Weekend Cooking: The Mersham Swan

A couple of weeks ago I read A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson - a book that I have been meaning to read for a very long time. I am intending to finish up my review of the book in the next few days, but I thought that this passage was too fun to pass up posting for Weekend Cooking.

I am not sure whether these kind of grand creations are a thing of the past, even in the lives of the rich and famous, but as a spectacle this would have been quite something don't you think?

Among her other anxieties, Mrs Park suffered from the conviction that guests at Mersham were in danger of starving to death. For the fifteen or so intimate friends invited that night to a buffet supper to celebrate the earl's engagement, she had prepared three freshwater salmon grilled and garnished with parsley butter, a mousseline of trout adorned with stuffed crayfish heads and a pike poached in court bouillion. There was  a fricasee of chicken with morels and cream, half a dozen ducklings, a York ham and a piece of boeuf royale which took up the whole of a side table.

But it was none of these that held the servants gaze. for, in the center of the huge table, drawing the eye as inevitably as the Winged Victory compels the eye of those ascending the main staircase of the Louvre, was the dessert that Mrs Park had created in homage to Muriel Hardwicke.

The gentle cook had seen in her mind's eye a great swan made of snow white meringue - The Swan of Mersham, which was part of the Frayne coat of arms. She had visualized its wings made of the palest almonds, furled and slithered to feathered authenticity and its beak and eye picked out in silver. She had imagined the inside of this mighty, heraldic bird as consisting of the most delicate and subtle mousse Bavarois which, at the touch of a knife on the creature's heart, would ooze out in a fragrant mouthwatering slither... she had conceived of a great lake of creme Chantilly with islets of whipped cream for the swan to float upon and, surrounding it, an emerald shore of fringed angelica...

And what she had seen she had created.

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