Jane Eyre is a book about a woman who hates feeling comfortable. Every meal that passes her lips is full of gravel and self-sufficiency. Sometimes she drinks tea, but more often than not she turns it down suspiciously, for what if within the tea someone had secretly placed the bonds of servitude?? Here is every meal she begrudgingly eats before running away into the hills.
A Bun And Someone Said Something Nice To Me And I Treasured It All The Days Of My Life
“Sometimes she would come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her scissors, or perhaps to bring me something by way of supper—a bun or a cheese-cake—then she would sit on the bed while I ate it, and when I had finished, she would tuck the clothes round me, and twice she kissed me, and said, ‘Good night, Miss Jane.’”
I Reject Your Vain Fripperies And Decadent Tarts
“This precious vessel was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late! I could not eat the tart; and the plumage of the bird, the tints of the flowers, seemed strangely faded: I put both plate and tart away.”
Surprise Bread
“A little before dark I passed a farm-house, at the open door of which the farmer was sitting, eating his supper of bread and cheese. I stopped and said:
‘Will you give me a piece of bread? for I am very hungry.’ He cast on me a glance of surprise; but without answering, he cut a thick slice from his loaf, and gave it to me. I imagine he did not think I was a beggar, but only an eccentric sort of lady, who had taken a fancy to his brown loaf. As soon as I was out of sight of his house, I sat down and ate it.”
Toast With No Fever In
“Hannah had brought me some gruel and dry toast, about, as I supposed, the dinner-hour. I had eaten with relish: the food was good—void of the feverish flavour which had hitherto poisoned what I had swallowed.”
Some Permission
“It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for the last three days: there would have been danger in yielding to the cravings of your appetite at first. Now you may eat, though still not immoderately.”
Potato Indifference
“The odour which now filled the refectory was scarcely more appetising than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast: the dinner was served in two huge tin-plated vessels, whence rose a strong steam redolent of rancid fat. I found the mess to consist of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together. Of this preparation a tolerably abundant plateful was apportioned to each pupil. I ate what I could, and wondered within myself whether every day’s fare would be like this.”
Fragment Rejection
“When it came to my turn, I drank, for I was thirsty, but did not touch the food, excitement and fatigue rendering me incapable of eating: I now saw, however, that it was a thin oaten cake shared into fragments.”
Insufficient Milk And Restraint
“I tasted what they offered me: feebly at first, eagerly soon. ‘Not too much at first – restrain her,’ said the brother; ‘she has had enough.’ And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of bread.”
The Bible And Self-Denial
“I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a gingerbread-nut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to learn, he says: ‘Oh! the verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms.’”
No-Thank-You Boiled Milk
“Bessie, having pressed me in vain to take a few spoonfuls of the boiled milk and bread she had prepared for me, wrapped up some biscuits in a paper and put them into my bag; then she helped me on with my pelisse and bonnet, and wrapping herself in a shawl, she and I left the nursery.”
Eating Berries While Pretending To Be A Monk To Make Hunger And Desperation Feel Like A Game
“I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in the heath: I gathered a handful and ate them with the bread. My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied, appeased by this hermit’s meal.”
Unburnt Not-Enoughs
“Breakfast-time came at last, and this morning the porridge was not burnt; the quality was eatable, the quantity small.”
Lying About Tea
“You must want your tea,” said the good lady, as I joined her; “you ate so little at dinner. I am afraid,” she continued, “you are not well to-day: you look flushed and feverish.”
“Oh, quite well! I never felt better.”
Thinking About Bread-Rinds
“Once more I took off my handkerchief—once more I thought of the cakes of bread in the little shop. Oh, for but a crust!”
Bible Hallucinations
“‘She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her,’ observed Adèle.
‘I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle.’”
Surprise Pig-Porridge
“At the door of a cottage I saw a little girl about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a pig trough. ‘Will you give me that?’ I asked.”
Faugh
“Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.”
Half Of Uncake
“Almost desperate, I asked for half a cake; she again refused.”
I Can’t Eat A Penny, I’m Not A Robot
“‘A penny cannot feed me, and I have no strength to go farther. Don’t shut the door:—oh, don’t, for God’s sake!’”
