth of the bottle before taking a good slug.

Rilke has stumbled on an Aladdin’s cave of pornography and erotica. Worth a pretty penny some of it as well, although he’s been sworn to secrecy if he finds anything scandalous. Even so, he gives the drawers and boxes a good going over. He finds a strange card for a ‘camera club’ before realising it’s probably time to knock off for the day:

I considered stopping, almost left right there. It was the whisky that drew me back. One more drink, leave the van in the driveway until morning, last orders at the Melrose, then a walk through the park and see what gave. It was the good stuff. A reward for working so hard, being clever enough to arrange a big deal, a pat on the back from me to me. I should have known myself: that bottle was too full and I was too empty.

His next discovery is a bundle of sexually horrific photographs. Ignoring his better judgement to leave well alone, Rilke decides to investigate, and begins a disturbing journey into Glasgow’s underworld...

Guernica by Dave Boling

It’s highly frustrating that the first post I’ve managed in several weeks is from a dud, but I’ve had a run of bad luck with books in the past month, partly my own fault, partly the choice of reading groups. Well, that’s the way it goes.

Guernica is the back story to the terrible dive bombing raid that the Luftwaffe perpetrated on the Basque town of the same name. Picasso’s most famous painting is a vision of the hell that took place there, so it’s a shame that a novel based on the atrocity and the work it inspired is such a mess of hackneyed prose and clichéd characterisation.

Even so, there are moments of diversion. The heroine’s dance on top of a wine glass during a traditional Basque dance is lively enough, and took my mind off the fact that there are still over 200 pages to go at this point:

Miren alone was the focus of the next dance, and cheers rose when she gathered a glass off a nearby table, filled it with wine, and placed it in the middle of the dance area. To a quickening beat, she stepped lightly on all sides of the glass. Without looking down, she stepped over it and beside it, side to side, front to back, barely missing it as her feet wove an intricate pattern. The breadth of her skirts at all times impeded her vision of the glass, making her avoidance of it an act of unfathomable precision. Then, impossibly, she rose and seemed to hover before gently landing atop the glass, one slipper on each side of the lip. And she was off again, levitating, flitting on each side, and then once more leaped back onto the glass, alighting softly with bent knees. Miguel was stunned to watch a girl so feathery and deft that she could dance on the lip of a wine glass. It was not stemmed crystal or a delicate flute, but it was nonetheless glass, and she danced so joyfully atop it, oblivious to the possibility that it could shatter beneath her. She not only didn’t break the glass but didn’t spill a drop of wine, either.A final leap, on and off, coincided with the last bar of music, and a greater cheer echoed across the courtyard. Accepting the applause with a deep curtsy, Miren retrieved the wineglass and drained the deep-red contents in a single gulp. She saluted the cheering crowd with the empty glass and licked her lips in theatrical enjoyment of the wine.

It’s a real feat and Miguel is suitably impressed:

“How could you possibly dance on a glass?” Miguel asked before she could speak. “Well, first you have to get a very strong wine,” Miren said.

Now there’s a thought...

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins by Rupert Everett

There are a few books that I come across that fall into the category of ‘too good not to share’. I was only partway into Everett’s first volume of memoirs when I found myself sending paragraphs by email to friends. It really is that good...

His account of making the film Hearts of Fire qualifies it for this blog as he seems to have spent the whole shoot permanently soused, although that could be said for quite a few other occasions. The finished film was a disaster, the full-on, no-survivors crash of my career, as he puts it. He hasn’t made The Next Best Thing with Madonna by this point...

Things don’t really get off to a good start with Hearts of Fire, despite Bob Dylan being cast. Everett really doesn’t gel with his leading lady, and when it comes for them to film a ‘bedroom’ scene, she runs screaming from the set. Help is at hand from his make up team, however:

Meinir sidled up to the bed, as the producer, the director and the lighting cameraman stood around my naked body, deciding what they could shoot instead. She winked as she opened her little Aladin’s cave of a kit. Inside gleamed a bottle of vodka. Well, if one couldn’t get legless after one’s leading lady had fled the lovemaking scene, when could one? I settled down on the floor in the corner of the set and drank the whole bottle with the help of hair and make-up; when the powers that be finally decided on the next scene, I could barely walk.

Meinir seems to be keeping the cast properly refreshed, including the star, Dylan, whose tipple is Jim Beam:

One day Meinir was walking across the lot at Shepperton when a bottle broke inside her kit and began to leak, leaving an incriminating and odorous trail in her wake. The producer was following behind. Pat and I were behind him. We watched in horror as he bent down and sniffed. “Meinir, what have you got in your kit?” he asked. Meinir gasped slightly as she observed the stream of whisky dripping from Aladdin’s cave. But this girl was quick on her feet. “I’m washing my brushes. It’s alcohol. Must have spilt! Oh dear, I’d better nip back to the truck, hadn’t I?” And she beat a retreat before our producer could move on to the next question.

The production moves to Toronto, where they are to film a live show in front of a crowd. Unfortunately, they have time to kill before the shooting starts, and make use of the minibar in Dylan’s trailer:

We all piled into his trailer before the show and got incredibly drunk. Bob strummed on his guitar. Assistants came and went. Richard dropped in. By the time we got to the wings we were in extremely high spirits, but Bob was too wobbly to make it up the very steep steps to the stage.

