Who eats cowslip pickles...

Enjoyed reading some of Lud-in-the-Mist...and also part of a review...

"We are in a Fantasyland, then, and an almost excessively charming one, whose inhabitants drink wild thyme gin and flower-in-amber, eat Moongrass cheese and smoked ham with pickled cowslips, and swear oaths like 'Busty Bridget!' and 'By My Great-Aunt's Rump'."

~ M. Francis

http://whitethreshold.blogspot.com/2014/03/hope-mirrlees-lud-in-mist_22.html?m=1

Alas...

"The central image of the book must owe something to Christina Rosetti's Goblin Market. More generally, it's in a tradition of fantasy that seeks to free the folklore of fairies from its sentimental trappings and recapture some of its old terror. In my last entry, on Robert Aickman, I mentioned Diane Purkiss's superb study of fairy stories; like Purkiss, Mirrlees understands the association of fairies with death. Her Fairyland is a land of the dead, and in order to be fully ourselves we have to reopen the borders and resume our relations with them, frightening as this is."

~ M. Francis

http://whitethreshold.blogspot.com/2014/03/hope-mirrlees-lud-in-mist_22.html?m=1

It is overdue.

https://books.google.com/books?id=OcsqrkeizeUC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=english+cowslip+pickles&source=bl&ots=k5_tNMBjtJ&sig=ACfU3U1bE1ii6DB8ndMw5V2Q8THPmL28hg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiRtqvXlPvgAhWIu54KHW66DYMQ6AEwFHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&q=english%20cowslip%20pickles&f=false