I am delighted that the paperback edition of The Almanack was released in the UK in November 2019. An ebook  version is also available retailing at under £4. The US paperback and ebook editions will be out on 3 March 2020.
Thanks to everyone who has already read it and especially those who have reviewed it or written to me from as far afield as New Zealand and the US.  
The Almanack was a UK Netgalley Book of the Month and had tremendous interest thanks to a great new pitch from the team at Canongate:
 ‘A puzzle-solvers delight, this engrossing historical mystery is as bamboozling as it is fiendishly gripping. Tabitha Hart’s mother is murdered, and the only clues to her death lie in an old book.’
It has a beautiful new cover design that I love, reflecting the story of blood and entanglement perfectly!  I have also had some great quotes for the new cover:
'Historical fans are in for a treat' - Publishers Weekly
'A dark and twisting riddle that is certain to keep readers guessing until the end.' - S D Sykes
'An ingeniously plotted, hauntingly atmospheric murder mystery.' - Deborah Swift

The story runs from Midsummer to Christmas through the English feasts and festivals, so I hope that as winter sets in you will cosy up with an edition in the warm.
Many readers enjoyed the 50 riddles that preface each chapter. In my researches it became clear that riddling is an entertainment people have long enjoyed at Christmas. Why not join them and see if you are smarter than a Georgian lady or gentleman?                             
The UK book  is available at bookshops and from Amazon or the Hive.
The Almanack is ideal for book clubs.  I have been asked what the themes are: murder, romance, superstition, enigmas, love, Time, the stars, and everything… 
If you do read it, drop me a line and let me know what you thought.
Happy reading!
 
Martine x

My heroine Tabitha was a courtesan in London, and is sharp-witted, light-fingered  and bold, a shrewd handler of people, and charming when she wants to be. To play her I had in mind Crystal Laity’s performance as harlot Margaret Vosper in Poldark, a mix of intelligence and physical allure.

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​Tabitha’s love interest is rakeish poet Nat Starling, a Cambridge University drop-out, obsessed with time. His creativity mixes with bouts of stupidity and drunkenness. No apologies for casting Aidan Turner (Ross Poldark) as the intense, long-haired writer. 

​Joshua Saxton is Tabitha’s devoted old flame, now a widower and the dogged village constable. Rugged Alex O’Loughlin would be ideal (convict Will Bryant in mini-series Mary Bryant).

​Joshua’s daughter Jennet represents the younger generation: still girlish at 15, her pursuit of romance and superstition leads her into danger. I’d love a young Christina Ricci, circa Sleepy Hollow to play her.

Youngest of all is Bess Hart, the infant left in the care of murdered Widow Hart. Precocious and beautiful at 3-years old, she walks in her sleep and some claim she has second sight. I picture her as Sally Jane Bruce, the child actor who played Pearl in the classic noir, The Night of the Hunter.

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​The Almanack is located in Cheshire and the county town of Chester, a 2,000 year old walled city in England famed for its distinctive black and white high-gabled buildings. Tabitha’s home village of Netherlea is scattered around a manor house, where country customs are celebrated, from a blood-stained harvest through autumn bonfires and a snowbound Christmas.

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​I would love to see a director capture the mix of fairy story and murder mystery, so someone with the talent of The Night of the Hunter’s Charles Laughton springs to mind as a dream come true. I’ll never forget the magical escape of the children along the benighted river with a soundtrack of Pearl’s eerily sung lullaby. 
 
I’m sure Laughton (and his wizard of a cinematographer, Stanley Cortez) would do justice to the stars and moon reflected in watermeadows, the snowbound castle, and flickering candlelight as Tabitha and Nat study the almanack for the next riddle and revelation.

To celebrate the launch of A Taste for Nightshade I was invited by 'My Book the Movie'  blogspot to 'dreamcast' an adaptation of my novel. It doesn't mean it's actually going to be filmed - I just get the chance to imagine it:

The main location, Delafosse Hall, is based on a house in North Wales with forgotten tunnels, decaying summerhouse, tales of hopeless love and ghostly hauntings. If it could have Hitchcock's brooding Manderley appearance I'd be very happy. My dark mystery also takes the reader to London’s Golden Square, the convict camps of Sydney, Australia, and Maori settlements of New Zealand.
 
