Enter the chivalrous Mr. Emerson and his dashing son, George. Sparks are sure to fly, but since this is the Edwardian Age, she'll have to fight those lovin' feelings!
The Movie and the Menu
A Room with a View is my favorite movie. I never realized how prominent food is in it.
The movie is divided into two acts: in the first half, Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and her aunt, Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith) are tourists in Florence, Italy, staying at the Pensione Bertolini, a middle-class establishment that turns out not to meet their expectations--they do not get their promised "room with a view" of the Arno.
They soon meet their fellow pensione residents, Mr. Emerson and his son, George, at a somewhat pedestrian-sounding dinner (the meat has been boiled and the stock has lost its flavor). George, a young free-thinker makes a question mark on his plate with the chunks of meat and vegetables.
For dessert, Lucy eats what looks like a prune or a piece of chocolate.
About the wine, in a later scene Charlotte and her friend, Eleanor Lavish, a novelist (Judy Dench), are wandering the back alleys of Florence and pass two wine vendors who are delivering those straw-basket fiascos of Chianti, a good wine to serve with this meal.
Later on, the whole party from the pensione takes carriages to the hills above Florence for a picnic. They seem to be eating rolls and apples and drinking tea. George takes this opportunity to kiss Lucy in a field of barley and poppies. (Later, in her novel, Under a Logia, Eleanor Lavish writes "no wordy protestations did he make, but enfolded her in his manly arms."). I would be happy with a simple meal of good bread, cheese, wine, and apples.
In the second act, the scene switches to England where Lucy lives with her mother and brother in an idyllic country home in Surrey. She has just gotten engaged to Cecil, (an Englese Italianato as he calls himself, wonderfully played by Daniel Day Lewis). If you didn't know any better, you would think from this movie the English had only one meal: tea.
Finally, there is a scene at Cecil Vyses's house in London where Lucy is entertaining what I assume are dinner guests by playing Schubert on the piano. Nothing is said about dinner, but I imagine they must have eaten before the after-dinner concert. So I have included a menu for one of our favorite dinners, Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding.
For Cecil's sake, let's hope the big roast beef dinner was fortifying. He'll need all his strength if he hopes to keep his chances with Lucy alive.
What's this?