Jane Austen, Toasted Cheese and the Georgian Table

What can a piece of cheese tell us about love, wealth and social ambition? In Jane Austen’s world, quite a lot. Food is rarely just food in Austen’s novels. A dinner invitation can reveal who belongs and who desperately wants to. A carefully chosen dish can be an act of generosity, hospitality or performance, and even a passing reference to cheese can tell us something about money, manners and the person eating it.

It seems particularly appropriate to look a little more closely at Austen’s table this September, as the Jane Austen Festival returns to Bath from 11 to 20 September. Austen herself lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806, and the city would later provide an important setting for both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. At Paxton & Whitfield, however, there is another part of Austen’s world that particularly caught our attention: Jane Austen really liked cheese.

Toasted cheese, entirely on Jane’s account

Fortunately for us, Austen’s letters give us a glimpse of what she enjoyed away from the fictional dinner table. Writing to her sister Cassandra, Austen described the hospitality of her friend Edward Bridges, noting that he had “made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account.”

It is an appealingly ordinary detail. More than two hundred years later, the idea of someone remembering that you love cheese on toast and making sure there is some waiting for you still feels like a perfectly good expression of affection.

We also have a rather good idea of what toasted cheese in Austen’s household might have involved. Martha Lloyd, a close friend who lived with Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra and their mother for many years, kept a household book containing recipes and domestic notes. Among them is a recipe for toasted cheese: grated cheese mixed with egg, mustard and a little butter, then served on toast or in paper trays.

It is not quite the cheese on toast we might make today, but recognisably part of the same family. More interestingly, the recipe brings us away from the formal dinners and drawing rooms we associate with Austen and into the everyday life of a household. These were women deciding what to cook, preserving favourite recipes, using what was available and feeding one another. For all the enormous cultural weight now placed upon Jane Austen, sometimes the most vivid way of imagining her as a real person is simply to picture her sitting down to a supper she particularly liked.

When a cheese is more than a cheese

In Austen’s fiction, food becomes rather more complicated. In Mansfield Park, Mrs Norris instructs Fanny Price to carry a cream cheese that she has been given. Mrs Norris makes much of the gift, explaining how difficult it had been to persuade its maker to part with it and how delighted her sister will be to receive it.

It is a small domestic moment, but Austen is very good at small domestic moments. The cheese is valuable enough to fuss over. It has been given, accepted and passed on, with questions of hospitality and obligation wrapped around it before Fanny has even carried the parcel. Then there is Mrs Norris herself, a character with an extraordinary ability to make generosity work in her own favour. Food, gifts and hospitality give Austen another way of showing us how her characters navigate status and obligation without stopping the novel to explain any of it.

Later in Mansfield Park, toasted cheese makes another appearance in a very different domestic scene. An exhausted Fanny retreats to bed while downstairs there is confusion and noise, including the boys begging for toasted cheese. There is something delightfully familiar about that too. Two centuries may separate us, but apparently the demand for something hot, cheesy and comforting at the end of the day is timeless.

Stilton, supper and social signals

Perhaps the cheese reference that most immediately catches a modern cheesemonger’s eye comes in Emma. Emma Woodhouse is attempting to encourage a match between her friend Harriet Smith and Mr Elton. On finding the two in conversation, she hopes that something romantic might be developing. Instead, she discovers that Mr Elton is discussing the previous evening’s dinner party and has reached “the Stilton cheese, the north Wiltshire, the butter”.

It is a wonderfully Austen-like joke. Emma is looking desperately for evidence of love and instead finds Stilton. But the passage also gives us a glimpse of the Georgian table. Cheese sits naturally among the foods worth discussing after a dinner, and Stilton was already a celebrated name by Austen’s lifetime.

