From Canto II of Don Juan:
For all we know that English people are Fed upon beef – I won’t say much of beer
Because ’tis liquor only, and being far
From this my subject, has no business here;
We know too, they are very fond of war, A pleasure – like all pleasures – rather dear;
So were the Cretans – from which I infer That beef and battle both were owing her . .
(Section CLVI)
Life of Lord Byron : with his letters and journals (Vol.1 – to 1811)
p.356 – 1811, June 25: “I must only inform you that for a long time I have been restricted to an entire vegetable diet, neither fish nor flesh coming within my regimen; so I expect a powerful stock of potatoes, greens, and biscuit: I drink no wine…. I have only to beg you will not forget my diet, which it is very necessary for me to observe. I am well in health, as I have generally been, with the exception of two agues, both of which I quickly got over.”
Another new year and another host of celebrity dieters, but it’s not a modern phenomenon. Lord Byron was one of first diet icons and helped kick off the public’s obsession with how celebrities lose weight, says historian Louise Foxcroft. The “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” Lord Byron was thought of as the embodiment of the ethereal poet, but he actually had a “morbid propensity to fatten”. Like today’s celebrities, he worked hard to maintain his figure.
At Cambridge University, his horror of being fat led to a shockingly strict diet, partly to get thin and partly to keep his mind sharp. Existing on biscuits and soda water or potatoes drenched in vinegar, he wore woolly layers to sweat off the pounds and measured himself obsessively. Then he binged on huge meals, finishing off with a necessarily large dose of magnesia.
At the infamous Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, in 1816, Byron was living on just a thin slice of bread and a cup of tea for breakfast and a light vegetable dinner with a bottle or two of seltzer water tinged with Vin de Grave. In the evening he stretched to a cup of green tea, but certainly took no milk or sugar.
To suppress the inevitable hunger pangs, he smoked cigars. By 1822, he had starved himself into a very poor state of health, even though he knew that obsessive dieting was “the cause of more than half our maladies”.
Because of Byron’s huge cultural influence, there was a great deal of worry about the effect his dieting was having on the youth of the day. Dr George Beard attacked the popular Victorian association between scanty eating and delicacy of mind because impressionable Romantics were restricting themselves to vinegar and rice to get the fashionably thin and pale look.
It is extremely impossible to say that how this name is given to the dish even by Chef Escoffier as he was unable to mention anything in his book. Whether Lord Byron loves to eat this particular potato item when he was on his extreme diet control or the dish name given prior when he loves to eat a lot.
Whatever the case may be – Pommes De Terre Byron is a dish which makes many a dish complete such as Rib Eye Steak, T-bone Steak, Steak A La Minute, Grilled Herring, Paunched Rabbit etc. There are N number of varieties of Potato preparation available in continental cuisine but Pommes De Terre Byron or Byron Potato’s historic resemblance with the Great Poet – SALUTE.