[Vwoolf] Muffins

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

Rereading /The Waves/ and came across this: "Yes, I hold Gray's /Elegy/ 
in one hand; with the other I scoop out the bottom crumpet, that has 
absorbed all the butter and sticks to the bottom of the plate." This 
suggests that Bernard and Neville are eating crumpets as Americans eat 
pancakes - already toasted and buttered or whatever, and piled in heaps. 
In contrast, my childhood memory is of toasting them in front of an open 
fire, then buttering them individually and eating them while the butter 
was only half melted. Much nicer that way. The toasting method is as 
described below in "Counsel's Opinion," but as the clerk is doing the 
toasting and leaving them keeping hot in the library, presumably they 
too will be buttered en masse and eaten from a greasy pile. Do families 
still possess toasting forks? I suspect that with the demise of the open 
coal fire, they exist only in Antique shops. My family had a rather fine 
telescopic one - fully extended you could toast without getting burnt by 
the fire.

Jeremy H


On 20.0.2019 10:34, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf wrote:
> I ‘as bin readin’ “Counsel’s Opinion”, Bella Sidney Woolf’s 
> jointly-written privately published one-act play of 1922, presumably 
> written for am.dram. performances of and for expats in Honkers.  Can 
> that be so?  It was printed in HK, but Bella was still in Colombo; she 
> only moved to HK in 1925.  So, perhaps it was intended for expats in 
> Colombo, and it is a coincidence that her husband Tom Southorn’s 
> career took him from Colombo to HK.
> Anyway, the play is set in “A room in the Temple”, belonging to a 
> “Lady Barrister”.  That’s progressive, and even more progressive is 
> that her love interest (another barrister) finally accepts that he 
> “was old-fashioned enough to think that men must work and women must 
> housekeep”.
> However, she has a clerk, Jenkins, who is also female: “As the curtain 
> rises, JENKINS, a quaint person in a black frock is toasting muffins 
> in front of the fire.  She is singing ‘. . .’ [censored, in case the 
> sensitives are caused distress]”.  Jenkins and references to muffins 
> continue throughout the play.  The muffins and the dropped aitches 
> (e.g. “D’yer like yer muffins ‘alf-toasted or done to a coal-black 
> cinder?”) reminds me of “Orlando”: “The muffins is keepin’ ’ot in the 
> liberry”.
> As part of the US imperial project, American muffins have invaded the 
> UK and are gradually taking over.  They are advertised as muffins, as 
> if English muffins didn’t exist. American muffins are the teatime 
> equivalent of the grey [sic] squirrel.
> It is a sobering thought that generations of Americans have not known 
> what muffins were in “Orlando”.  Some may have wondered why they 
> needed to be kept ‘ot, or why one should apply butter to them (see 
> “The Importance of Being Earnest”).
> The new CUP edn of “Orlando” provides info. on the history of the 
> muffin (and the crumpet) under the quote “The muffin was invented and 
> the crumpet”, but does not explain what a muffin actually is.  Of 
> course, you can look up a dictionary, but sometimes you don’t know 
> that you *need* to look up a dictionary.  Cf. “street scavengers” in 
> “Jacob’s Room”.
> Stuart
>
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