The Crust Of Poverty
“I am obscure: Rivers is an old name; but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn the dependant’s crust among strangers.”
There’s also the seed cake of soon your only friend will die.
Did you know that seed cake is made with caraway seeds? I had some once, it’s truly food only a starving orphan could appreciate.
Remember when Miss Temple tries to get the housekeeper to send up extra bread for Jane and Helen and the housekeeper literally sends a message back saying, “I know you’re the superintendent and all but FUCK YOU, NO EXTRA BREAD FOR ANYONE, WELCOME 2 HELL”
(ok not literally)
Literally the housekeeper’s message was pretty snooty — “I have sent up the usual quantity” — which was actually more of a burn than any all-caps profanity. You’re not the boss of me, Miss Temple, and don’t you think you are. Although when you think of it, it was a little unfair that Miss Temple should treat Jane and Helen better than the other girls (unless you’re Helen or Jane of course). The others may not have been as sympatico and waif-like as Helen or Jane, but they must have been just as tired of rusty stew and oatcake fragments.
Disagree, seed cake is great.
Ah, caraway, the tried and true (and only) seasoning of peasant foods.
I’ve made seedcake damp with poppyseeds and that’s very nice.
I hate caraway seeds with the fire of a thousand suns. I mean, if you must use seeds in a cake, why not sprinkle a handful of toasted white sesame seeds on the top and be done with it? I would probably eat a hunk of fruit cake from last Christmas before I eat a slice of seed cake.
I would happily eat either. Fruitcake is awesome and seed cake is pretty good.
So many carbs!
Nobody’s gluten-free in a Bronte novel, by god!
Except for the pastor in The Tenant at Wildfell Hall who goes on and on about “slops” like some proto-Paleo jerk.
“what if within the tea someone had secretly placed the bonds of servitude??”
LOOK IT’S A REAL RISK, SHE IS A BIRD, NO NET ENSNARES HER OK
I’m beginning to realize how much reading Victorian lit as a kid shaped my games of pretend. According to my ten-year-old self, so much of being a EPIC HEROINE was wrapped up in food— the plainer and more spartan to look upon, the better.
I have a distinct memory of playing “lost princesses” with a friend, during which we tied hand towel kerchiefs to sticks and packed to run away. She was like, “Let’s take some gummy worms!”
I looked at her with profound disapproval.
“We’re HEROINES, Sarah. We can only take bread and a small hunk of hard cheese.”
“But you have gummy worms. There’s a big bag in your kitch”–
“LOST PRINCESSES DO NOT HAVE GUMMY WORMS”
Good pretend-partners were hard to find.
I would have wholeheartedly joined you. My favourite pretend game was “we are all crippled orphan waifs”, because nothing is more romantic than excessive hardship. I blame Pollyanna.
I thought I was the only kid whose favorite game was orphans! My parents worries about me…..
Mine was orphans who are forced to slave in a cotton mill by cruel overseers, and then run away and live a precarious life on the streets. Am relieved to know I am not the only one who took precisely the wrong lessons from classic children’s literature!
My favourite game was orphans too! I had to spend all day outside, barefoot and I used to make my mum leave a slice of dry bread and a bit of cheese out in the kitchen so that I could sneak into the house and “steal” it.
I took a bunch of stuffing out of one of my doll’s legs and made her a crutch to hobble around on. She then became a prostitute and had a child and suffered dreadfully, because I read things that were too old for me…
Are you me? It was all bread and hunks of cheese… Unless we were playing Narnia, in which case, an abundance of apples was also acceptable.
Also pavenders, toffee, and sardines on toast.
truly every other book I read in my childhood featured HUNKS OF HARD CHEESE and HARDTACK as the main source of sustenance at some point (childhood me: “these illustration look like biscuits though? Which are yummy?”)
Little House, and the longing for just one piece of snow-maple-candy, or the disappointment of a Christmas stocking with no orange in the toe.
Desperate hunger or unrelenting unvaried diets build CHARACTER, y’all.
+1000000 on the snow maple candy. I tried to make my own with ice as a child.
