The Dig: Seed Cake Drenched in Cognac Recipe 🥁🥁🥁🥁1/2

Year Released: 2021
Directed by; Simone Stone
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, Archie Barnes
(PG-13, 112 min.)
Genre: drama Based on History

“A man could dig the earth his whole life through and not find anything like I’ve discovered here.”  –Basil Brown

It’s about hidden ancient treasure, but don’t think Indiana Jones. Neither is this English period drama circa 1938 a Downton Abbey of landed gentry with glittering gowns, uniformed chauffeurs, and a kitchen staffed with a small army of cooks. 

Although we do have some landed gentry in the form of Carrey Mulligan’s Mrs. Pretty, a wealthy widow who lives on a 500-acre estate near Ipswich, 60 some miles from London. But she is no drawing room diva; instead Mrs. Pretty dresses mostly in soft browns and tweeds and seems more interested in the curious burial mounds on the estate than anything else.

In fact, she is almost a sartorial match for Ralph Fiennes’ Basil Brown, the amateur archeologist she hires to explore the mounds, whose taste in colors echoes his name.  

And that is just as well, as he is long attached to the russet earth, and just as subtle and unyielding as the dirt he digs:

Edith Pretty: He told me you were a difficult man.
Basil Brown: Did he, now?
Edith Pretty: Unorthodox, and untrained.
Basil Brown: So that’s his reference, is it? Well, I’m not untrained. I’ve been on dig since I was old enough to hold a trowel. My father taught me.

Yet he refuses to call himself an archeologist, preferring the plainer moniker, excavator.

And that unyielding temperament shows itself quite early when he tips his hat and peddles his bicycle back home after refusing Mrs. Pretty’s proposed project over what he regards as poor wages. It is the she who repents, barreling down the dirt road in her sedan to renegotiate. They settle on a fee of £2 a week (approximately £120 in 2020). 

As great as the findings Basil unearths, probably even better are the conversations, especially those between Basil and Mrs. Pretty, or with Robbie (Archie Barnes) her young son, as well as Basil’s taciturn dialogues with his wife. 

***

Basil and Mrs. Pretty differ on which mound to dig first.  She has feelings about the larger one, but he thinks the compact earth on its shows that grave robbers have already been there.  And the pragmatic Brown does not have too much regard for feelings, anyway. Some historians allude to the real Mrs. Pretty’ fascination with spirituality and speculate that she or one of the locals saw a ghost in full battle gear riding a horse near the bigger mound. 

Feelings and ghost aside, it is indeed Mrs. Pretty who is right. The smaller mounds do not yield much, but the larger one, the one she preferred from the first, shows promise.  

But Basil must go much deeper here and there is some danger.  In one of the most compelling scenes of the film, suddenly, the earth collapses on Basil and buries him.  Only after frantic digging with just their hands, do Mrs. Pretty and the assorted farm hands unearth him, and it seems just in time. But Basil is back to work in no time, refusing to take the rest of the day off as she suggests. 

And all that work pays off because when he goes very deep, Basil Brown finds something quite remarkable. But he will show, not tell:

May Brown: You got something to show me? I think you have. I can see it in your eyes.
Basil Brown: I’m not saying anything.

What he has found and finally shows Mrs. Pretty as well is an 80-foot burial ship, or at least the impression of one.

By that time, it was more like the ghost of a ship—the acidic earth had decayed the wood and the body of whoever was buried there, but the imprint of the hull and its rivets remained pressed into the dirt. –Gabrielle Bruney

Again it is the dialogue, not the dig that really compels us. 

Even the plainspoken Brown is impressed. “A man could dig the earth his whole life through and not find anything like I’ve discovered here,” he says simply.

The items are buried deep under the mounds, findings so amazing they have been hailed “Britain’s Tutankhamun,” and their beauty and sophistication “literally caused history to be rewritten” The so called Dark Ages, those four centuries between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Vikings, had been discarded as a kind of shutdown of culture, but the depth of this find, probably the burial ship of Raedwald, a powerful leader who died circa 624, dispensed that myth.

There was a gold buckle engraved with intricately interwoven snakes and beasts – a piece so extraordinary that the British Museum's keeper of Medieval antiquities almost collapsed upon seeing it; jeweled shoulder clasps and belt fittings; a wonderful, ornate helmet with a full face-mask – the haunting visage of some ancient hero seeming to gaze out across the centuries. –Neil Armstrong

The big find ushers in melancholy, though, as well.  The stoic Mrs. Pretty finally surmises that her “heartburn” is much more serious, and a consult to a London specialist confirms a rheumatic heart.  She must avoid all stress and not tax herself.  But her son Robert knows her spells are serious.

With his father gone, Robert accepts that he must now care for his mother, but he has failed, he tells Basil, now his best friend and mentor. Instead of some sugary words of comfort, Basil answers with a hard truth that is perhaps more comforting, because he is treating Robert like the man he wants to be.  

