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The Barbara Pym Cookbook
The authors combine an intimate knowledge of Barbara Pym and her fictional characters with memories, anecdotes, appropriate callings from letters and diaries, and the family recipes that Pym drew upon and incorporated into all of her works
111 pages, Hardcover
First published November 10, 1988
27 people are currently reading
137 people want to read
About the author
Barbara Pym
40 books994 followersPeople know British writer Barbara Pym for her comic novels, such as
Excellent Women
(1952), of English life.
After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death.
Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropologists crop up in her novels. She never married, despite several close relationships with men, notably Henry Harvey, a fellow Oxford student, and the future politician, Julian Amery. After her retirement, she moved into Barn Cottage at Finstock in Oxfordshire with her younger sister, Hilary, who continued to live there until her death in February 2005. A blue plaque was placed on the cottage in 2006. The sisters played an active role in the social life of the village.
Several strong themes link the works in the Pym "canon", which are more notable for their style and characterisation than for their plots. A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or suburban life, with excessive significance being attached to social activities connected with the Anglican church (in particular its Anglo-Catholic incarnation). However, the dialogue is often deeply ironic, and a tragic undercurrent runs through some of the later novels, especially Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died.
After studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, Barbara Pym served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II. From 1950 to 1961, she published six novels, but her 7th was declined by the publisher due to a change in the reading public's tastes.
The turning point for Pym came with a famous article in the 1975 Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Pym and Larkin had kept up a private correspondence over a period of many years. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Another novel, The Sweet Dove Died, previously rejected by many publishers, was subsequently published to critical acclaim, and several of her previously unpublished novels were published after her death.
Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and played a large part in the editing of its scholarly journal, Africa, hence the frequency with which anthropologists crop up in her novels. She never married, despite several close relationships with men, notably Henry Harvey, a fellow Oxford student, and the future politician, Julian Amery. After her retirement, she moved into Barn Cottage at Finstock in Oxfordshire with her younger sister, Hilary, who continued to live there until her death in February 2005. A blue plaque was placed on the cottage in 2006. The sisters played an active role in the social life of the village.
Several strong themes link the works in the Pym "canon", which are more notable for their style and characterisation than for their plots. A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or suburban life, with excessive significance being attached to social activities connected with the Anglican church (in particular its Anglo-Catholic incarnation). However, the dialogue is often deeply ironic, and a tragic undercurrent runs through some of the later novels, especially Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 22, 2016
This was a fun little read for Pym fans, but there's absolutely not one recipe in this that I would consider making. I've always heard not to expect much from English food, but really, Tuna Mousse, boiled meats, steamed puddings?; even the names of the recipes are off putting. Bland, over cooked food seemed to be a theme. So, no thanks on the recipes. However, lots of fun quotes from her books.
May 4, 2020
2020 has become my year of rereading the novels of Barbara Pym, my favourite novelist - "favourite" in the sense of "speaks most to my soul", not as in "greatest" or "best"; I believe she would have appreciated the distinction. This is my revised review.
This cute little trinket (also published in the UK as À la Pym) is a "must-have" collector's item for serious Pymheads - although perhaps not a necessary cookbook for anyone else!
To recap: Barbara Pym (1913-1980) published six novels between 1950 and 1961, social comedies (or "high comedies") set in the world of vicars, spinsters, anthropologists, and gossips of all flavours. Her "Austen-meets-Wodehouse" vibe sold comfortably, although she couldn't leave her day job working on indexes and proofreading for anthropological journals. This smart, sensible, occasionally silly woman who had served in WWII became highly regarded for her precise character insights, her quiet wit, and that almost-Shakespearean ability to present you with one, seemingly undeniable, point-of-view, only to throw three alternate points-of-view in to the mix, destabilising all of her characters and creating a well-rounded world - even if that world often seems to encompass such a narrow part of society.
Alas, between 1962 and 1976, publishers would not have a bar of her. In the '60s, as Pym lamented in her letters, publishers wanted "men and Americans". Modernity had arrived. Pym dutifully kept writing new novels, submitting them, taking the rejections in her stride, suffered health scares, and retired with her sister to the country to live out a quiet life. These plans were dashed on a winter's day in January 1977, when her champions promoted her to the world - via the Times Literary Supplement - and Pym was able to pull out her unpublished novels from her desk drawer, and begin again. Booker Prize-nominated in 1978, Pym's triumph was cut tragically short when she died in January 1980 from cancer.