My mom still gives us an orange in our Christmas stocking every year.
lucky!
Did it work, making your own? Because I too loved that idea and tried it at least twice and all I got was cold sticky stuff, not what I was hoping for.
It did not. It was a terrible failure, sadly. Maybe it would work better with shaved ice?
Sugar on snow, it’s a big thing in Vermont. What you need is boiling sap at the right temperature so it does not become a rock when it hits the (clean, fresh, always) snow. It can’t be syrup, exactly. Sometimes there is a side of pickle. Damn I miss the open sugarhouse weekends. Truly an old-fashioned tradition worth preserving. There are instructions at this link (if you have a candy thermometer it’s easier than I expected): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_taffy
I tried it with Mrs. Butterworth’s. I think that’s why it didn’t work.
My mum also gave us oranges in stockings, because she always had oranges in stockings.
But we lived in New Zealand, where it was summer, and the oranges you could buy were horrible.
My mom does this too!!
Hear, hear! I will never understand why no one wanted to play Island of the Blue Dolphins with me and be the sick brother lying on the patio while I foraged around the back yard for abalone and murderous octopuses.
FORAGING FOR ABALONE WAS MY LIFE
I used to dream of the pirate life, wherein I would survive, of course, on salt beef, inedible hunks of biscuit and rum. Either that or being on the run in the Scottish wilderness. Too much Robert Louis Stevenson at an impressionable age I suspect; thank God I didn’t read Jekyll and Hyde earlier, or things might’ve taken a spectacularly bad turn.
OH MY GOD are you me?
I still remember arguing with my playmate about this. We were make-believe escaping, and I insisted that we had to pack imaginary hunks of cheese before our escape.
She kept saying the cheese would give her diarrhea.
Make-believe diarrhea, I said with finality, and we brought the hunks of cheese.
Make-believe diarrhea, so much less interesting than make-believe consumption. (Both of course involve bodily substances making (pretend) flecks onto tissues, but imaginary blood on a handkerchief *definitely* wins out in that battle as well.)
Thanks to Little House on the Prairie I would have the time of my LIFE with a piece of buttered bread and a very-slowly-consumed mug of milk.
Speaking of mugs, shout out to Jo March for eschewing delicate china and taking it [in the garret] like a champ.
We had blue-enameled tin cups as kids and they were the BEST make-believe prop for our prairie-hardship-life imaginings. I would sometimes drink my milk out of mine at dinner and get tears in my eyes thinking about how Mary and Laura had to share a cup.
Man, women have always been sold a pile of bullshit regarding food.
My childhood bestie and I would play Rhyme and Reason trapped in the Castle in the Air (the vacant upstairs apartment had a SPIRAL STAIRCASE that led down to our deck) and we would inevitably rescue ourselves because we weren’t waiting for a child and a dog to outwit some demons.
What about medicinal sip of wine after abstaining from food and drink for 12 hours because your true love tried to trick you into bigamy that morning, which has to sustain you through fighting him off for the next hour or two?
So many heroines having a spoonful of wine. What was it even supposed to do?
I love that the first comment on this was WHAT ABOUT THE SEED CAKE THOUGH, because that was also my first thought upon finishing.
That gingerbread-nut kid gets TWO gingerbread-nuts for pretending he likes Psalms so much, and therefore he gets to be in my dissertation about terrible children (no lie)
Nah, he’s a smart kid. What kind of dolt honestly expects a child to pick Bible verses over sweets? Honestly??
Ugh, I can just imagine the simpering way in which he says, “And I wish to be an angel here below.” I HATE THAT KID SO MUCH, even though we never actually see him!
My stomach curdles just thinking about that line now, without the context of the text around it. Ban that kid!
Hey that kid is just working the system as best he can. Hate the game, not the player!
I reserve the right to hate both, and more besides.
Truly, I have enough hatred for both the player and the game.
Ok, I keep adding things to the embroidery spreadsheet, but that one really is going on a sampler on the wall.
That kid knows exactly what he’s doing! Bronte basically invented the Marshmallow Test!
Wait your dissertation is about terrible children? That is awesome!