The food needs to be highly crafted, from aphrodisiacs and poisons, to a tiny sugar four-poster bed for a wedding cake and a miniature baby and cradle. When writing the book I studied sugarwork with TV food historian Ivan Day, who created the food for Death Comes to Pemberley.
 
I’m sure Hitchcock would conjure the twisting staircases of Delafosse Hall, the snowbound winter rides, flickering candlelight and create edge-of-the-seat moments from the twists and revelations.

Image stills courtesy of Hitchcock's 'Rebecca' 1940.

A Taste for Nightshade – Recipes, mystery and a dark secret
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My novel A Taste for Nightshade (published as The Penny Heart in the UK) was particularly inspired by five objects that resonate with memory and secrets. At the end of the 18th century Britons developed a passion for keepsakes and souvenirs, from painted china and fans to miniature portraits and mourning rings. One interesting theory is that this might be similar to our contemporary obsession with photography; a fear that if we don’t record our lives, our crucial selves might be lost in the bewildering bombardment of life. Together they inspired the story of impersonation and revenge that became A Taste for Nightshade. 

​This copper penny was created by a British convict sentenced to transportation to 'the ends of the earth', as Australia was then described. Its motto reads, 'When On this Peice you Cast an Eye, THINK ON THE MAN THAT is NOT NIGH'. On its reverse are the initials of an unknown convict, ‘M.C.' and the date 1792.  Now called a Penny Heart convict token or 'leaden heart', these pennies were smoothed and engraved with messages by convicts doomed never to see their families or homeland again. At a time when the criminal classes were mostly believed to lack all tender feelings, these crude keepsakes commemorate desperate people about to embark on the 18th century equivalent of a trip to the moon. Though the most usual emotion expressed is pain at separation, anger and defiance are also found in a rich selection of verses and mottoes.  In the novel, Peg, a confidence trickster, has a token engraved at Newgate prison with a rhyme that is part promise, part threat:

​Before photography the most common keepsakes were locks of hair, often exchanged by family members and lovers. While the working classes carried hair clippings in pouches or paper, wealthier people set hair into rings, pendants and brooches. Though we now find hair jewellery rather strange and Gothic, at the time it offered an easy way to carry and touch a tangible part of a loved one. In the novel, Peg's new mistress, Grace, paints miniature portraits embellished with strands of hair, creating what the writer Laqueur calls, 'a bit of a person that lives eerily on as a souvenir.' Human hair braiding became a popular craze, as books offered advice on how to create complex pictures of flowers, feathers and landscapes. When Grace’s mother dies, she commemorates her by braiding her hair using equipment similar to a lace-making table. She has this net-like memento set into a silver crucifix, from which she draws strength and a sense of connection to her mother's spirit. 
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3. Maori koauau bone flute
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​Peg's adventures in the Antipodes take her to the shores of New Zealand, a very wild place indeed in the 1790s. There she commissions a macabre memento in the form of a bone flute, based on this koauau made in the 18th century.  I was fortunate to hear the unearthly sound of these ancient instruments at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington and later to discover the art of bone-carving on the East Cape. While the penny heart that Peg wears on a ribbon around her neck is a constant reminder of her impulse to revenge, the bone flute is a memorial object, summoning a loved one in the grounds of desolate Delafosse Hall:
'Raising it to her lips, she blew softly against the top until a high unearthly note made the grass, the leaves, and the dusk-heavy air vibrate. The tone was off-key and haunting, a summoning call quite at odds with the gentle English glade.'
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4. A Sugarpaste Bed
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This elaborately carved piece of boxwood dating from the 1720s is a confectioner's mould (courtesy of Ivan Day at historicfood.com). While learning period sugarwork with TV food historian Ivan Day, I was surprised to find that one of the skills of a great confectioner was carving wooden moulds, in order to make three-dimensional figures for banquets and desert tables. Soft gum paste was pressed into this mould and the pieces assembled to make a miniature dolls-sized bed. 

