Verses

excerpt from Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That (1929)—

Bavarian food had a richness and spiciness that we always missed on our return to England. We loved the rye bread, the dark pine honey, the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice and the help of snow stored during the winter in an ice-house, my grandfather's venison, the honey cakes, the pastries, and particularly the sauces rich with different kinds of mushrooms. Also the pretzels, the carrots cooked in sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blueberries. In the orchard, close to the house, we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were also rows of black-currant and gooseberry bushes in the garden. The estate, despite the recency of my grandfather's tenure, his liberalism, and his experiments in modern agricultural methods, remained feudalistic. The poor, sweaty, savage-looking farm servants, who talked a dialect we could not understand, frightened us. They ranked lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians, settled about half a mile from the house, whom my grandfather had imported as cheap labour for his brick factory—we associated them in our minds with 'the gipsies of the wood' of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day and made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards—when milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burned, and we complained—'Those poor Italians in your grandfather's brick yard used to burn their polenta on purpose, sometimes, just for a change of flavour.'