No wonder everyone’s* constitution is so delicate, if the majority of what they ingest is flour and sorrow (dairy and tea optional).
*LADIES
right? Had any of the Brontë sisters even heard of a vegetable?
They lived in Yorkshire, on a moor, in the 19th century. Vegetables cannot survive the climate.
Man, these people like to boil milk.
Pre-pasteurization? I’m guessing it might have saved some lives…
Mallory, do you never sleep? It seems like everywhere I go, there you are, being prolific.
I love the gingerbread-nut episode. That kid was on his a-game with Mr. Brocklehurst. I bet he grew up to bilk the taxpayers out of millions of pounds.
God I hope Mallory’s next book is The Bronte Sisters Diet. There’s a mint in this.
THERE IS NO MINT IN THIS. Mint is GREEN and VIBRANT and has SPARKS OF LIFE.
Aye, ’tis wick all right, lass. (hahahaha)
A thin mint, naturally
With Mallory’s unflagging research into Bronte novels’ food-yearnings, I’m beginning to suspect that the Bronte sisters suffered from malnourishment and/or eating disorders.
Maybe that’s the real roots of the Romantic movement – sublime fixation on unfoodliness.
In Shirley, Caroline Helstone legitimately develops an eating disorder and wastes away after being rejected by the dude who gave every indication he was going to propose and then being denied by her awful uncle any other means to support/distract herself/leave the situation through working. Working, so unladylike!
Emily definitely did. At the very least, she used food avoidance as a means to manipulate people around her when they were being jackasses.
Not unlike Cathy. Hmmmmmm. We may need to do an in-depth study of how the Bronte sisters used each other as character fodder.
Did they actually know any other people though?
Villette is going to be fun. Remember that M. Paul’s OPENING MOVE in his weird courtship of Lucy is to lock her in an attic with no food – dude is way more efficient than Mr. Rochester – and refuse to let her out until she has an effective drag performance prepared. And then he brings her a pastry and she’s delighted.
Hah! “Unfoodliness” is my new favorite word!
These are all great but what about the FORGOTTEN WONTED HALLUCINATORY POTATOES:
That night, on going to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont to amuse my inward cravings
Bar·me·cide (rare): “illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing.” Thank you for expanding my sorrowfood vocabulary, persons above and authorial.
You left out the part at Lowood where Jane and the others start eating well for the very first time, because there are bigger rations to going off now that their classmates are dying of tuberculosis by the dozens.
“Besides, there were fewer to feed; the sick could eat little; our breakfast-basins
were better filled; when there was no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often happened, she would give us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick slice of bread and cheese, and this we carried away with us to the wood, where we each chose the spot we liked best, and dined sumptuously”
After 50 pages of cold gruel and burnt porridge, this sounded like a feast. I was like “fuck yeah, cheese! And PIE!”
This series is reminding me how much I love novels shaped by the author’s fixation from food due to being hungry all the time as a kid. Like Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Laura Ingalls Wilder in everything, esp “Farmer Boy,” the ultimate food orgy fantasia. Seriously, it’s just like 120 pages of her husband inhaling food as a gluttonous young kid. Definitely some subconscious resentment and longing from Laura “We ate salt pork on Sundays if we were lucky” Ingalls there.
Farmer Boy is and always has been my hands down favorite and I think you finally helped me figure out why. The FOOD! (Also the part where Almanzo throws the stove-black at his sister ahaha)
See also why the Long Winter is the WORST: the food.
But what IS vinegar pie?
http://www.marthastewart.com/939300/pioneer-vineg…
It… actually doesn’t look horrible. Not very MUCH vinegar, and a lot of spices!
It’s a kind of chess pie, using vinegar to cut the sweetness instead of (less scary to modern bakers) citrus.
It’s honestly quite good and you don’t taste the vinegar. Plus it’s really easy to make. If you want an easy, tasty pie that will scare people with the name, I recommend it.
Seriously!! The long, long, loving descriptions of Mother Wilder (the expert butter-worker!) and her dougnuts and pies and roasts are 100% Laura’s inner Oliver Twist with his nose pressed against the governors’ window.