​The wedding bed is decorated with two sugar pillows and an eiderdown of multi-coloured comfits. It would have been used as an ornament on a bride-cake, reflecting the rather bawdy symbolism of the day. Other sugar devices in the novel include a tiny cradle and swaddled baby. Just as we might treasure the 'cake-topper' from a wedding or Christmas cake, these are symbols of hope and fecundity. In the novel however, they do have a double-edge; though beautiful objects, they are in the end fragile, lifeless, and of course ultimately edible.
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​This late 18th-century steel chatelaine would have been worn by the 'woman of the household'. It is a belt hook or clasp to be worn at the waist with a number of chains suspended from it to hold keys, a pincushion, button hook, thimble holder, and corkscrew. In A Taste for Nightshade, Grace, the mistress of the house fatefully relinquishes the household keys to her duplicitous cook housekeeper, Peg. Embodied in her chatelaine is Peg's fascination with locks, keys and chains, and the control she seeks to exert over the household. The steel clasp bears the initials of her vanished predecessor and is also lacking a thimble, later found by Grace in a dark underground passage. Peg's chatelaine is also a rather more dangerous object, as it includes a very sharp and handy knife…

Historic baking is the theme of this week's Great British Bake-Off. Following the initial excitement came the disappointment that the Victorian era is the focus. If Georgian cookery is the Elizabeth David of British cuisines (earthy, aromatic and regional), surely Victorian would be Fanny Craddock (overworked display and mass-produced ingredients)?  And yet, the first baking challenge is to make a game pie. To put the record straight, the golden age of the game pie was the Georgian era, when gigantic Christmas pies were so popular that Josiah Wedgewood designed special decorative dishes for them. ‘Eaten cake is soon forgotten,’ says an old proverb, and this it seems is the case for British bakery.

By the eighteenth century Britons had developed a wealth of old-fashioned bakery: not only game and meat pies but plum cakes, yule cakes, Madeiras, ginger, chocolate, cherry, and marmalade cakes , jam roll, beer cakes and seed cakes.  Besides these were an almost infinite variety of curranty buns, shortcakes, gingerbreads and little cheesecakes such as Richmond Maids of Honour.

Many celebratory cakes were linked to the seasonal calendar, such as harvest-time, Saints’ days and festivals. Their common origin was a medieval spiced pastry filled with currants known as Banbury Cakes (said to be brought home by the crusaders from the East), with variants as Eccles and Chorley Cakes, Cumberland Currant Pasties, Coventry Godcakes, and Mrs Raffald's Sweet Patties shown below. All around the British agricultural calendar, special cakes were made to use up surpluses, such as the Flead Cakes of Kent, made after rendering.
 

So what remains of these regional traditions? Not very much, for the loss of British regional cooking in the Victorian era was one of the prices Britain paid for being the first industrial and urbanized nation. At my Village Autumn Show last week, the most eagerly entered contest was to bake the best Victoria Sponge, a late invention celebrating Queen Victoria. There were no Cheshire specialities such as flummery, pork pies or soul cakes.

Then again, like most of history, baking is about constant renewal. Recipes, however well loved, are updated. Recently, in an attempt to revive the autumnal delights of Taffety Tart (a much loved Georgian pastry of apples, quince and spices) I devised a Taffety Cake. My recipe, featured in The Clandestine Cake Club's new collection, A Year of Cake, uses the modern inventions of ready-made quince jam and fragrant rosewater.  It seems to me both comforting and wise economy to bake by season, so with apples bending the branches of our village trees, it is a pleasure to bake nature’s bounty.

In An Appetite for Violets my cook-heroine Biddy Leigh also uses her apple glut to bake a batch of Taffety Tarts:

 My Best Receipt for Taffety Tart

Lay down a peck of flour  and work it up with six pound of butter and four eggs and salt and cold water.  Roll and fill with pippins and quinces and sweet spice and lemon peel as much as delights.  Sweet Spice is cloves, mace, nutmeg, cinammon, sugar & salt.  Close the pie and strew with sugar.  Bake till well enough.

