Shaky puddings:
Fredrika Bremer's fictional way with food and drink.

by

Sarah Death

(First published in Swedish Book Review Supplement 2003: Food and Drink in Sweden and Swedish Literature. p 13-17.)
 

 My research on the novels of Fredrika Bremer was far behind me, but some quotations from Familjen H*** (1831, translated as The Colonel's Family, Norvik Press, 1995) and Grannarna (1837, The Neighbours) persisted in my head. There was one about the stimulating effects of a  'strengthening Arabian drink', coffee. There was another about a pudding which had to be placed a particular way on the table so the young hostess's mother would not see that one side had collapsed. And there was a third concerning a breakfast served by a new wife to some appreciative guests. It suddenly struck me that they were all to do with food and drink, but why were they proving so memorable?
   I knew I had had frequent recourse to recipe books of the mid-nineteenth century (Eliza Acton, Mrs Beeton) when translating Familjen H***. There is copious evidence of a good appetite and healthy interest in food in Bremer's extensive correspondence, but this was by no means a foregone conclusion in view of the contradictory messages about food which she received as a girl. The Bremer girls' mother thought they should aspire to the near-anorexic eighteenth century feminine ideal, and fed them very frugally, yet insisted that Fredrika and one of her sisters should be schooled in advanced cookery skills for their coming domestic role. Bremer also saw hunger and poverty first-hand when she decided as a young woman to embark on good works on her father's estate. So it is perhaps no surprise that, like Charles Dickens in his novels, she is often prompted by social conscience to dwell on the feast/famine contrast, for example in Presidentens döttrar (1834, The President's Daughters) where the narrator, a governess from a poor background, critically observes the abundance of rich food at her master's table, particularly in one dinner-party scene featuring oysters, lamb cutlets with green peas, cold pike with lobster tails, ices, pastries from Behrends and fresh peaches. Mamselle Rönnquist herself pointedly drinks milk instead of wine and selects a homely apple rather than hothouse fruit.
  It may be that food in Bremer's novels is memorable because she is writing from her own experience of cooking and eating. In this she is totally unlike Strindberg, a writer who is renowned for his food scenes but was in real life scarcely able to make his own coffee, let alone his dinner. Bellman, another Swedish writer known for literary eating and drinking, offers on closer inspection little in the way of physical sensations (there is even research to suggest he had no sense of taste or smell), whereas Bremer on occasions seems to take an almost sensual pleasure in her own food descriptions, as in her account in Familjen H*** of honey cakes ìflowing with aromatic juices 'and plum tart 'light, delicious, exquisite'.
   Nor does Bremer ever try to deny that food is a basic human need even for women, unlike her contemporary Charlotte Brontë, whose heroines at times seem free from all earthly appetites. While Brontë and, before her, Jane Austen, considered it vulgar for their female characters to speak appreciatively of food, Bremer in her ëfamily novelsí of the 1830s shows a healthy relish for good food and drink as a positive and socialising element in family life. Those female characters who refuse to eat are either ill or deeply unhappy, and their companions are seen eagerly trying to tempt their palates.
   Food is not just food in Bremer's novels, however, it is also a narrative device: used in imagery, in characterization and for creation of atmosphere. In characterization, it is a convenient and universally accessible short-cut to a person's nature and motivation. A good example was one of those memorable quotations in my head, from the epistolary novel The Neighbours. The central character Fransiska, who has just come to the district as the bride of the local doctor, writes to her friend of the first time she receives guests as mistress of her own home: 'I had prepared a little breakfast, and my eggs, my fresh butter, my foaming chocolate were praised in no small measure.' These words are a distillation, one could say, of her character, her role in the novel, and Bremer's food philosophy. Firstly, Fransiska is nervous in her new, housewifely role, and her reaction to the success of her breakfast reveals not only pride but also some relief. 
   Secondly, the breakfast is composed of fresh ingredients, with dairy produce from Fransiska's own animals. (We should recall here that Bremer campaigned for animal rights.) This novel eschews descriptions of sumptuous dinner parties and concentrates on simpler things, like the 'freshly-baked rye bread and milk warm from the cow' with which she hopes to feed up her sickly friend Serena. Party food at Fransiska's consists of home-made cakes and lemonade; or duck from the local lake, with fresh vegetables and salad. Fransiska swiftly develops her own garden into a virtual smallholding with cows, chickens, ducks and  turkeys, peas, beans and gooseberry bushes. The novel as a whole idealize s rural life in the province of Småland, and is a sustained hymn of praise to simple, locally-produced, home-cooked food, making Bremer a very early protagonist of environmental awareness and organic products. 
   Bremer also uses food as a direct characterization device, likening a person to a particular foodstuff; the most memorable example is again in The Neighbours, when Miss Hellevi Husgafvel prepares Fransiska for coming encounters with her new neighbours by comparing them to different dishes. According to Hellevi, they vary from watery soup to horseradish; she calls the doctor and Fransiska 'a plum pudding served with a sweet, fiery sauce, without which it would be far less tasty'. Fransiska secretly thinks of Hellevi as 'preserved ginger; if you eat it occasionally, you think: delicious! But you would not want it every day.'
   Similar culinary games with an underlying characterising function introduce Bremer's Hemmet (1839, The Home), which opens with the Frank family in a tableau round the dining table, a recurring motif in the text. They await the arrival of eldest son Henrik's new tutor, Jacobi. He reveals himself in the first few days as a thoughtless glutton with a vast intake of jam, sugar and coffee. But as he settles in and reveals himself as a likeable, skilful tutor, food is mentioned less and his eating resumes normal proportions. Interestingly, when he later courts the eldest daughter Louise and finds himself in competition with her rich cousin Thure, Thure is the one painted as a mindless, chomping figure, who hunts, shoots and farms on an almost industrial scale on his large estate. His food habits are quite alien to the home-baked Frank family, and Louise rejects his suit. Moderation in one's enjoyment of food is clearly an important indicator of strength of character in Bremer's view: in The Colonel's Family too, a self-indulgent fiancé is rejected in favour of a man to whom mental nourishment is more important than cutlets and sweetmeats.

