CARAWAY SEEDS
It seemed to us that we saw a deep significance in the fact, told by Lytton Strachey in his Queen Victoria, that the Queen’s pious governess, Lehzen, was a fanatic about caraway seeds. Mr. Strachey says:
Her passion for caraway seeds, for instance, was uncontrollable. Little bags of them came over to her from Hanover, and she sprinkled them on her bread and butter, her cabbage, and even her roast beef.
Surely throughout the whole Victorian era the attentive observer can discern the faint but pungent musk of the mild, bland, uncandid caraway. We ourself, in our early youth, crossed the trail of that seed more than once, in small cakes and patties, and instinctively revolted from it. If there is any emblem symbolic of the Victorian age, perhaps it is the caraway seed, a thing that Greenwich Village, we dare say, has never encountered even in its most enterprising tea-room. The kingdom of Victoria, we suggest, was like a grain of caraway seed; but it became a tree so vast that the fowls of the air lodged in the branches thereof.
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