Martha Garland her best receipt writ on a butter-marked scrap of parcel paper,  1758

Martine Bailey’s debut historical novel, AN APPETITE FOR VIOLETS, is available in paperback and as an eBook from Hodder & Stoughton. Find out more by visiting Martine Bailey’s  website and by following her on Twitter.
 

It is Biscuit Week on The Great British Bake Off, with some cracking challenges: to bake Italian biscotti, wafer-thin arlettes and build a 3D biscuit-box filled with 36 biscuits!

Biscuits originated as rock-hard military or sailors’ rations, that were ‘bis-cuit’ (twice-baked) to prevent them from mouldering. ‘As dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage,’ says Jacques in As You Like It, recalling the thankfully forgotten experience of trying to eat one of these jaw-crackers.

The British Navy mass-produced ship’s biscuits or ‘hard tack’, issued to eighteenth century sailors as a pound of biscuit and a gallon of beer a day. ‘As hard as a captain’s biscuit’, complained a contemporary proverb. These biscuits were inedible without dunking, and were used to bulk out dishes such as Lobscouse, a seaman’s stew of salt beef, biscuits and onions. As for the weevils (flour bugs) that rapidly infested the store –  I have battled weevils in my kitchen in rural New Zealand and there is nothing quite as revolting as finding wriggly white bugs in your flour bags!
 

Over time, biscuits became lighter as Elizabethan cooks sought to satisfy the taste for fashionable sweetstuffs. Made of whisked sugar, eggs and flour, these are the recognisable prototypes for sponge fingers, their preservative quality reduced in favour or lightness and flavour. Naples biscuits (long oval sponge fingers) were developed, to dip into wine rather than tea, and to make desserts such as trifle. Many of Britain’s most delicious varieties were invented by the eighteenth century: macaroons, lemon wafers and ginger nuts.

Yet biscuits long remained associated with travel: we find recipes for Gingerbread For A Voyage and various forms of hard-tack to be carried in pockets while riding, or stored in airless, metal-lined tins for years on end. Street-sellers sold them from baskets, as this illustration from The Cryes of London: Drawn After the Life, in 1688 shows.

The ‘Dutch Biskets’ this woman is selling may have been an import from Holland at the time of William and Mary. A contemporary recipe shows that these snack foods sold ‘To Go’ were made of yeasted biscuit dough flavoured with caraway, cut into circles and pricked with a pattern.

Biscuits have always been a vehicle for fashion. In my new novel, THE PENNY HEART, the heroine recollects the faded gentility of her mother’s Apricot Jumbles or Knotted Biscuits, made from a ‘receipt’ of the time of  ‘Good Queen Bess’. These pretty sweetmeats were the origin of the term ‘Jumbled up’ – perhaps a foretaste for this week’s Bake Off. Crisp biscuits need a light hand and a hot oven: with Paul and Mary looking over the contestant’s shoulders we should see some fun at crunch time!

The SONG OF THE SEA MAID  is launched on 20 June 2015 (Hodder & Stoughton).

Iona: My first novel, Letters to the Lost, is mostly set in London so is very urban in atmosphere! It’s a dual time-frame novel, and I did manage to squeeze a little bit of Cheshire in later on in the book when one of the characters has to come to Crewe for business reasons, but sadly that didn’t give me a chance to write about Cheshire’s beautiful countryside or black and white timbered villages. However, the book I’m writing now is set partly in rural Cheshire, so I’m making up for it, and really enjoying writing about familiar places. Compared to counties like Cornwall and Norfolk, I think Cheshire has been relatively left out of literature so it feels good to put it on the page. (It was also a huge thrill for me to see my own very small home town appear in An Appetite for Violets. Now that’s something that hasn’t happened before!)

2. Both Letters to the Lost and An Appetite for Violets are partly written in the form of letters that also express the writer's character. Did you look at any old letters as part of your research?

Iona:  About six months before I started writing the book my very much-loved godmother died and, since she had no children of her own, my brother and I were in charge of sorting out her house. We came across some tins in the garage that were stuffed with all sorts of paperwork – everything from photographs and birthday cards to receipts and property deeds and death certificates. There were a few letters in there too, which were both poignant and intriguing. There’s something intensely personal about a handwritten letter, and even though they were sent by strangers half a century ago, it still felt very odd to read them – almost like an intrusion. I loved how each one was only half of a conversation, and the fact that the other half had been lost to time left a space for me to fill from my own imagination. 