Louise marries Jacobi, bears him nine children and at the end of the novel gathers three generations of her family about her, serving them pasties, milk, coffee, arrack punch and a 'really uplifting' lemonade. In other words, she triumphs as hostess and mistress of her house, but Bremer is well aware that the route to that triumph is not always smooth; she dwells in various of her novels on the domestic challenge facing a young wife, epitomized in the first, critical visit of her parents to the new home. This is where we return to the lopsided pudding in the opening quotation: it features in The Colonel's Family on just such a day. Newly-wed Emilia serves all her father's favourite dishes in an effort to impress, and even passes scrutiny with her mother when sister Julie turns the sub-standard pudding round just in time.
  Scenes like these with Emilia and Louise recur quite predictably in Bremer's 'family novels'. Adelaide in The President's Daughters and the slightly older Fransiska in The Neighbours both undergo variations of the test, the latter almost failing at the last hurdle because her biscuits melt together in the oven. But interestingly, if Bremer's women can survive these baptisms of fire they then find themselves in a position of considerable domestic power. The  authority of Beata Hvardagslag, the 'household adviser' and narrator of The Colonel's Family, has been much discussed in this light. The whole novel is suffused with the imagery of cooking: chapters have titles like 'Midday meal. A little of everything, all stewed together' and the resolution of the narrative is compared to the successful preparation of a clear wine jelly. At the external plot level, Beata's foolproof recipes and common-sense advice make her indispensable in a troubled household at times verging on the hysterical. In this, her first novel, Bremer repeatedly deploys food to bring the narrative down to earth from its more romantic or melodramatic excursions. The most famous instance is that of son Carl, who is desperately trying to reach his beloved to save her from an uncertain fate, but finds himself cornered by his pursuers in a pantry. The place is full of good food... .
   In The Neighbours, Bremer gives a psychologically sensitive account of a new wife boldly testing the limits of her domestic power. She not only steals a sheet of her husband's best writing paper to bake biscuits on, in order to test his reaction, but also finds she can quell his anger with a pie fresh from the oven and persuade him out on pastoral picnics he would never have dreamt of enjoying. In this sphere, the men in Bremer's novels are largely passive consumers; whenever they  get involved in the preparation of food and drink there is usually a mess or a disaster. When Jacobi and Henrik try to make pancakes for the whole family in The Home, there ensues a slapstick scene from which Louise must rescue them. The Colonel (The Colonel's Family) causes havoc in the kitchens as he makes wine cup for his daughter's wedding party. But the men are at the women's mercy when it comes to the timing of meals. When Elise Frank in The Home is distracted from her domestic duties by her new - and illicit - interest in writing novels, her 'horribly punctual' husband, outraged to find she has forgotten to order tea, flounces off to his club where he partakes of a predictably bad meal. The system of values in Bremer's novels always underlines that home food is the best, whether it be routine meals, picnics in the country or grand dinners for special occasions. The majority of the meals she depicts are shown as celebrating or cementing family life, and in almost all cases it is women who are responsible for them. Women's control of the day-to-day food supply in these novels gives them some leverage in a time of patriarchal authority.

