Triple Error
In the “Heart of Midlothian” (ch. 1.) is the following passage respecting Effie Deans:
“She amused herself with visiting the dairy, in which she had so long been assistant, and was near discovering herself to May Hettly, by betraying her acquaintance with the celebrated receipt for Dunlop cheese, that she compared herself to Bedreddin Hassan, whom the vizier, his father-in-law, discovered by his superlative skill in composing cream-tarts with pepper in them.”
Brewer, in his “Reader’s Hand Book,” points out several errors in these few lines: (1) “cream-tarts” should be cheese-cakes; (2) the charge was that he made cheese-cakes without putting pepper in them, and not that he made “cream-tarts with pepper;” (3) it was not the vizier, his father-in-law, but his mother, the widow of Noureddin, who made the discovery, and why? For the best of all reasons—because she herself had taught her son the receipt of Damascus. See “Arabian Nights” Noureddin Ali.
Brewer also shows that Thackeray, in “Vanity Fair” (ch. 3) repeated at second-hand Scott’s allusion to Bedreddin, instead of quoting directly from the original. He makes Rebecca Sharp say, “I ought to have remembered the pepper which the Princess of Persia puts in the cream-tarts in the ‘Arabian Nights.’” Aside from this repetition of Scott’s blunders, it was not a princess, but Bedreddin Hassan who was the confectioner. Nor could it have been a princess of Persia, for Bedreddin’s mother was the widow of the vizier of Balsora, at that time quite independent of Persia.