Literary Feast  ·  Read the passage. Cook the meal.

A pair of blue eyes

by Thomas Hardy

1 meal in this book

A PAIR OFBLUE EYESTHOMAS HARDY
Our binding, not the publisher's
A dish that matters

“That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one to young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had suggested to her father, with the materials for the heterogeneous meal called high tea—a class of refection welcome to all when away from men and towns, and particularly attractive to youthful palates. The table was prettily decked with winter flowers and leaves, amid which the eye was greeted by chops, chicken, pie, &c., and two huge pasties overhanging the sides of the dish with a cheerful aspect of abundance.”

1660  ·  May
To bake Oxe cheeks in a Pasty or Pie

Take them being boned and soaked, boil them tender in fair water, and cleanse them, take out the balls of the eyes, and season them with pepper, salt, and nutmeg, then have some beef-suet and some buttock beef minced and laid for a bed, then lay the cheeks on it, and a few whole cloves, make your Pastie in good crust; to a gallon of flower, two pound and a half of butter, five eggs whites and all, work the butter and eggs up dry into the flower, then put in a little fair water to make it up into a stiff paste, and work up all cold.

Recipe from The accomplisht cook of 1660.

Sources: Every passage above is quoted verbatim from A pair of blue eyes, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipes come from cookbooks of the period, also free in full. All are in the public domain in the United States. The binding is ours — navy cloth, teapot stamp.

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