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)

It is the end of October, the fields are bare, the leaves have been blown from the trees, and the nights are growing longer. The darkness is coming. At this time of year we celebrate the end of summer and the cycle of death and rebirth. From as far back as anyone can remember, on one special night we gather together to share food and drink, play tricks and games.  It is a time to connect with our ancestors, and honor the dead.

In my home county of Cheshire this gathering has long had a unique name – Souling or Soul-caking. ‘An Appetite for Violets’ begins on Souling Night, a time when mischief is rife and the world can turn upside down. It is 1774 and the household is baking to welcome a band of mummers with blackened faces and outlandish costumes who demand entry at the door and sing:

A soul, a soul, a soul-cake,
Please good missus, a soul cake…’

Later they perform a mumming play in return for food and drink. Just how ancient Cheshire Souling might be is suggested by the ritual of a horse’s head led by a man in a white sheet, a performance called ‘hodening’ thought to be an echo of the Norse god Odin.  Other characters can include a Hero, Saint George or King George, a Blackamoor or Saladin, Kings, Fools, Devils, and a Doctor who magically brings the hero back to life in a way that echoes many rituals of death and renewal.  The rhyming couplets of the play are passed on orally, so characters emerge like ‘Bellsie Bob’, a corruption of ‘Beelzebub’. But then none of it is serious - it’s about slapstick, taunting, and free-flowing beer.

So what are soul cakes and why are they handed out?  Even in the fourteenth century the idea of Soul Cakes was ancient, as John Mirk wrote in Festial ‘wherefore in olden time good men and women would this day buy bread and deal (give) it for the souls that they loved, hoping with each loaf to get a soul out of purgatory’.

In pre-Reformation England these cakes were given to the poor as alms to try to free dead souls from Purgatory. Later, in one of those mixing ups of pagan and Christian traditions, the poor village Soulers conferred a blessing on rich households in return for food and drink - suggesting the rich had better pay up or risk a bad harvest, or worse.

Surviving recipes for Soul Cakes vary, but they are generally small, round, spicy and sweet. Sugar and spice and dried fruit were for centuries the mark of festival food, a welcome relief from bland everyday food. Recipes describe a ‘cross’ design that hints at two crossed bones rather than a crucifix. When I baked them as research for An Appetite for Violets they were quite delicious spiced biscuits. An ancient ‘serving suggestion’ from a pre-literate age was to lay the cakes ‘in a tall heap like the picture of the Shew Bread in the Bible’.

These days a few groups of Cheshire Soulers keep the ritual alive and next weekend I’ll be looking for a performance in local pubs. On Souling Night (or All Hallow’s Eve or Hallowe’en) it seems history does indeed live, in our instinct to walk the streets in outlandish costumes and eat and drink special foods, and bless or curse (trick or treat) our neighbours…

                                   ~ Historic Recipe To Make Soul Cakes ~

Work 4lb fresh butter with your hand to a cream.  Beat in the same of  loaf sugar pounded and sifted fine. Take two dozen egg yolks beaten and add by degrees.  Then put in flour 8 lb with salt, allspice and mace as you wish.  Add your currants 2 lb picked and dried well.  Lay saffron as you have it in a churn of milk and lay next to the fire.  Mix your dough with the warm milk strained and make flat rounds marking each with Crossed Bones in remembrance of Dead Souls.  When done enough in a quick oven lay in a tall heap like the picture of the Shew Bread in the Bible.  All who knock for entry and chant the rhyme may eat from the board to keep the blessings on the house.

 
A MODERN INTERPRETATION OF SOUL CAKES

8oz butter softened at room temperature
5oz caster sugar
2 egg yolks
12 oz plain flour
2 oz cornflour (this makes the cakes shorter)
A pinch of salt
2-3 teaspoons of spices as you have them: allspice, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
4oz currants

Cream together the softened butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until pale and fluffy. Gradually add the yolks to the mixture.

Sift in the flour, cornflour, salt, spices and baking powder.

Add the currants and mix together with your hands to make a smooth dough. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180/350/gas mark 4.

Roll the dough out on a floured surface to about ¼ inch and stamp out circles.

Mark with crosses with a sharp knife.

Bake on baking sheets for about 15 minutes until golden.

Remove and cool for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. 

This week it is the ultimate test on the Great British Bake-Off – the grand final between three astonishing bakers, Richard, Luis and Nancy. The challenges have not been announced, but there is little doubt it will involve something very large and architectural. We may think the trend for man-size towers of croquembouche or gingerbread houses you could happily inhabit, are new phenomenon – but as ever, history is merely repeating itself.

In Britain a fashion for sculptural food can be traced back to Medieval Royal feasts and the use of sotelties moulded in the shapes of people, animals, and mythical creatures in wax, marzipan or sugar.  These in-between courses showstoppers were accompanied by texts or verses that revealed their allegorical nature, for example an angel accompanied by a text: ‘Thanke all, god, of this feste’. 

On a more modest scale, the eighteenth century saw the height of elegant sugar architecture. Classical temples, military monuments and ornate gardens were constructed to form the centrepieces of breathtaking banquets. The secret to constructing so many edible buildings was the use of carved moulds that allowed sugarpaste to be ‘mass-produced’ and then assembled. To conquer the inherent problems of food architecture – wobble and collapse – many decorations were not intended for consumption, strengthened by rice flour, plaster, starch and ground marble. Furthermore, to prevent slumping, buildings were often supported by wires and armatures.

