Romantic Dinners: Feast Like Keats on Claret and Roast Pheasant

In this new series, we contemplate food, drink and pleasure at the dining table in the Keats-Shelley circles, complete with a recipe or two to inspire your next “Romantic” meal.

In an 1819 letter to brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, Keats admits to two particularly English “palette-passions,” as he calls them – Claret and game, especially game birds like partridge and pheasant. As Proma Tagore remarks, in "Keats in an Age of Consumption: The 'Ode to a Nightingale,'" from the Keats-Shelley Journal archives, “the frequent images of eating and drinking found in Keats’s writing point to the fact that, for Keats, ingestion and consumption represent genuine ways of apprehending life." When we sit down to dine with Keats, then, perhaps we too can get a taste of his worldview.

In the letter, Keats describes the effect of Claret as simultaneous physical and spiritual transcendence: the wine “fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness - then goes down cool and feverless” and “the more ethereal Part of it mounts into the brain […] like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step.” It is not a brutish alcohol, but a light-footed one that elevates rather than sinks the mind’s faculties.

Keats goes so far as to suggest to George he mail them young vines to be planted in Kentucky, where the Keats’s had settled, to grow for summer evenings in the country: “Would it not be a good speck to send you some vine roots - could it be done? I’ll enquire - If you could make some wine like Claret to drink on summer evenings in an arbour!” This pastoral daydream may seem improbable (Kentucky is the home of bourbon, not wine, after all!) but it conjures a connection between John and George, separated by an ocean. If George could make and enjoy a nice glass of claret after a hot summer day, he and John could sit for a while with a shared experience.

Claret emerges as a medium of the imagination, a metaphor for fantasy, connection and poesy – agreeing, perhaps, with Robert Louis Stevenson’s observation late in the same century that “wine is bottled poetry.”

So as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere prepare forsummer, what should we look for in our local wine shop to find our own bit of“gushing freshness”?

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats provides the following tasting notes:

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! (Lines 11-14).

Claret is the traditional English term for red wines from the French region of Bordeaux; typically a mix of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot grapes. In the 12th century the region came under British control via the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose duchy of Aquitaine included Bordeaux. Even though the end of the Plantagenets was the end of English rule of the region, the English affection for “Claret” remained, though it was never an official term. For us Americans, we are likely more familiar with the bolder and more aggressive Cabernets of Napa Valley, though a number of American producers today use “Claret” to help designate Bordeaux-style blends. You might also look, in the States, for a “Meritage,” which is another designation for Bordeaux-style red blends.

To accompany your wine, you might take another hint from Keats. Later in the same letter, he corrects his earlier statement: “I said this same claret is the only palate-passion I have - I forgot game - I must plead guilty to the breast of a Partridge, the back of a hare, the backbone of a grouse, the wing and side of a Pheasant and a Woodcock passim.” The type of game birds Keats admits as a particular guilty pleasure here were typically served roasted, basted with butter or covered in streaky bacon to keep the meat from drying out during cooking.  Plus, their strong flavor can stand up to a sturdy red wine.

The Magazine of Domestic Economy for 1837 offers up the following preparations for partridge and pheasant, specifically:

Roasted partidges “should be well basted with fresh butter, and, just before they are done, dredged with a small quantity of flour, and sprinkled with a little salt. They ought to be served up in some good gravy, with bread sauce in one tureen, and sauce poivrade in the other” (113).

“Roasted pheasants are roasted precisely in the same manner as partridges, except that they ought to be larded on the breast and legs, and they require a little more in doing. Twenty minutes is the time generally allotted. They must not, however, be too much done, or they will lose all their flavour. Serve them up with gravy in the dish and bread sauce in a tureen” (116).

For a more up-to-date version of this classic dish, in the video below Chef Gordon Ramsey demonstrates how to roast a pheasant:

Bon appétit!