A highly fitting topic for the day before Valentine’s Day!
It’s slim pickin’s for my purposes in this chapter, especially compared to the last one. There’s a lot more about clothes and young men than food, which seems entirely fitting for the shift of childhood interests to those of a young woman. But for all that, we do get a couple glimpses into Agatha’s appetite.
For one, her ferocious love of sweets survived adolescence. She relays a particularly comical story about sightseeing in Florence, being urged by a chaperone that she really must see a painting of St. Catherine before she returns to England the next day. They race around the Uffizi looking for it. But all the while “my anxiety was mounting. Would we have time to go to the patisserie and have a final delicious meal of chocolate and whipped cream, and sumptuous gateaux?” Well, it turns out the painting wasn’t in residence at the moment after all, so there was after all “just enough time to stuff me with chocolate and cakes before catching our train,” the cakes generously endowed with “cream and coffee icing.” Now that’s a happy memory of Florence.
The only other mentions of food occur in conjunction with courtship. One suitor had the good sense to send her “enormous boxes of exotic chocolates,” though it wasn’t enough to win her hand in marriage.
Another suitor, Reggie Lucy, would take Agatha for ambles around an unused golf course (I’m sure I’m not the first person to think she would’ve been better off with him than Archie Christie—there is something symbolic about the unused golf course!), after which they’d go back to the family home for tea and fresh toast.
But it was Archie who captivated her, for good or for ill. Agatha remembers that when he turned up, unannounced, at her home, forcing her mother to entertain him until Agatha got back from an outing, the unspoken question passed between them whether he’d be asked to stay on for supper. The answer turned out to be yes, though not because Agatha already had designs on him. If anything, she was astonished to see him again after their first meeting at a dance. Anyway, it was soon after Christmas, so they had “cold turkey” leftover from the feast, along with “salad and something else, cheese I think.” May I also suggest that it is symbolic, even prophetic, that for once Agatha doesn’t remember exactly what she ate, and that there was neither cake nor chocolate present at the meal?!
My guess is that Agatha had a much fonder taste for extremely sweet and creamy treats than I do, so I decided not to attempt to recreate an elaborate confection from a Florentine patisserie (why she put that in French, rather than Italian, I don’t really know). Instead, I simply took inspiration to make my own ideal chocolate-coffee-and-cream cake.
I baked this Chocolate Olive Oil Cake from Cook’s Illustrated on the principle that after all it was Italy, why not make a cake with olive oil? I topped it with an icing of about 1/2 c powdered sugar, 2 Tbsp instant coffee granules, and just enough milk to make a thick but pourable sludge, which I tipped over the top and let ooze out to the edges. Finally, when serving, I topped it with a big old dollop of heavy cream whipped with a little more powdered sugar and vanilla extract.
I don’t know if it would have pleased Agatha, but it sure as heck pleased me!
