"LET'S FACE it, food just doesn't taste the way it used to. Time was, we milked our cows by hand, directly into the syllabub bowl. We raised free-standing pastry "coffins" to encase perishable pie fillings. We "sweetened" rotten meat by burying it for three months – then cooked it, smothered in sugar and spices, for several hours before serving it forth. (And if the result was unrecognisable, so much the better.)
Of course, all this was 200 years ago, when Patrick O'Brian's Captain Jack Aubrey was sailing the seas and keeping Napoleon's navy at bay, all the while eating Lobscouse, Burgoo, Skillygalee, Drowned Baby, Floating Archipelago in the Shape of the Galapagos, and Millers Dressed in Onion Sauce.
Recreating the tastes of early 19th-century food is not unlike today's popular sport of trying to recreate the musical sounds of the same era. No matter how faithfully you reproduce the conditions, the effect will never really be the same, because the environment, our bodies and our senses have changed. It's not just the sound itself that is inevitably different: it's different partly because the ears that hear it now are not necessarily equivalent to the ears that heard it then…"
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Armand
looks at a multi-period building.
