Jane Austen at the table

In Georgian gentry homes, the main meal — dinner — was taken in the late afternoon and served "à la française": all the dishes of a course were placed on the table together (soups and meats for the first course, then roasts and entremets for the second), each person helping themselves from the dishes within reach. Dessert followed (fruits, cakes, sweet wine), and later in the evening, the sacred ritual of tea in the drawing-room, accompanied by buttered toast and small cakes. Breakfast was light: tea, bread and butter.

This small, aromatic seed — aniseed and warm — is the soul of English pastry-making in Austen's time: it is sprinkled on seed cakes, coated in sugar to make the comfits that crown Bath buns. Jane, who adored sugar and cakes, would have recognized it at the first bite.