The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf may have been a gourmet but she was no cook. The famous passage in To the Lighthouse describing the daube of beef is, quite simply, full of howlers. ‘Everything depended upon things being served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bay leaf, and the wine – all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of the question,’ she asserted. How a bay leaf can be ‘done to a turn’ is a conundrum at best: it is there to give its aroma and to be eventually discarded. The beef, and the wine for that matter, are cooked for a very long time and the notion that any precision is required is somewhat erroneous. One of the many good things about a daube of beef is that it will wait around for a long time without coming to any harm whatsoever.