User:Moxie5000/sandbox

The Dining Experience
The ideal Victorian woman, ‘the Angel of the House,’ were females who perfectly combined the management of her household, making it attractive and comfortable for everyone in the family, and providing medical, spiritual and physical care to its members. This physical care took a very artistic and liberating turn in history when dining and cooking suddenly became fashionable pastimes. Factors that encouraged this innovation were improvement in kitchen safety, availability of ingredients, and the influence of the female aesthetic. With the new, positive view that “cooking was a high art practised by geniuses,” middle and upper class Victorian women in the home began to express their creativity for the first time, much as male artists had always been able to do.

Company for Dinner
Dining became an elaborate event that took planning and skill to pull off, and hosting fancy dinner parties was a new way to artistically define one’s social class in Victorian England. Instead of cooks and servants, middle and upper class women began to fill their spare time by making complicated dishes, using non-traditional ingredients and large proportions to impress family members and guests, ultimately transforming the mundane tasks of cooking and eating into artful experiences all their own.

With this fashionable dining rave came the concept of multiple courses per meal and a bill of fare, a guideline to plan menus. A three course meal, for example, would consist first of soups with fish, second of meats or roasts and stew second, third of game and pastry, with salads and cheese and liquor to follow. Setting the table was an important part of the dinning aesthetic as well, and company suppers included expensive silverware and china, with table decorations of “glass, linen, fruits, foliage, flowers, colours, [and] lights.” Standing at parties became fashionable too, and the food served was oftentimes cold and light to accommodate guests and the latest trend.

Eating and Cooking at Home
The Victorian Era was also an age of eating at home as a family. Middle and upper class breakfasts, which typically consisted of porridge, eggs, fish and bacon, were eaten together as a family, as well as were Sunday Lunches, a meal of meat, potatoes, vegetables and gravy. Family meals cooked by the women of the house became common events that linked the comforts of home with a newly recognized artform.

Victorian England began to be known throughout Europe for its bland, disgusting food, since “hunger and flavor were associated with sexual desires. British chefs like Mrs. A. B. Marshall encouraged boiling and mutating food until it no longer tasted or resembled its original form. Many housewives started cooking in this fashion since it was the only ‘safe’ way to encounter food. On the other hand, one evocative figure who promoted the flavor and originality in cooking and dining was Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Pennell was a critic who voiced her strong and controversial opinions in her unusual book The Feasts of Autolycus, 1896. This book not only encouraged women to become creative in the kitchen acting against the Victorian cooking norms, but also urged the necessity of it stating that “cooking is the ultimate form of art”.