Martine: That is a another coincidence – I also inherited some old family letters written by my great grandmother. Two of my great grandmothers were keen amateur cooks: one had a lodging house in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, and the other was a confectioner specialising in wedding cakes. The letters from Much Wenlock were beautifully warm and spontaneous, and their affectionate phrasing forms the basis of a few of Mrs Garland's letters, the cook in An Appetite For Violets.

I also read a great many travellers letters from the 18th-century. In the end I had to edit out some observations about Europe to speed the pace of the book. But I'm glad that some remained, for example Mr Pars' waspish descriptions of foreigners are a toned down version of the bullish British attitudes of the time.

3. Why did you choose to write about your chosen era in your novel? What is it about that time that appeals to you?

 Iona: I think I grew up steeped in WW2 stories. As the happy product of parents who divorced and both remarried when I was very young, I had twice the usual allocation of grandparents, all with a wealth of wartime tales to tell and experiences to share, which I never grew tired of hearing. I was born in the 1970s which seemed to be the time when the war started to filter into children’s fiction on a significant scale, and I remember devouring books like When the Siren Wailed (Noel Streatfeild) and Carrie’s War (Nina Bawden) and being utterly enthralled by a time of danger and disruption that was only just past but felt light years away from the world I lived in.  Over the years my interest in the war never waned, so by the time I came to write the book it felt very natural to set it during that era.

4. Both novels use recipes and household items to evoke the past. Where did you get these ideas (and taste descriptions) from?

Iona: Again, because the past I was writing about was within living memory (unlike the historical period Martine brings so vividly to life in An Appetite for Violets and The Penny Heart) I think most of my information came simply from listening to my grandparents and parents. My mum was born in 1940, so her earliest memories are set against the backdrop of wartime. As such a small child she was oblivious to many aspects of the war, but food was the way in which it made itself felt most strongly in her young life. (She still shudders when you say the words ‘powdered egg’ to her.) My grandmothers and godmothers talked often about the impact of rationing and the difficulty of feeding a family in the face of such shortages. They were all excellent cooks – I suppose because they had to be – and none of them ever lost their horror of wastefulness! That extended from food to other aspects of their lives, so the things in their kitchens were the ones they’d had for decades; wooden spoons and rolling pins worn smooth with use, chipped enamel dishes and ridged bone-handled cutlery, china tea sets that never lost their bloom by being put in a dishwasher. Nothing was ever replaced because it got old or fell out of fashion, and I loved how those ordinary, everyday domestic items seemed to tell the stories of their lives, as they must have done for countless women down the ages. 

[1] ‘An Appetite for Violets’ is such an intriguing and beautiful title. Can you explain how you came up with it and what it signifies in terms of the novel’sthemes?

The idea for the title began with the discovery of a recipe for Violet Pastilles in an old recipe book. It seemed such an old-fashioned and rather decadent flavour fashion, ideally representing Biddy’s secretive mistress, Lady Carinna and her addiction to sugar and fashion. Floral flavours were very fashionable in all sorts of confectionary at the time, so when Biddy makes ice creams using jasmine and honeysuckle she was absolutely on trend!

When Hodder were considering titles, I realised that violets also featured on Carinna’s violet-spangled dress that Biddy calls ‘a Parisian picture of a gown.’ (Spangles were little pieces of glass that sparkled in the candlelight, before sequins were invented).

Then in the final scenes the scent of violets returns, and when Biddy smells them she recalls a significant moment when she first met Carinna, and understands the scent’s other, more disturbing significance. I chose violets to symbolise the final twist in the novel, because there is something about the scent and flavour that many people find slightly sickly and unsettling:

‘There is something of burned blackened sugar, of overcooked sweetness in their pulsing fragrance.’

So the taste and flavour of violets is something corrupt, that the reader finally understands lies at the heart of the mystery. 

