Anyone who has been reading this blog so far will know that Harriet’s recipes are known for their brevity and this one doesn’t disappoint. Crammed on to the bottom of a page, it’s little more than a list of ingredients, although it is pleasingly splattered and singed, as if it’s been consulted many times.
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At last, a savoury dish appears in the recipe books! (What a shame that my photography skills can’t do it justice…) This recipe is on the second page of Maimie’s book so, as ever, is difficult to date. The mid-1880s would be my best guess. Maimie is in her late teens or early twenties. Two of her younger brothers, Charles and James, are off at boarding school, leaving Maimie with her siblings Ethel and Edmund.
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In my last post about Harriet, she was working as a servant to a vicar in rural Yorkshire. This recipe follows the pattern set by her previous ones: scribbled, abbreviated, difficult to read. The instructions she gives are brief and, despite her notebook being small, she manages to cram three recipes on to one page.
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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 recipe from Harriet is another hastily scribbled one, consisting of a list of ingredients and little else. I’m guessing that working as a domestic servant was not leaving her with much leisure time to perfect her recipes.
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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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This recipe is from the first page of Harriet’s book. Inside the front cover, she has written her name, ‘Harriet Ibson’ and ‘1903, Huttons Ambo Vicarage.’ Harriet was 22. Two years previously she had been working in nearby Pickering as the maid for a widowed solicitor, so I presume that this was a similar position. She was employed by a Welsh vicar, Reverend John Griffiths, and his wife and three daughters.
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Eating With The Ancestors 