The village of Stilton sat on the Great North Road and became particularly associated with the blue cheese sold to travellers passing through. Although the cheese itself was made elsewhere, its fame became attached to the place from which it was sold, and by Austen’s time Stilton had acquired considerable prestige. The cheese Austen knew would not have been identical to the Stilton made under today’s regulations, but what remains wonderfully recognisable is its place at the table: a distinctive English cheese whose name itself carried expectations.

Austen does not need to stop and tell her readers that the Coles have put on a good dinner. The details do some of the work for her. That is one of the pleasures of reading about food in her novels today. Her contemporary audience would have understood countless little signals instinctively: what was plentiful, what was fashionable, what was economical, what was generous and what was showing off. We have to look a little harder for those signals now.

The Georgian dining table as a stage

Austen’s novels are famously concerned with marriage, class, money and reputation, so it follows that food should matter. Eating was an intensely social activity. People meet over breakfasts, dinners and suppers. Invitations establish intimacy, while entertaining gives characters opportunities to display taste, wealth and generosity. Conversations around the table move relationships forwards, reveal alliances and provide particularly fertile ground for gossip.

In Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park and elsewhere, the meal itself is often less important than everything happening around it. Who has been invited? Who sits with whom? Who talks too much? Who is observing somebody else across the room? Austen understands that a dining table is a very useful place to put people if you want them to reveal themselves.

This was also a period in which British food culture was changing. Agricultural improvements increased the production of meat, dairy, vegetables and grains, while improving roads, canals and transport networks made it easier to move food around the country. Cookery books were becoming increasingly common too, alongside the handwritten household collections in which families recorded and shared their own recipes.

At the same time, a growing middle class developed a greater interest in entertaining and displaying hospitality. Food could therefore communicate a great deal. Serving something special might demonstrate generosity. Offering a prized ingredient could create an obligation. A generous table could establish status, while knowing what to serve, and how, was itself a form of social fluency. For an author as interested in the difference between genuine good manners and social performance as Austen was, the dinner table offered endless material.

Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are

Austen also uses appetite very simply to tell us about character. Take Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His anxieties about health and rich food, and his obsession with gruel, are entirely consistent with a man who worries incessantly about illness and almost everything else. Mrs Elton, meanwhile, approaches food and entertaining rather differently, using hospitality as another arena in which she can display her opinions, sophistication and importance.

Fanny Price’s relationship with food feels quieter. Around her, other characters make meals into expressions of status, indulgence or control. Her own encounters with food can be noticeably simpler, making that chaotic scene of children demanding toasted cheese all the more memorable.

These details are funny because Austen never labours them. She does not announce that a bowl of gruel tells us something about a character’s temperament. She simply puts it in front of him and lets us notice. The same is true of cheese. A cream cheese can become an object around which Mrs Norris performs generosity. Stilton can appear in the middle of Emma’s elaborate romantic scheming. Toasted cheese can be both a thoughtful gesture towards Jane herself and the noisy supper demanded by a household of children. Each appearance is brief, but each tells us a little more than it first seems to.

Jane Austen never wastes a meal

Perhaps that is why food in Austen remains so enjoyable to read. Meals are ordinary, and Austen is exceptionally good at showing how much human behaviour is hidden inside ordinary things. Around her tables people flirt, judge, boast, misunderstand one another, demonstrate affection and expose their own vanities. Wealth can be shown without mentioning money. Generosity can be offered sincerely or performed loudly. A piece of cheese can carry far more social significance than we might initially expect.

More than two centuries later, much of that still feels familiar. Our cheeseboards may have changed, and the cheese on a modern counter is made within a very different world of cheesemaking and regulation, but food remains one of the ways we welcome people, celebrate with them and show that we know what they like.

Which brings us back to Edward Bridges and his toasted cheese. Of all the grand gestures available in the novels of Jane Austen, arranging someone’s favourite cheese for supper seems remarkably hard to improve upon.

And should ten days celebrating Austen in Bath leave you craving a little toasted cheese of your own, the cheesemongers at Paxton & Whitfield Bath will be very happy to help with that particular part of the research.