[2] The idea of the recipes at the beginning of some chapters is such an interesting one. Could you explore the reasons why you chose to use that as a narrative framing device? How important are these recipes to the atmosphere of the novel?

The recipes were the starting point of the book, from when I first saw them in the kitchen of a National Trust property, Erddig Hall, near Chester. I picked up a few hand-written recipes for dishes such as venison pasty and plum pudding, and felt they brought the past vividly to life. I wondered how a young servant who worked there might react if she was taken from that tranquil setting to cook and learn about different foods in foreign countries and eventually be forced to use her talents to survive.

What especially fascinated me was the rambling, poetic language of those early recipes, before methods and instructions had become codified as they are now.  Many of them are highly individual and personalised – such as ‘Mary Jones, Her Best Way,’ and of course lack all temperatures and instructions, just stating ‘till enough’ or ‘to your taste’.

With no recipe illustrations, there are occasionally Biblical references, such as ‘heap like the Shew Bread in the Bible’ or commonplace references such as, ‘use as much butter as will cover a penny’. One of my favourite instructions is to use prayers to time a process: ‘boil for one Hail Mary’, meaning 15 -20 seconds.

I especially love recipes that guided women through different rites of passage in their lives. Old recipes tell us there were hot drinks or caudles to help give birth, sweet and spicy goods for festivals, bride cakes for marriage and funeral cakes at the end of life – and a lot of other regional specialties in between. I especially find it poignant that recipes are often the only surviving marks on paper left by unvoiced women. So I wanted to convey the way recipes transmitted women’s pleasures down the generations, passing on moments of happiness in hard-won lettering and precious ink.

[3] Could you share with us some of the cookery research you did in preparation for writing about an C18th cook?

As soon as I knew what I wanted to write about I applied to learn about Georgian cookery with TV food historian Ivan Day. It was thrilling to learn how to cook on an open fire with a jack that turns the spit, to make wafers with irons in the fire, stitch lard into meat with a larding needle, boil a pudding in a cloth, and many other things I’d read about but didn’t understand. It was also the quince season, so as well as making dishes like quince and marrow tart I discovered the recipes for Taffety Tart in his wonderful collection of old recipe books.

Last year I went back to Ivan’s farm in Cumbria and learned more about sugarwork, using forgotten techniques and attempting the amazing sugarwork skills that confectioners developed in the 18th century, when sugar temples and gardens were created as grand table decorations. I am especially interested in the history of gingerbread as it features in The Penny Heart; it intrigued me to find it was made in all sorts of fancy shapes such as carriages and ‘husbands and wives’ in special moulds, and really was gilded with gold leaf. In my researches not everything has worked – I tried to make boiled wheat furmenty at home and however long I cooked it, it was still as hard as pebbles!

4] The novel employs a variety of narrators, including 3rd and 1st person, as well as as the aforementioned recipes and also a variety of letters. Why did you decide on this range of styles and did this choice develop gradually in the planning stages?

In fact at first it was even more fragmented. I had the idea of a sort of metafiction, a series of texts related to a journey – inventories, accounts, recipes, snatches of journals, and letters. I would have liked maps, too, and clues buried in them – so fairly ambitious! My idea was to weave a narrative through them, based on those early epistolary novels such as Richardson’s Clarissa. I also loved the idea of the Household books given to wealthy women when they first married, and written in different handwriting by mothers, servants, friends, like scrapbooks of prayers, dowry lists, remedies, recipes, household instructions and accounts.

I had to rein in that idea to get a strong narrative moving, and when I found an agent and publisher it naturally became more conventional as it moved towards publication. But there are still traces of the early attempt, for example in Biddy’s list of possessions and of course the recipes and changes of narrator. I think a journey lends itself to multiple viewpoints, and of course it was an opportunity to bury clues in the text so that no single character could be aware of the entire story.

[5] Your next book, The Penny Heart, is coming up in May 2015. Can you tell us a little about your exciting new novel to whet our appetites?