I was going to say! It’s the first time Jane gets a decent meal and it’s because half her classmates are DEAD.
I suspect that the pie was probably a meat pie and not a desert pie like apple or cherry. But yes, the first time I read it i thought she was scarfing down half an apple pie and all those deaths were WORTH IT.
I still puzzle over the word, “croquant”, due to Mr. Rochester’s Bon Bons of Infidelity and Attempted Murder. Good Christians avoid delicacies sourced from the New World (double entendre intended!)
Croquer, to munch. Croquant, munching.
Thanks for bringing up the Chocolate and Betrayal – it’s not technically a meal Jane eats, but I still think it belongs here.
Honestly, though, bread and cheese is starting to look like a good option for dinner tonight.
I’ll take bread and milk only if Nigella Lawson makes it for me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZHm3gTAuOw
Fun fact! I once wrote a paper entitled “Reader, i Marinated Him” about how Jane’s malnourishment symbolized emotional malnourishment.
That is the best title ever. If I was your teacher/professor, I’d have given you bonus points for that alone! (Seriously, every time I think about it, I giggle softly at my desk. Thanks for the afternoon pick-me-up!)
I think I did get bonus points! And, actually, recently (six years after writing it!) my old teacher reached out via social media to say that she still talks about my title/paper when her class gets to Bronte.
That is solid gold! I had a student a few years ago whose every essay had a clever title like that, and every single one got him bonus points. I miss that kid.
As a companion volume to this, can you do all the meals in Rebecca next? That entire book is actually about food, to the point where it gets disturbing.
” I found the Republican Party to consist of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together. ”
FIFY, Charlotte.
What I’ve gleaned from this and the previous post in the series is that there’s more actual food in the three days Jane spends starving than there is in all of Wuthering Heights.
This was the novel that started my lifelong love of science fiction.
Because; whoever heard of a world without electricity? Wow.
That seedcake was beaten by hand and raised by eggwhites because there was no baking powder. Just for the record.
if you ever played, ah, Vagrant Story? It was very romantic, and dramatic and they -named- all the rooms?
A fanfiction writer years ago compiled them into a list, and it had some qualities in common with this one
http://www.bishink.org/vs/roomlist.htm
“The Body Fragile Yields”
“The Crust Of Poverty.”
The tone seemed very similar! to me
Wait (oh why am I always late to the party? I need to come here every day,not twice a week).
What about the Orange? Yes, there is an orange in this book. It’s the salary Jane pays the little orphan girl who works as her maid in the village school funded by Mr. Oliver. At least, on the first day. The little orphan child, Alice Wood by name, is still hard at it on Nov 5, a holiday (perhaps she’s non-union?) and Jane pays her in real coin this time. A penny. She is well satisfied.
Query: would the orange be worth more or less than a penny, and where did Jane get it in rural Yorkshire in the fall?
Oranges show up in Wuthering Heights too, it’s practically The Godfather in that respect. Nelly the housekeeper in Wuthering Heights sends a servant for oranges for Cathy just before she dies and there’s another scene where Nelly meets Heathcliff’s little son and gives him an orange from her pocket, as though she walks around with oranges all day. So somehow a little Yorkshire village had some kind of bagman that supplied them with oranges.
I don’t recommend them, what with all the misogyny and racism and torture porn and paedophilia, but there are some stonking good salads in the Game of Thrones books*. Really imaginative combinations of ingredients and dressings. Alas, they don’t last more than a few books in, he must have been told to cut them. There should be more salad-oriented fantasy out there.
* I was desperate to have something in common with my ex while we were still together, and he wouldn’t read my books, so I was reading his. Yeah. Don’t date people who do that. He still wouldn’t talk about books with me. Chatting someone up in a bookshop: it may not turn out as well as you hope, even if they are the assistant manager.
Yes, the descriptions of the Queen eating these freaking amazing “modest” salads while everyone is starving during the battle are underrated.
Dang the milk-sop sneering joyless sanctimonious Rivers — he makes practically every other male in the book more bearable, even the wretched cousin in the first chapter who gets Jane booted into The Red Room for the night. He, at least, was a kid. Fie, St. John, fie, I say
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