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The first time I came across a cookery book was when I was about ten. It was not the cookery that attracted me; it was just the size of the book. It was a biggish sort of book and the title, Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book, made me curious.
But looking into it at that time there was no encouragement for me to explore it further. But the title stuck in my mind for a very long time and I had the impression that Mrs Beeton was a crotchety sort of old fogey who had decided to pass on her knowledge in her declining years to the younger generation.
But imagine my surprise when I discovered recently in a Guardian article that she was just a 'slip of a girl who couldn't cook'! and had passed away at the age of 29, that her recipes were not her own but ones she had collected and that she was only the editor of this collection. It was her husband, a publisher, who had given her the go ahead to do this work.
And come what may, generations of the English middle classes in the middle of the 19th century (that was the time her book appeared) had learnt their table manners as laid down by Mrs Beeton.
For her book taught them not only how to bake and eat a cake but many other things like how to run a Victorian household with advice on fashion, the management of servants, childcare, animal husbandry, and a thousand and one other things, so much so her cookbook first appeared under the name of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.
The book became so popular that it was soon after referred to under the more comfortable name of Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book.
The appearance of Mrs Beeton's book may have been timely at this period of English social history. Although the British imperialists had set out at this time to civilise countries like Ceylon, the administrators that were sent out during this period were of that very middle class that Mrs Beeton was trying to reach to acquaint them with the social graces that they were apparently lacking in.
And whatever social graces our own English-educated middle class, too, acquired at this time, may have come from the long reach of Mrs Beeton's cookbook. And that may be how Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book happened to be lying around our household in my childhood.
To leave Mrs Beeton aside for a while, this whole business of eating to live or living to eat may have been finally decided for the world only after the middle classes in England came into their own. For today the whole world seems to be living to eat and not eating to live - the dominant philosophy that is ruling our planet and has become the source of trouble to all those who are trying to run the world today.
Things seem to have been so different in the past. Take the Golden Age of Greece, for instance. The way the ancient Greeks lived, there was very little gold as such for the people; it only recalls what Mahatma Gandhi said about the required rule of life being - plain living and high thinking; just the opposite of what we are having today, high living and no thinking. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, they all lived a simple and frugal life, living on what is called flat bread, the equivalent of our 'pol roti'.
The leavened variety which we call 'paan' was only eaten on special occasions. As the picture drawn by Professor Kitto in his excellent book The Greeks tells us, this is how they ate in the Golden Age of Greece: "The Greek muleteer today can keep going for days on a loaf of bread and a few olives, and his ancestor of classical times was just as frugal. Barley meal, olives, a little wine, fish as a relish, meat only on high holidays -such was the normal diet."
And such being the state of affairs in the Golden Age of Greece there was no need perhaps for the services of a Mrs Beeton. My search for the origins of cookery books made me look up Larousse Gastronomique described as the World's Greatest Cookery Encyclopaedia.
There were descriptions of how certain European foods originated but nothing about the history of cookery books. There is an interesting story about the origin of the French roll called croissant, which I must narrate before I proceed further.
For one tantalising moment, Europe was about to fall into the hands of the invading Turkish army. Miraculously, as it were, Europe rallied and saved itself from this attack. To celebrate the event European bakers made a roll in the form of a crescent moon, which was the emblem on the flag of the invading Muslim armies, to indicate that the cross had finally triumphed over the crescent.
As I turned away from my search for the first cookery books I found a compatriot, the late Dr. Punchi Banda Sannasgala, one time Editor of the still unfinished National Sinhala Dictionary, who had also been in search of a cookery book, the one used by the cooks in the royal household of the Kings in Kandy.
He had visited many of the archives in Europe and was lucky to find not one but two, the first in the inevitable British Museum in the Hugh Nevill collection and the other in Denmark's Copenhagen. There is an intriguing story about how the Danish copy of the cookery book of the Kandyan Palace came to be acquired by the Danes.
Dr Sannasgala writes that Dr. C.E. Godakumbura, who was himself researching in Copenhagen at the same time, told him that a Danish envoy who was visiting our King in Kandy, was quite taken up with the aroma of food, redolent of the famed spices of the East, floating from the royal kitchen. When he inquired about it, he was told of the existence of this cookery book, which he then managed to secure a copy of, according to the story, through undiplomatic means.
The Kandyan cookery book, however, is very unlike Mrs Beeton's. The biggest difference being it consists of 332, not just recipes, but recipes and advice put into verse. The metrical form in the older literatures was not confined to literary presentations only. It was used to present philosophical thinking like the Dhammapada as well as the finer points in Ayurvedic treatises.
Human memory was used to a greater extent then than today being far superior even to computer memory as retained in its software. Besides, it was absolutely free and no foreign exchange involved.
The 332 verses tell you not only how to prepare dishes, but also the usefulness of the kind of ingredients to be used not merely for its aroma but for their keeping qualities, minimising the spoilage of food. Also, the preparations of dishes were, in most instances, designed to keep a balance between the body's divergent humours.
What did our kings eat and how did they conform to the religious requirements they were called upon to observe ? Like most of the kings' subjects including the king, everyone did try to meet the religious requirements. Killing of animals was discouraged and no domesticated animals were brought up, accordingly, to be killed for eating. But no tears seem to have been shed for the animals in the wild.
The palace cooks, therefore, laid before the kings such delicacies as wild boar, venison, dressed peacock flesh as well as iguana and porcupine. The God of Kataragama, who is described as having six faces, twelve arms and riding a peacock, seems to have cast a blind eye to what his devotees were doing to his sacred mount.
Dr Sannasgala says that in his search for cookery books he came across a reference to the existence of another Sinhala cookery book under the Dambadeniya kings in the 12th Century, but until that is found the 'Soopasastra Potha' he has edited will remain unique.
This book has been dated to the 18th century when the Nayakkar kings who came from Andhra Pradesh held the reins of power. This may account for the use of asafoetida and camphor in the preparation of certain dishes which are no longer in use today in Sinhala cookery. In the course of editing this book he makes a number of allusions to modern day food habits of the Sinhala people, which, he says, are the same as recorded in the classical literature of the Polonnaruwa period.
Kandavuru Siritha, he says, records the daily activities of Parakrama Bahu II. There is a brief reference to the right royal spread before His Majesty for his midday meal, which consisted of a "full course... of a number of cooked rice varieties, curry dishes, fruits, sweetmeats and beverages." This reference may have led to the popular Sinhala belief that 32 dishes were prepared for a king's single meal.
Courtesy The Ceylon Daily News of Tuesday, 5 February 2008.
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