By the nineteenth century such ostentatious trionfi di tavola (triumphs of the table) were deemed  excessive. Urbain Dubois, chef de cuisine to Wilhelm I of Prussia, created sculptures that reflected the Kaisers two greatest passions: warfare and hunting. A sculpture depicting the pleasures of the hunt in the form of a boar’s head and miniature stags, made from fat, must be one of the most ghastly food sculptures ever made. More attractive were the huge Gothic sugar centrepieces, such as that recreated by food historian Ivan Day at www.historicfood.com

Looking ahead to the Bake-Off final, it does look as if Richard, master builder by trade and devotee of pencil and ruler, enters with a clear advantage. However, unlike the food sculptures of the past, I hope that ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’ and sheer ‘scrumminess’, as Mary would say, will win the day.

~ How to Make A Solomon’s Temple in Flummery ~

Take a quart of stiff flummery and divide into three parts.  Make one a pretty pink colour with a little cochineal, bruised and steeped in brandy.  Scrape an ounce of chocolate and mix with another part of flummery to make a stone colour.  The third part must be white.  Then fill your mould first with pink flummery for the tower and then white for the turrets.  Fill the base with chocolate flummery and let it stand for one day.  Then loosen it round with a pin and shake it out gently.  When you set it out, stick a small sprig of flowers into each tower, which will strengthen it and also give it a genteel appearance.

Extracted from THE PENNY HEART by Martine Bailey, to be published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2015.

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

Later, when the puppies are smuggled across the beautifully rendered English countryside, timid Missis goes in search of safety while her husband Pongo lies wounded. In a scene that has been compared to a doggy version of Du Maurier’s Rebecca:

‘She could see no house ahead of her because the drive twisted. It was overgrown with weeds… so wild and neglected that it seemed more like a path through a wood than the approach to a house. And it was so strangely silent… suddenly she was out in the open, with the house in front of her… very old, built of mellowed red brick… with many little diamond-paned windows and one great window that stretched to the roof.’

Inside the crumbling Jacobean Manor the very elderly gentleman ‘pet’ of an ancient King Charles spaniel makes buttered toast for himself and his canine guests in front of the open fire. Touchingly, he believes that Pongo and Missis are the much missed ghosts of long-dead carriage dogs. It is a beautiful scene and I admit to the influence of the manor on my latest book, The Penny Heart, set in dilapidated creeper-choked Delafosse Hall. An enjoyable book is one that leaves deep memories, and to me Dodie Smith wrote a sweet and stylish masterpiece. 




A huge thank you to Rebecca Mascull, author of The Visitors,  for inviting me to take part in the The Chocolate Challenge.

Take a look at Rebecca’s Chocolate blog post at:

http://rebeccamascull.tumblr.com/post/86149066018/chocolate-book-challenge 


I have tagged two new writers to take on the Chocolate Challenge, firstly Louisa Treger, author of The Lodger:

https://www.facebook.com/louisatregerwriter 


And secondly, Tessa Arlen, who has posted her super Chocolate Challenge at:


http://www.tessaarlen.com/iyntwood-chocolate-challenge/


This brings me to the end of The Chocolate Challenge; its been a great deal of fun and a lot of fun making the recipes and rediscovering my book choices.

1 Venue
Size, location, food and drink are all important. But the essential quality must be ambience. Book and Kitchen, a literary café in London’s Notting Hill had style, friendliness and a touch of literary glamour. Send email invites out as soon as the venue is booked and ask for a RSVP – though there are bound to be surprises right up to the last minute.

2 Books
Now is your big chance to show-off your book, so make sure there are a few artful displays, including the shop window for passing custom. Someone needs to make sure there are lots of copies to sign and a till to take the cash. The Appetite for Violets bookmarks also proved popular -  all of them disappeared on the night.

3 Food and Drink
If you have a theme, go for it. Book and Kitchen supplied gorgeous cheese and breads but we also laid on lavender macaroons and 18th century Soul Cakes along with explanatory leaflets.  The wine and fruit juices were well chilled and flowed liberally…

4 Nerves
After sitting in a solitary room for years it can feel pretty overwhelming to face your audience en masse. Write your speech early, get feedback from friends and do a few practice runs.  It is far easier to speak ‘off the cuff’ if you have virtually learned your words by heart. Consider listening to a Public Speaking audio guide from the library to visualize the scene and calm the inevitable nerves.

5 Feeling Good
Now is the time to reward yourself for all that hard work. Get your hair fixed, wear a new outfit and get a good night’s sleep. If you are away from home, stay somewhere that makes you feel good and pampered. Face powder should keep the inevitable shininess at bay. Be wary of too much alcohol before you speak and sign your books - but you can let yourself go afterwards! You deserve it.

6 Speech
You will probably be introduced by your publisher and then all eyes are on you. You are an author not an after-dinner speaker so clutching notes is fine (in fact bring a spare set, too.) The audience might be expecting to hear what inspired the book, what the title means and how you set about researching and writing it – briefly. A short extract will also give a flavour of your work. It is also your big chance to thank the many people who helped create your book and remind everyone of what a terrific team helped you to publication.

7 Book Signing
Bring along a few reliable pens and it also helps if you’ve practised signing your name – especially if it’s a pen name! Your book buyers may want very specific dedications along with difficult name spellings, so book signing can be more demanding than you might expect. But it is also massively rewarding to meet and thank your fans in person.

8 Photos
Ideally, ask someone to take charge of photography. It probably isn’t possible to have all the photos you’d like of you with every person in the room, but a good selection for blogs, twitter and facebook should ensure your fabulous event stays alive in people’s memories long after the book hits the shops.