Mrs. Simpson’s Regency Journal. No 17 Food and The French

Thursday, 11 November 1830

Me and Mrs. Ainslie was talking to-day about food. Ah well, you might say, seeing as how you be a cook that’s nobbut what you would expect.

But it wasn’t just about any old food we was talking about, ’twas about the gentry and food.

Now I know scores of recipes — not just for meat and fowl and fish, but for possets and medicinals and and all, and many of them I learned from souls met on my travels, while even more of them I learned from my mother, and she from her mother and so on back down the years.

For cooks, like the minstrels of old, do have prodigious memories - and this is the reason I’d never learned the reading and the writing ’til recent times. For I was afeared that if I let all that sort of learning into my head ‘twould push out the other learning I had and I would not remember how even to make an old fashioned pease pudding!

But times is changing since the war with that Boney,

and now ’tis the gentry who choose about the cooking and the recipes; and the half of what they choose is got from books and not from real people!

Take these Volly Vonts Mistress was so keen to have me make. First I heard of ’em was when a receipt was passed down to me scratched out on a piece of paper — from Mistress to Mrs. Ainslie to give to me. But I could not make head nor tail of what they was about for I had never in my born days heard tell of such a thing.

So I asks Mrs. A, and Mrs. A asks the Mistress and the answer comes back that they is “delicious little French morsels.”

Well, first I thought it was Frenchy “mussells” she meant and I wonders to myself how on earth a body could tell? It’s not as though the blessed things comes out the shell waving little French flags, now is it? So I might as well go down and buy some good Brighton mussells from John Gunn by the Strand and teach them to say !’ Ooh lala!’ when served at table!

But no, a ‘morsel’ was what she meant and what blessed good is that to tell me what they is? A nice piece of pork pie or yet a bit of good red herring is delicious morsels too, and I daresay some of them is got in France and no-one the wiser. So finally I has to put on my bonnet and go down the street to the Admiral’s house, where lives that fancy Madame Moyselle as she calls herself who is Lady’s Maid (though I am sure myself ’tis many a long year since that one has been a maid!).

And what do these Volly Vonts turn out to be but small tarts, pure and simple!

‘But’ says she ‘I hope your mistress knows that they must be served with dandylion garnish?” and then she does laugh and whinney and snort like an old carthorse until Pearce, the Butler there, cries “For shame.” And explains to me her sudden mirth.

Seems Volley Vont is naught but the French word for ”Farts in the wind” which I mind is a wee bit droll and most peculiar for to name a dish. And all do know, a’course, that the country name for dandylions is “Piss a Bed”. So ‘serve your farts in a bed of piss’ what was the coarse old harriden was a saying of . And very nice -I don’t think — for her who calls herself an Upper Servant! So I sniffed and bid them both gooday, for twas meant as a joke, to be sure; but I couldn’[t help but think it were aimed at my Mistress who would be sure to go into a decline if ever she learned what that Frenchy name meant!

So in truth I think these ‘delicious morsels’ should not be called Volly Vents at all, but “Folly” Vonts for all the trouble they have caused me! And I shall never, ever, serve them with dandylions!!