Dining at Oxbridge
Both Fictional and in Reality
Lately I have been thinking about food because I am compiling a family cookbook, which I will announce in a later newsletter when it is finished. But even when I was at Oxford, the letters to my mother contained detailed descriptions of some of the meals that I ate there.
The dining experience at Oxford depends entirely on what college you belong to. Keble had its own set of college dinnerware, marked with the college crest. On Sundays, there was a cold luncheon buffet with a decidedly colonial-empire influence, including cold roast meats, pilafs, coronation chicken, as well as various curries, lime or mango pickle, and chutneys.
Virginia Woolf likewise observed the difference in food that was served in the colleges of a fictional Oxbridge University, which is where I begin this newsletter. If you find the fiction too heavy, skip down to the letter I sent to my mother and the video of a formal dinner at Keble in 2009.
A Fictional Luncheon at a Men’s College in Oxbridge
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf was invited to give talks at Newnham and Girton Colleges, which at that time were the only women’s colleges at Cambridge. She contrasts a luncheon at a men’s college (possibly based on accounts from her brother Thoby who went to Cambridge) with a prewar luncheon and a postwar dinner at a women’s college in a fictional Oxbridge. The intertwining of two themes—the after effects of World War I and differences in the treatment of women—are a tangled line of argument suggesting that the effects of food have less to do with nutritional content than the context in which we eat it.1
“The clock struck. It was time to find one’s way to luncheon. It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist’s convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine.
Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent.
And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.
Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus, by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. We are all going to heaven and Vandyck is of the company—in other words, how good life seemed, how sweet its rewards, how trivial this grudge or that grievance, how admirable friendship and the society of one’s kind, as, lighting a good cigarette, one sunk among the cushions in the window-seat.
. . . Something seemed lacking, something seemed different. But what was lacking, what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk? And to answer that question I had to think myself out of the room, back into the past, before the war indeed, and to set before my eyes the model of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these; but different. Everything was different. . . . And as it went on, I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together, I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.”
A Fictional Dinner at a Woman’s College at Oxbridge
“This [luncheon], thanks to the hospitality of the host, had lasted far into the afternoon. The beautiful October day was fading and the leaves were falling from the trees in the avenue as I walked through it. Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for another night. After the avenue one comes out upon a road—I forget its name—which leads you, if you take the right turning, along to Fernham. But there was plenty of time. Dinner was not till half-past seven. One could almost do without dinner after such a luncheon. . . .
Shall we lay the blame on the war? When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed? Certainly it was a shock (to women in particular with their illusions about education, and so on) to see the faces of our rulers in the light of the shell-fire. So ugly they looked—German, English, French—so stupid. But lay the blame where one will, on whom one will, the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then. . . .
Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring, it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain.
Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less.
Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune.
Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. Down corridors and up staircases the youth of England went banging and singing. And was it for a guest, a stranger (for I had no more right here in Fernham than in Trinity or Somerville or Girton or Newnham or Christchurch), to say, ‘The dinner was not good.’ . . . No, one could say nothing of the sort.
Indeed, conversation for a moment flagged. . . . One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all PROBABLY going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we HOPE, to meet us round the next corner—that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them. . . .
Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the [men’s] colleges down there, I said; but this [women’s] college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?”
A Real Dinner at Linacre College, Oxford
If I juxtapose my own account of the dinner that Moses invited me to at Linacre College with Virginia Woolf’s writing, you will see how large the gap is between fiction and reality. Sometimes a dinner is just a dinner. Real life at Oxford can be pretty mundane for both men and women. The best of food will not make us brilliant and even prunes can inspire the writing of the likes of Virginia Woolf.
Or maybe, life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is more light-hearted than the interwar years when Woolf was writing. Linacre, like the fictional Fernham, is a red-brick college. Moses is black, I am a woman, and the dinner was comparable to the best of any historic men’s college, which may mean that we are now all able to eat in an “unhealthy” way.
From a 1987 letter to my mother, “Not all my life has been hard work. Last week I got invited to a formal dinner at Linacre College by my friend Moses. I thought I would describe it in detail to give you a sense of what life at Oxford can be like. Dinner started off with a slice of honeydew melon and sparkling white wine; next, we had halibut steak with cream sauce, new potatoes, French bread and butter, snow peas, and fried potatoes; this was followed by the first dessert of fresh strawberries with whipped cream; then we had a second dessert consisting of a cream cracker with melted brie. Altogether we had three forks, three knives, and two spoons—all of which had been used by the end of dinner. But this was not all!
Then we all got up and went to a different dining room for formal dessert. We had to sit next to someone other than the person who brought us. We then had a glass of sauterne, a glass of port, a cup of coffee, more fresh fruit (pineapple, grapes, cherries, peaches) and two kinds of candy (chocolate and Turkish Delight).
Dinner took two hours. The conversation was polite, but not profound. My friend describes it as the ‘cult of the amateur’ . . . as opposed to the ‘cult of professionalism’.
There was a similar type of dinner at Keble last Wednesday night, which I took [my housemate/boyfriend] to. It was not quite as fancy, but had an additional round of drinking beforehand—known as ‘sherry’. He seemed to enjoy the experience—even though it ruins the evening’s work. First, because it takes so long to dine, and second, because you end up drinking too much.”
There is more to be said about the arrival of my housemate/boyfriend in Oxford, which I will take up next week.
Here is a 2009 illicit video of a formal dinner at Keble College.
The quotations are taken from chapter 1 of Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).