This recipe is from page ten of Althea’s recipe book. It is dated June 1868, nearly two years after her marriage to James and a year after the birth of her first child, my great-grandmother Maimie. It must have been a rollercoaster couple of years, as she became a wife, mother and northerner all at once! Moving from London to the banks of Windermere, far from her mother and siblings, would perhaps have been disorientating and even lonely at times.
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This recipe is from Maimie’s book and follows the recipe for Tinned Tomato Soup. The pages in this book are not numbered and the dates jump about, as if notes and clippings were all written up at a later date. Whereas the soup recipe dates from 1896, this one goes back in time a whole decade, to 1886. It is attributed to the ‘Manchester School of Cookery.’ A pencilled note next to the recipe title suggests ‘Rather less sugar.’
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This recipe is from page seven of Harriet’s cook book and so is likely to date from 1902 or 1903. There was no making them look any nicer than they do in this photograph. They were a disaster. Welded to the baking pan and yet not properly set. One day, one of Harriet’s recipes will turn out well but today was not that day.
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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 recipe is from Althea’s book. This week, I decided to deviate from my usual method of trying, more or less, to stick to the recipes in order. I thought I’d try and find something festive. Surprisingly, given that this book is by far the longest of the three, Christmas recipes were few and far between. Fig Pudding is on page 148 (which perhaps gives you some indication of just how long this book is!)
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The pages in Maimie’s book are not numbered but this recipe features on what would be page five. Intriguingly, a number of pages before this one have been cut out and part of a recipe for ‘Rolls’ on the page opposite has been crossed out. Maimie’s recipe book can only be called slapdash when compared with that of her mother Althea’s, where the pages are numbered, there is an index at the back and the majority of recipes are dated, and even attributed. However, the hand of Althea is never far from this book too, as this recipe is in her handwriting and she has initialled it at the bottom: ‘ANH‘.
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After skipping forward a few pages to reach her Parkin recipe, this post takes us back to page three of Harriet’s recipe book, so it can likely be dated to around 1903. Here we find the first pudding recipe in the book. As ever, Harriet’s instructions are nothing if not concise!
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This recipe is from Althea’s book. It is not dated but sandwiched between recipes from 1880 and 1889. Confusingly, Althea’s recipes jump about in time, as if she collected them and wrote them up at a later date. I confess that I’ve skipped a couple of recipes on page three; the first because no-one in my household will eat clarified dripping in a million years, and the second because, as is often the case with Althea’s recipes, it demands more thought, preparation and purchasing than appears at first glance! That one will follow in due course.
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The book containing this recipe has an inscription in its front cover, written by my grandmother, that says ‘Recipe Book belonging to our grandmother. A.M. Harrison, Newby Bridge and mother M.A.M. Fullmer, West Felton and Clifton Reynes.’ It’s difficult to work out who has written each recipe, as the handwriting in both is often similar. There are clues though to make me think that Maimie wrote a great deal of it. Althea‘s own, earlier book is very precise; pages are numbered, there is an index at the back and most of the recipes are dated and attributed to a person or publication. In contrast, there is no such order in this book, especially in the earlier pages. Several recipes have been copied directly from Althea’s book, which also leads me to think it likely to be her daughter’s.
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Eating With The Ancestors 