Somehow they keep it together long enough to film the gig. The shoot finally comes to the end with one last scene to do:

On the last day, we shot a scene in a limo... We played the scene over and over. We chatted between takes. We had drinks in the scene and they were constantly refilled – the real thing, needless to say. The props guys who were in charge of administering the drinks didn’t even ask. Apple juice was for babies. Bob dozed off, sinking into himself like a parrot. We must have been there for a couple of hours. When we finished the first assistant opened the car door. Bob climbed out. He looked around, squinting. “Where’s the hotel?” he said, apparently confused, thinking he had been driven home.

The end result wasn’t a hit, or, in Everett’s words:

The film brought my career to a standstill...

Millennium People by JG Ballard

Middle-class revolt... Millenium People is a Ballardian examination of the vacuity of bourgeois existence, and the subsequent search for meaning that leads professionals in their thirties and forties to start a random bombing campaign in London.

David Markham, a psychologist living in North London, is drawn into the conspiracy after his ex wife is killed by a bomb at Heathrow Airport. Going under cover, he infiltrates a group of dissatisfied home owners living in Chelsea Marina who, fed up with negative equity and the exorbitant cost of living, have begun to wage a campaign of arson against video stores in the area. Suspecting that they are behind the larger, more deadly explosion at Heathrow, he quickly gets involved, putting smoke bombs onto tape racks in Blockbuster and quickly graduating to helping his new friends set fire to the National Film Theatre.

As the South Bank disintegrates into an inferno, Markham flees the scene, already abandoned by the others. He finds himself on the Millennium Wheel, the perfect observatory for his crimes:

I stepped into the gondola and leaned on the rail overlooking the river, almost too weary to breathe. While we moved along the boarding platform an off-duty waiter swung himself through the door, a tray bearing two champagne flutes in his hand. He placed the tray on the seat and sat beside it, searching his pockets for a cigarette. As we rose above County Hall the fires lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark water of the Thames. A huge caldera had opened beside Waterloo Bridge and was devouring the South Bank Centre. Billows of smoke leaned across the river, and I could see the flames reflected in the distant casements of the Houses of Parliament, as if the entire Palace of Westminster was about to ignite from within. The waiter pointed to a champagne glass on the tray. Without thanking him, I tasted the warm wine. The bubbles stung my lips, cracked by the fierce heat in the auditorium. I though of the smoke-swept corridors lined with portraits of the film world’s greatest stars. The fires set by Vera Blackburn had taken hold, burning fiercely throughout the NFT, engulfing the smiles of James Stewart and Orson Welles, Chaplin and Joan Crawford. My memories of them seemed to rise with the turning Wheel, escaping from a depot of dreams that was giving its ghosts to the night. I crossed the gondola, my back to the smoking waiter and the Thames, and searched the streets around County Hall. I almost expected to see Kay and Joan Chang darting from one doorway to another as the police cars sped past, sirens wailing down the night. Needless to say, they had escaped without warning me, through the riverside entrance to the theatre café, which they had left open to create a fire-spurring draught. The first smoke had reached the windows of the gondola, laying itself across the curved panes. I began to cough, tasting the acrid vapour that had churned outside the manager’s office. I retched onto the rail, and spilled the champagne over the floor at my feet.

The waiter is in fact Richard Gould, a disgraced doctor who acts as the movement’s Svengali. Markham already suspects how far Gould is prepared to go, the question is, how far is Markham prepared to follow him?

A fantastic and darkly humorous novel, Millenium People also contains this gem from the author in the Q&A at the back:

Q: How do you organize your time? Do you write by timetable? A: Yes. Unless you’re disciplined, all you end up with is a lot of empty wine bottles. All through my career I’ve written 1,000 words a day – even if I’ve got a hangover. You’ve got to discipline yourself if you’re a professional. There’s no other way.

I’ll raise a glass to that.

The Time Machine by HG Wells

One of Wells most famous books, The Time Machine is an account by a scientist known only as the time traveller, who relates to his dinner guests one night the story of his visit to the far flung future.

His guests are waiting for him to join them at the dinner table when he appears at the door in a dreadful state:

He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to me greyer — either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it — a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in silence, expecting him to speak.
He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his face. “What on earth have you been up to, man?” said the Doctor.

Small wonder he’s thirsty. He has just spent over a week in the year 802,701 where the human race has split into two – the innocent, childlike Eloi, and the cave-dwelling, photosensitive Morlocks who prey on them. It has been a trying experience, to say the least:

The Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with his fingernail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate away, and looked round us. “I suppose I must apologize,” he said. “I was simply starving. I've had a most amazing time.”

His account is incredible; the future of the human race depicted as degenerate and ultimately doomed. The time traveller finishes his sojourn on a dying planet Earth, where the last living things, now little more than jellyfish, flop about on the blood red shoreline.

The Time Machine’s influence is undeniable. Time travel in fiction starts here, and with the brassy finish of Victorian engineering on eponymous time machine itself, arguably, so does Steampunk...