But the public appetite had grown, on both sides of the Atlantic, and Pym's sister Hilary and good friend and author Hazel Holt (mother of Tom Holt) set about shoring up her legacy. They published her remaining novels (leading to 12 complete plus a further collection of shorter and unfinished works), an autobiography, a biography and finally, to round out the set, this Cookbook.
A Barbara Pym Cookbook.
It's an amusing idea that makes no sense at first, and then a heckuva lot of sense, and then rather no sense again. And I enjoy it for all those reasons.
This is a thoroughly unnecessary item. A merry attempt to make a bit more money off the Pym narrative and continue to spread her name. Yet, food plays such a substantial role in the novels. Her works are about psychology, culture, religion, love, and food; not necessarily in that order. When she began writing, Pym was an Oxford undergraduate in a parochial England of village fetes and church garden parties. The 1940s and 1950s were, of course, an era of rationing, and so Pym's early novels often feature characters "making do" with a single hard-boiled egg and a leftover piece of cheese, or some stale fruit cake (in her diaries for the time, Pym writes longingly "remember bananas?"). Even once Britain embraces global cuisine in the 1960s, the role of cooking and culture remains strong. Does one go to a continental restaurant when overseas, or remain at the safe hotel with only English food and English guests? Is it scandalous if one's hostess serves a meal from a tin? Is a cauliflower cheese good enough acceptable to feed the vicar? From tuna mousse to plates of cakes and ravioli, the novels are a time capsule of "good English cooking" in an era of enforced restraint, and the ensuing cultural trends of the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
This volume collects mentions of food from throughout the 12 novels, and provides simple recipes and commentary to each. The recipes are very simple. Moreso, wherever possible, they focus only on the immediate item being made. So a pie or tart will simply instruct you to use "shortcrust pastry" rather than how to make it - meaning that a recipe for gooseberry pie essentially instructs you to put the gooseberries into the pastry and then cook it! But this is frankly fine because it's unlikely many people would make the recipes for anything other than historical interest. It's astonishing to think that the world into which my parents were born was still a time when one enjoyed the fruits that existed in one's own locality, lived off a limited range of vegetables and types of meat except on special occasions, and couldn't rely on the supermarket to have an endless variety of ready-made food, spices, and so on. The joy of reading Pym, for my generation, is a twin joy: on the one hand, an astonishing (even absurd) tale of human progress that renders 2020 so far removed from 1960; on the other hand, a comforting realisation that, in many ways, we as people haven't changed at all. (Of course, as I write this in 2020, many of us are experiencing supermarket shortages for the first time in our lives, so perhaps we really haven't changed.)
What recipes will you find herein? There are dolmades and duck with olives, true. But for the most part, it's carrot soup, curried fish cakes, toad-in-the-hole, rock buns, parkin, and trifle. As someone of Anglo-German origins, the starchy and stodgy are my heritage. The everyday item chosen for its filling nature and easy availability, combined with something flavoursome to cover up the repetitive nature of the meal. My ancestors were just brilliant. These main meals and desserts, so often simplistic and then occasionally utterly extravagant for those special occasions, were the backbone of a culture, but ultimately by custom and technological limits, not choice. I'm culturally in love with these cuisines, but - beyond romanticising The Great British Bake Off - I suspect most of us are glad these days have passed! The recipes are accompanied by quotes from relevant novels.
When all is said and done, this is a marvellous treat. A sort of dessert amuse-bouche to accompany the broader Pym banquet. For me, it's special as a physical book in a way that would be lacking in e-book form. Pym mania died down after the 1980s, although is kept alive by a devoted Barbara Pym society and a certain type of younger person keen to rediscover humanist writers of the 20th century. In truth, I'm doubtful that she will ever have the kind of widespread fame that existed for the decade after 1977. Still, this book warms my heart, and it will warm the hearts of a select few for many years to come.
This cute little trinket (also published in the UK as À la Pym) is a "must-have" collector's item for serious Pymheads - although perhaps not a necessary cookbook for anyone else!
