An important historical food writer is Lieut.-Col. (Ret’d) Nathaniel Newnham-Davis. He was active from the late 19th century until the First World War. British food writer Elizabeth David acknowledged him as an important influence, which speaks for itself.
The Colonel had a protean post-Army career. Restaurant reviewer. Journalist and writer on food and travel. Cookery teacher. He did it all, a progenitor of today’s Rays, Olivers, Ramsays, etc. That he wrote charmingly is perhaps less relevant today given how easily-produced images, v-logs, and other social media cater to to the consumer food market.
That said, his ability with the pen, his extensive culinary knowledge and affable tone make his work attractive still – not an easy trick for any writer of ca. 1900.
After a Harrow education this soldier-writer joined an elite infantry regiment. Despite his military obligations his gastronomic knowledge developed apace, in divers parts of Empire including when on surveys from British Indian garrisons. (Elizabeth David evoked well this dimension of his career).
Retiring at only 40 he alights in London as a singleton man-about-town, blasé he once called himself. He promptly opened a cookery school in the West End that drew the Victorian aspirational classes (more on this below).
He also wrote novels, plays and the books for stage and ballet productions. He knew his way around literary and bohemian London, bringing an upper-crust, Harrovian sensibility to it all. I don’t know if he knew Oscar Wilde or William Morris, but similar associations would have been natural for him.
His first book was published at the turn of the century. It reviewed London restaurants of different categories and went through numerous editions.
One essay reviewed the Jewish restaurant Goldstein’s. It was the type of restaurant I discussed earlier once common in Western cities, offering true home cooking vs. the attenuated genres considered Jewish today, viz. the delicatessen and bagel shop.
Extracts of Goldstein’s menu may be read via Hathitrust, here. Some of the Colonel’s reaction is reproduced above.
He was impressed with the meal served him, almost to a t. I was struck by the respectful tone he exhibited towards Jewish customs and rites.
The Colonel seemed free from any animus to the Jews, not all that common in general writing of the day.
True, his meal was hosted but that doesn’t fully account for the warm tone; I think he was just like that. Perhaps the artistic and bohemian circles he moved in inclined him to a tolerance beyond the contemporary norm.
Eliza Acton was another Victorian food writer of great influence on Elizabeth David. Writing earlier than Newnham-Davis, she showed a similar interest in Jewish cookery and Jewish ritual customs.
It seems unlikely Newnham-Davis was unfamiliar with her work, perhaps she influenced him that way.
The Colonel’s essay on the Cheshire Cheese tavern is good too (in the same volume). He drank beer there, a bitter ale, of interest to me on the beer historical account, but the essay mainly deals with tavern atmosphere, food, and the denizens he encountered.
Academic food studies is aware of Newnham-Davis’ importance, as testified for example by Andrea Broomfield’s Soldier of the Fork published in Gastronomica a few years ago, see here.*
She focused on the Colonel’s successful efforts to make dining out an easier experience for the rising classes in Britain. He guided them in the codes and ritual language of menus, wine lists and maitres d’s, an increasingly necessary skill in late Victorian society as Broomfield explained.
Most dishes in Goldstein’s menu are recognizably Ashkenazi Jewish, or redolent of Europa in some way. He was also served from Goldstein’s delicatessen kitchen, including a cured meat that perhaps resembled Montreal smoked meat or New York pastrami of today.
The Colonel protested politely against the plenty offered him, too much for one dinner he said. But he had gotten through multiple courses and wines before, indeed it was characteristic of the Edwardian table. I suspect he rather enjoyed the mode, finally.
Did a food critic’s inevitably expansive diet contribute to his demise? He died (1917) in his early 60s, when back in the Army tending to German POWs in a British camp.
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*See the comment below where I link to a pdf of Prof. Broomfield’s full article, available on her website.