I have to admit, that when I set out to recreate Victorian recipes from a Lancashire cook book, tropical fruit were not at the top of my shopping list. But here we are, on page nine of Althea’s book, in 1868, preserving pineapples. Clearly, they were not being grown on the balmy shores of Lake Windermere in Victorian times but I had also assumed that such fruits would be difficult and expensive to obtain. It turns out I was wrong.
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This is the first hand-written recipe in Althea’s book. It is dated to 1866 and credited to ‘M.N.’ in Liverpool. I presume that this is Mary Newton, Althea’s sister-in-law, as Althea and her husband appeared to spend the first few months of their marriage living with the Newtons in Catharine Street, Liverpool.
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This is the first recipe in Althea’s recipe book, stuck on the opposite page to the first, proper hand-written page. Underneath it, Althea has written her name ‘Althea N. Harrison‘ and the date ‘November 20th 1866.’ On the inside cover, in faint pencil, someone (probably her husband, James, after he was widowed) has written ‘Dear Althea’s Recipe Book‘ and ‘Catherine Street. 20th November 1866.’ The recipe is a newspaper cutting, and the only recipe in the book that is not hand-written.
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Eating With The Ancestors 