In the February issue of Vogue, Simon Schama offers some thoughts on -- and recipes for -- stews. (Unfortunately there is no link that I could find online, but here's the cover of the issue.)

According to Mary Beard, Schama takes some shots at Virginia Woolf by questioning just how tasty the stew cooked by Mrs. Ramsey in To The Lighthouse would actually be in real life. As Woolf has it, Mrs. Ramsey gushes over the sumptuous “confusion of savoury yellow and brown meats.” 

Schama, a professor of art and art history at Columbia University, is dubious about the presence of yellow meats, and a few other details that Woolf brings to bear in that scene. He concludes that Woolf did not know the first thing about cooking.

Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge, begs to differ and offers a rousing defense of Woolf's culinary honor.