The Penny Heart is the narrative of two women with hugely different backgrounds and sensibilities. Much of it is written in alternating viewpoints, firstly by Grace, a sensitive and artistic young wife who finds herself at isolated Delafosse Hall, horribly attracted to her indifferent and selfish husband, Michael. The alternate strand follows Peg, her housekeeper, a clever cook and - the reader realises - a talented confidence trickster. When Grace finds The Penny Heart, an old penny engraved to commemorate a departing convict, it represents the collision point between the two women, proof of Peg’s past-life as a Botany Bay convict and also a darker secret.

Like Grace, I love the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, so I did enjoy exploring the Gothic tropes of a mouldering, isolated Hall, a sinister servant, an underground tunnel and the legend of a ghost. I also wanted to recreate the uneasy 1790s, when the French, American and Industrial Revolutions were threatening the stability of the English class system. Propertied but legally powerless women such as Grace were vulnerable to the material greed of their partners. Working class criminals broke the law to take what they could of Britain’s fabulous new wealth. As an ‘out and out fly-girl’, Peg takes an oath to follow what was called The Life – learning the secret canting language of rogues and wearing secret tattoos as part of a vibrant Georgian underclass.

I’m not sure if I can whet your actual appetite, because it explores the darker aspects of food – starvation, adulteration, and poison! A fascinating aspect of the era is the world of secret ‘remedies’ and elixirs peddled by criminal quacks and charlatans. This potential danger surrounding food within the home led me to write Grace’s opening warning:

‘I fancy you think little of who makes the food you eat. Thrice a day it appears; you ingest it with more or less pleasure. Do you honestly know whose fingers touched it? Do you give a moment’s attention to the mind that devised your dish, its method and ingredients?’

As I was living in New Zealand when I began the book, the research took me to locations such as Sydney Cove and the wilder shores of New Zealand. Though there are some fine puddings and pies in the novel, I did eat some delicious food at a Maori Hangi, as well as kangaroo, crocodile, paua (black sea snails), campfire damper and grubs!

In An Appetite for Violets my cook heroine Biddy Leigh repeats a common saying of the day, that ‘Nothing is busier than English ovens at Christmas.’ In the book I recreate a  Christmas feast for fifty people; a communal task undertaken on fiery spits, peppered with mishaps (scalding fat, fire and falls) and sweetened with traditions (kissing boughs and singing carols in rounds). The early drafts needed a ruthless diet before publication, so carried away did I become by a menu of lost delights such as Yule cakes, crucifix engraved cheeses and plum pottage.

By the Victorian era giant pies merited a feature in the newspapers, a sure sign that the old tradition was dying. The magnificent pie baked for a Royal Banquet at Windsor castle in 1857, was borne by four bewhiskered footmen and preceded by another medieval relic, the boar’s head on a platter. An accompanying illustration showed the larder at Windsor, replete with shelves of hanging game and white-coated male chefs.

Nowadays vast Christmas Pies seem only to be found in historic recreation, for instance at www.historicfood.com.  No longer do we say, ‘He hath eaten many a Christmas Pie’ - presumably an early variant of ‘Who ate all the pies?’

In ending I’d like to offer some advice from seventeenth century poet George Wither’s Christmas Carol:

Without the door let sorrow lie,
 And if for cold it hap to die,
 We'll bury it in a Christmas pie,
 And evermore be merry.

May all your sorrows be buried in good Christmas eating and have a very Merry Christmas!

 Christmas Pie

 Make a standing crust of 24 pounds of the finest flour, six pounds butter, half a pound rendered suet and raise in an oval with very thick walls and sturdy bottom.  Bone each of a turkey, a goose, a fowl, a partridge and a pigeon and lay one inside the other along with mace, nutmeg, salt and pepper.  Then have a hare ready stewed in joints along with its gravy, woodcocks, more game and whatsoever wild birds you can get.  Lay them as close as you can get and put at least four pounds of butter in the pie.  Make your lid pretty thick and lay on flowers or such Christmas shapes as you wish on the lid around a hole in the middle.  Rub it all over with yolks of egg and bind it round with paper and lay the same over the top.  It will take four hours baking in a bread oven.  When it comes out melt two pounds of butter in the gravy that come from the hare and pour it hot in the pie through the hole. 

 From ‘An Appetite for Violets’ by Martine Bailey 

(This blog article was first published on History Lives 2014)