Food has another function in Bremer's novels for us today: as a source of historical information. We learn much of the eating habits of the day, such as the times of meals: dinner was apparently eaten at two in the afternoon, tea was taken at six or seven, and the evening meal could be as late as nine in the evening. We also learn much about attitudes to certain foods, for example coffee, which in the 1830s was still relatively new and exotic. Bremer refers repeatedly to its 'Arabian' origins, but makes good and frequent narrative use of the contrast between inclement weather, stormy nights and the warmth and cosiness of a coffee party round the fire. 
   Fruit is another interesting example, featuring widely in Bremer's family novels, and especially popular with the children there. Historically this is perhaps surprising, as there is evidence that fruit was considered harmful to children, a potential source of stomach disease. It was widely forbidden to the children of the upper classes until the discovery of vitamins around 1900. Perhaps Bremer was again ahead of her time? She certainly appears aware of the health-promoting properties of fruit; invalids and sickly people in her novels are seen receiving grapes. Often a gift to a loved one, fruit also appears in many of the family tableaux as if to provide colour and a sense of occasion, combining the pure and healthy with a feeling of luxury and a certain ritual resonance. 
   Bremer even employs the symbolic potential of fruit to tackle the then taboo subject of sex. Fruit often occurs in conjunction with courting couples in her novels. She is far from unique, of course, in exploiting fruit's link to fertility and to things forbidden. For a generation well-versed in the Bible, the obvious association would be to the Garden of Eden and the Fall. No one is more closely linked to fruit, however, than the well-meaning but wayward Petrea in The Home. Much of Petrea's story revolves around fruit, which causes trouble whenever she comes into contact with it. She gets lost in the forest searching for raspberries, for example (and is almost bitten by a 'serpent'), and spends her dress allowance on tempting apples and oranges. Petrea's predominant characteristic in the novel is her quest for knowledge, and her childhood attraction to inaccessible fruit can be read as a metaphor for her precocious urge to learn.
  Space does not permit discussion of the ubiquity of food imagery and metaphor in Bremer's novels, but there are some lovely examples: a cruel brother, for example, likens his sister's dress fabric to 'spinach and porridge', and love is referred to as 'that heavenly yeast capable of leavening even the heaviest sour dough of this earthly life'. As for Bremer's correspondence with Victorian cookery book writer Eliza Acton, and how recipes from The Neighbours and The Home found their way into various editions of Acton's Modern Cookery, that is another story.
 
 

All translations from Swedish are my own. This is an abridged re-working in English of a paper first given as part of the Fredrika Bremer Bicentenary Year programme at a seminar at Södertörns högskola, Stockholm, 6 March 2003. The full text is published in Swedish in: 'Mina ägg, mitt färska smör, min skummande chocolad blefvo ej litet prisade' Om matens roll i några Fredrika Bremer-romaner.  Gastronomisk kalender 2003 (Gastronomiska Akademiens årsbok, 42), pp 37-57.

Sarah Death  (born 1956) translator, literary scholar, and editor of  UK-based journal Swedish Book Review (www.swedishbookreview.com) lives and works in Kent, England. She gained her Ph.D. at University College London in 1985 for a thesis on the works of Fredrika Bremer and Elin Wägner. She has translated novels by Swedish writers of various periods, including Fredrika Bremer's Familjen H ***, 1831: The Colonel's Family, 1995, Norvik Press (www.llt.uea.ac.uk/norvik_press).