Mutton and rhubarb
Jane Austen seems to have spent as little time as possible in the kitchen, leaving the cooking to the women she lived with and the servants they supervised. And, frankly, that’s a good thing: As Mr. Darcy might have said, Austen employed her time much better. “Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb,” she wrote in an 1816 letter (#145 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of the correspondence), apropos of her I-don’t-know-h