Five... dishes served at the Victorian dinner party inside a dinosaur
Mock turtle, pigeon pie and extreme jelly
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter…
This edition’s a handful of dishes you might like to consider putting on the menu if you ever host a dinner party inside a dinosaur.
When reading up on Victorian revelry for this piece: Five times 19th century London partied extremely hard I came across an 1853 dinner party for the ages.
To recap: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who designed the original Crystal Palace animal statues, sent out an invitation to dinner inside a dinosaur: “Mr. B. Waterhouse Hawkins solicits the honour of Professor ____’s company at dinner, in the Iguanodon, on the 31st of December, 1853, at four p.m.”
‘The incredible request was written on the wing of a Pterodactyle, spread before a most graphic etching of the Iguanodon, with his socially-loaded stomach, so practicably and easily filled, as to tempt all to whom it was possible to accept, at such short notice, this singular invitation.’
— from The Illustrated London News, 7th January 1854: read more in this article about the event from Professor Joe Cain
Guests sat in the hollow stomach of the 30-tonne Iguanodon, eating pigeon pie and French plums — full menu in this History Press article — and drinking port till the new year rolled in. The Iguanodon itself, with some restorations along the way, survived the centuries and still stands in Crystal Palace, now grade I listed.
In honour of the holiday season — and in case any of you are planning your own 7-course, 32-dish celebration in a highly niche venue this NY — I’ve picked out a handful of dishes from the menu to help you hit the holiday season as extremely hard as our Victorian forefathers.
Mock turtle soup
The 1882 book Modern Cookery for Private Families by Eliza Acton has outstandingly detailed and dense instructions for preparing a mock turtle soup.
The book’s free to read on Project Gutenberg and fantastic for dipping into just to admire the effort, technical skill and precision that went into cooking even what were considered pretty everyday dishes.
The section below covers roughly one fifth of the steps involved for this dish, and that doesn’t even involve her nonchalant asides, for example around de-boning the calf’s head, which according to Acton: ‘…is so simple and easy a process, that the cook may readily accomplish it with very little attention. Let her only work the knife close to the bone always, so as to take the flesh clean from it, instead of leaving large fragments on. The jaw-bone may first be removed, and the flesh turned back from the edge of the other…’
Mock turtle soup was a dish that, by the mid 19th century had mostly replaced actual turtle soup in British affections, as overfishing in the West Indies had driven turtles to near-extinction, and raised the price of turtle meat to be out of reach for most people. Mock turtle rose in popularity instead, a mix of meats and organs — including calf’s head, brain, beef neck, veal, beef tongue, ham — that apparently replicated a lot of the flavour and taste of turtle soup.