The food diary Louisa M Alcott might have written back in the 19th cent
What might Louisa M Alcott have liked to eat? Buzzfeed’s flight of imagination – a food diary the famous 19th century author might have written – is quite extraordinary. It imagines Ms Alcott, who’s best known for ‘Little Women’ and its sequels – ‘Good Wives’, ‘Little Men’ and ‘Jo’s Boys’ – behaving like a character in one of her novels.
“…recuperating from a passing fever”, she is described as overcome “by something of a fit, waking at dawn to sit at my desk and scribble away at my pages, often unmoved by the task of eating until the sun is set.” It gives her a broth before she partakes of roast chicken and cake for supper.
Ms Alcott was, of course, from New England – Concord near Boston, so I turned to Fannie Merritt Farmer’s ‘Boston Cooking-School Cook Book’, first published in 1896 and regularly reprinted till 1936.
It offers a selection of cheese soufflés, Florentine eggs in casseroles, lobster stews, stuffed eggs, Macedoine salad and tiny hot rolls, among other things.
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
– Jack Kerouac