To recap: Barbara Pym (1913-1980) published six novels between 1950 and 1961, social comedies (or "high comedies") set in the world of vicars, spinsters, anthropologists, and gossips of all flavours. Her "Austen-meets-Wodehouse" vibe sold comfortably, although she couldn't leave her day job working on indexes and proofreading for anthropological journals. This smart, sensible, occasionally silly woman who had served in WWII became highly regarded for her precise character insights, her quiet wit, and that almost-Shakespearean ability to present you with one, seemingly undeniable, point-of-view, only to throw three alternate points-of-view in to the mix, destabilising all of her characters and creating a well-rounded world - even if that world often seems to encompass such a narrow part of society.
Alas, between 1962 and 1976, publishers would not have a bar of her. In the '60s, as Pym lamented in her letters, publishers wanted "men and Americans". Modernity had arrived. Pym dutifully kept writing new novels, submitting them, taking the rejections in her stride, suffered health scares, and retired with her sister to the country to live out a quiet life. These plans were dashed on a winter's day in January 1977, when her champions promoted her to the world - via the Times Literary Supplement - and Pym was able to pull out her unpublished novels from her desk drawer, and begin again. Booker Prize-nominated in 1978, Pym's triumph was cut tragically short when she died in January 1980 from cancer.
But the public appetite had grown, on both sides of the Atlantic, and Pym's sister Hilary and good friend and author Hazel Holt (mother of Tom Holt) set about shoring up her legacy. They published her remaining novels (leading to 12 complete plus a further collection of shorter and unfinished works), an autobiography, a biography and finally, to round out the set, this Cookbook.
A Barbara Pym Cookbook.
It's an amusing idea that makes no sense at first, and then a heckuva lot of sense, and then rather no sense again. And I enjoy it for all those reasons.
This is a thoroughly unnecessary item. A merry attempt to make a bit more money off the Pym narrative and continue to spread her name. Yet, food plays such a substantial role in the novels. Her works are about psychology, culture, religion, love, and food; not necessarily in that order. When she began writing, Pym was an Oxford undergraduate in a parochial England of village fetes and church garden parties. The 1940s and 1950s were, of course, an era of rationing, and so Pym's early novels often feature characters "making do" with a single hard-boiled egg and a leftover piece of cheese, or some stale fruit cake (in her diaries for the time, Pym writes longingly "remember bananas?"). Even once Britain embraces global cuisine in the 1960s, the role of cooking and culture remains strong. Does one go to a continental restaurant when overseas, or remain at the safe hotel with only English food and English guests? Is it scandalous if one's hostess serves a meal from a tin? Is a cauliflower cheese good enough acceptable to feed the vicar? From tuna mousse to plates of cakes and ravioli, the novels are a time capsule of "good English cooking" in an era of enforced restraint, and the ensuing cultural trends of the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
This volume collects mentions of food from throughout the 12 novels, and provides simple recipes and commentary to each. The recipes are very simple. Moreso, wherever possible, they focus only on the immediate item being made. So a pie or tart will simply instruct you to use "shortcrust pastry" rather than how to make it - meaning that a recipe for gooseberry pie essentially instructs you to put the gooseberries into the pastry and then cook it! But this is frankly fine because it's unlikely many people would make the recipes for anything other than historical interest. It's astonishing to think that the world into which my parents were born was still a time when one enjoyed the fruits that existed in one's own locality, lived off a limited range of vegetables and types of meat except on special occasions, and couldn't rely on the supermarket to have an endless variety of ready-made food, spices, and so on. The joy of reading Pym, for my generation, is a twin joy: on the one hand, an astonishing (even absurd) tale of human progress that renders 2020 so far removed from 1960; on the other hand, a comforting realisation that, in many ways, we as people haven't changed at all. (Of course, as I write this in 2020, many of us are experiencing supermarket shortages for the first time in our lives, so perhaps we really haven't changed.)
What recipes will you find herein? There are dolmades and duck with olives, true. But for the most part, it's carrot soup, curried fish cakes, toad-in-the-hole, rock buns, parkin, and trifle. As someone of Anglo-German origins, the starchy and stodgy are my heritage. The everyday item chosen for its filling nature and easy availability, combined with something flavoursome to cover up the repetitive nature of the meal. My ancestors were just brilliant. These main meals and desserts, so often simplistic and then occasionally utterly extravagant for those special occasions, were the backbone of a culture, but ultimately by custom and technological limits, not choice. I'm culturally in love with these cuisines, but - beyond romanticising The Great British Bake Off - I suspect most of us are glad these days have passed! The recipes are accompanied by quotes from relevant novels.