“We all fail. Every day.  There are some things we just can’t succeed at. No matter how hard we try, “ he tells him.

Basil even offers some archeologically tinted comfort to Mrs. Pretty, even though her condition is never overtly discussed.

 “From the first human handprint on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous.  So we don’t really die.”    

Another cause of melancholy occurs when news of the find comes out, and all the big boys want to muscle in on it.  Particularly odious is Charles Phillips (Ken Stott of Rebus fame) who pretty much kicks the amateur Brown off the dig, relegating him to mere manual labor on its perimeter. When Basil decides to quit after this indignity, his wife uses his own words to set him straight:  

You told me that your work’s not for the past or even the present but for the future, so that the next generations can know where they came from, the line that joins them to their forbearers.  –Mrs. Basil Brown

Thus Basil Brown returns, and the professional archeologists admit that his work has been quite good, and after the mild tongue lashing where Mrs. Pretty says it is only “snobbery” that is keeping Basil from working the dig alongside them, he does.

Different Drummer agrees with the many critics who praise the fine acting from Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in the two leads. Like the burial mounds themselves, all the treasure is below the surface. One sees repressed sorrow, anger, and pain only in their eyes, or a shadow that passes over the features for an instant.  Stoic Mrs. Pretty (Mulligan) never shares the heart doctor’s grim diagnosis with anyone, though both her son Robert and Basil Brown are aware she is seriously unwell.  

Or as Gabrielle Bruney observes, we see “characters whose preferred means of conducting tough conversations is via loaded glances.”

One can quibble over some of the film’s details, and many have, particularly the soft-hued portrait of Mrs. Pretty, who was actually much older and quite independent with a life history of bold adventures.  She actually was the strong women so much desired by current filmmakers, but her actual feats, such as crewing racing yachts, flying a plane, or “traveling to France to work as a nurse with the Red Cross during the even though everyone warned her not to” are not mentioned as all in the film.

Also the romance between Peggy Piggot (Lily James of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) and Edith Pretty cousin Roray Lomax (Johnny Flynn) is a complete fabrication. Roray himself never existed and Peggy Piggot stayed married to a fellow archeologist Stuart Piggott her whole life.

However, those are merely quibbles to Different Drummer. 

The Dig brings history to life through the understated emotions of the humans who discover an early sophisticated culture just as theirs is threatened by the ravages of the World War II.

Not to miss. 

(It is interesting to note that the BBC (as their American connection via Netflix and Masterpiece Theater in America) has two great new productions set in the late 1930s, The Dig , and the new version of All Creatures Great and Small.

Both recall another era almost a century ago with an emphasis on local people, community and country life.)  

–Kathy Borich
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Film-Loving Foodie

It is 1939 and Basil Brown has finally unearthed a burial mound, but his treasure has also buried something in its own right – the idea that the Anglo-Saxon period was without learning or sophistication.  The Dark Ages, so to speak, are dug under with Basil Brown’s humble little spade. 

To celebrate, Mrs. Pretty arranges a gathering of the town people at the Sutton Hoo estate, complete with champagne – “…or is it sherry?” Basil Brown wonders. 

Well, we need something quite British to nibble on after the toast, don’t we?  And it will have to be authentic and delicious to keep our attention on the speaker from the British Museum as he struggles to he heard over the Spitfure engine overhead as England prepares for war against the Nazis.

Our recipe comes from the Middle Ages and is almost as ancient as the artifacts (circa 624 AD) that Basil Brown unearths.  And it is from Different Drummer’s own Appetite for Murder: A Mystery Lover’s Cookbook.

Seed Cake Drenched in Cognac

Often called nun’s cakes because baking them was one of the few leisure activities permitted medieval sisters, they continue to enjoy popularity in Britain.  Along with tea and treacle tart, this confection is frequently mentioned in Agatha Christie’s writing.   

Ingredients 

1 cup butter                                                     

1/2 cups sugar                                     

6 egg yolks                                          

3 egg whites                                        

3 1/2 cups flour, sifted             

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 cup milk

1 tablespoon caraway seeds

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

5 tablespoons cognac 

Confectioner's sugar for dusting

 Directions

Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Add the egg yolks, beating well.  Stir egg whites, breaking up just slightly, and add to mixture.  Beat well for 1 minute.  Resift flour, salt, and baking powder 3 times and fold into mixture gradually, alternating with the milk.  Fold in caraway seeds and vanilla.  Pour batter into buttered and floured 9-inch tube pan.  Bake in a preheated 350 oven for 50 to 55 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.  Cool for 2 to 3 minutes, unmold, and invert to cool on a cake rack. Puncture the cake all over with a wooden skewer.  Drench with cognac and allow to cool completely.   Serve sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Appetite for Murder: A Mystery Lover’s Cookbook