When all is said and done, this is a marvellous treat. A sort of dessert amuse-bouche to accompany the broader Pym banquet. For me, it's special as a physical book in a way that would be lacking in e-book form. Pym mania died down after the 1980s, although is kept alive by a devoted Barbara Pym society and a certain type of younger person keen to rediscover humanist writers of the 20th century. In truth, I'm doubtful that she will ever have the kind of widespread fame that existed for the decade after 1977. Still, this book warms my heart, and it will warm the hearts of a select few for many years to come.
Read
November 12, 2009I had the clear sense that Barbara Pym's sister wrote this book to eke more money out of her sister's fame. It's true that B Pym included food and meals in her books (and I was happy to finally find a recipe for "cauliflower cheese") but I think Barbara would have found the idea of someone writing this book hilarious.
Want to read
June 9, 2007There is a Barbara Pym cookbook?!?
August 31, 2019
Love the book!!
Wonderful stories, enjoyed the excerpts. I want to make the salmon mousse soon! Also rock buns and plum cake they sound delicious.
Wonderful stories, enjoyed the excerpts. I want to make the salmon mousse soon! Also rock buns and plum cake they sound delicious.
February 1, 2021
It's been quite a while since I read Barbara Pym's novels. I enjoyed them and remember how large a part of the books was devoted to food.
Some critics have criticized this as an attempt by her sister to make money off of her legacy. I think it just lends an air of authenticity to the book that her sister was instrumental in making it happen.
Some critics have criticized this as an attempt by her sister to make money off of her legacy. I think it just lends an air of authenticity to the book that her sister was instrumental in making it happen.
January 4, 2019
I’ll read anything Barbara Pam...
July 16, 2020
Given to me by another Pymite who was moving; such a charming gift! Not likely to make any of these recipes for dinner, but always a wonderful glance into another age and the day to day life of Pym.
Read
January 1, 2024Enjoyed.
April 10, 2024
I’ll never make any of these dishes but it was fun to read the recipes and accompanying excerpts.
October 17, 2012
Very cute. Lots of quotes from Pym's books. The homey recipes do seem like they were taken right out of someone's little box of handwritten, smudged file cards. They are short and simple-sounding. (Only the tone is a little sycophantic.)
"Queen of Puddings
This is Irena Pym's recipe.
Take 3 parts of a pint of breadcrumbs, 1 pint of milk, the rinds of 2 lemons grated, 3 eggs separated, 1 ounce of butter, sugar to taste, and a little raspberry jam. To make the pudding, put the bread crumbs into a pie dish with the grated peel and sugar. Bring milk to a boil and stir in the butter until melted, then pour over bread crumbs, stirring. Add well-beaten egg yolks and stir to combine. Bake for about 20 minutes in a moderate oven, 350F (180C). When done, spread top with jam, then cover with egg whites beaten until stiff with a little castor or superfine sugar. Place again in the oven for a short time to set and brown top."
"Queen of Puddings
This is Irena Pym's recipe.
Take 3 parts of a pint of breadcrumbs, 1 pint of milk, the rinds of 2 lemons grated, 3 eggs separated, 1 ounce of butter, sugar to taste, and a little raspberry jam. To make the pudding, put the bread crumbs into a pie dish with the grated peel and sugar. Bring milk to a boil and stir in the butter until melted, then pour over bread crumbs, stirring. Add well-beaten egg yolks and stir to combine. Bake for about 20 minutes in a moderate oven, 350F (180C). When done, spread top with jam, then cover with egg whites beaten until stiff with a little castor or superfine sugar. Place again in the oven for a short time to set and brown top."
Want to read
January 20, 2011I think I need to get this!
August 5, 2013
Preparing food is a big part of Pym's books, even it if just a roasted chicken; this book was compiled by her sister and references the exact passage in a book for each recipe.
May 25, 2011
Very enjoyable literary cookbook with more interesting recipes than one might expect, since it draws from Pym's personal correspondence as well as her books.
July 21, 2012
Fantastic. Made me hungry for toad-in-the-hole and shrimp paste on toast :)
April 13, 2016
For those who enjoy Pym's books, the cookbook is a delight.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews