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 Althea’s book. As with To Preserve Pineapples it is attributed to her aunt, Jane Harrison, who lived at nearby Singleton Park. As such, it is likely to date to around 1868. Jane would have been in her late fifties and was clearly of a generation that had known the necessity of preserving and ‘making your own.’
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This recipe is from Maimie’s book and is dated from March 1896, a year before her marriage. If there is a theme to this post as a whole it is that I consistently underestimate the Victorians and how they lived, ate, travelled and innovated. As with a recent post about pineapples, it came as a surprise to me that tinned food was so readily available at this time. It also came as a surprise to find out that Maimie’s travels were not restricted to jaunts around the Lake District…
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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 Maimie’s book. Because marmalade is seasonal I skipped several pages to find the recipe. I also tinkered with the quantities somewhat, as I’m the only one who eats marmalade in my house and it looked like it was going to produce industrial quantities! The recipe is neither dated nor attributed to anyone but I estimate it to be from the 1880s. Unlike some of the recipes in this book, which were copied out by her mother, Althea, this recipe is in Maimie’s handwriting.
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This recipe is from Harriet’s book, on page six. The photograph above, terrible as it is, fully does justice to the dry and inedible quality of this cake. At least, unlike Harriet’s Sponge Cake, this does have some fat in it but it only makes for a marginal improvement in taste and texture.
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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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Today’s recipe is from page three of Althea’s recipe book. It is dated ‘Queen, March 1880′ and so it is likely that Althea copied it from Queen magazine, which had been established by Samuel Beeton (Mrs Beeton’s husband) in 1861. I have to say, it was tempting to skip this one. There is nothing much appealing about rissoles, conjuring up as they do memories of cold, fatty school dinners. Even the name is unappealing. But I had already passed over the recipe for clarifying dripping, so it was time to face my fears.
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This recipe is from page three of Maimie’s book. Although I believe that some of the recipes in this book have been copied out by her mother Althea, this one is in Maimie’s handwriting. I estimate it to be from the late 1880s or early 1890s.
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This recipe is on page six of Althea’s recipe book. It is dated 1889, which is some twenty years after the recipes just a couple of pages back. There seems little doubt that Althea wrote up her recipes at a later date, as the times continue to jump about all over the place throughout the book.
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This recipe is on page three of Harriet’s recipe book. It’s interesting that, so far, Harriet’s book has provided only sweet recipes, for cakes, buns and tea-cakes. Perhaps she was watching the cook that she worked alongside in the vicarage, as she provided afternoon tea for the vicar, his daughters and parishioners. Or, as I speculated in a previous post, her grandmother Ann could have been teaching her to cook – and we all know what a sweet tooth grandmothers tend to have (or perhaps that was just mine!)
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This recipe is on page three of Maimie’s recipe book (which also duplicates some of her mother Althea’s recipes). The recipes from this book tend to be undated but I would hazard a guess at the 1880s for this one. Indeed, a search of English newspapers finds a very similar recipe (almost word for word!) first occurring in 1862 and very much peaking in the 1880s.
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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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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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When I first looked through the recipe books, with starting a blog in mind, I thought that I would be making a lot of cakes and puddings. Certainly, the recipes from Harriet’s books have so far backed up this notion. However, Althea’s book in particular is proving to throw up some rather more fascinating and challenging recipes; first we had North Country Curds and then, turning to the next page, I found ‘Store Barm or Yeast.’ My first thought was ‘What on earth is this?’ and, on reading through the recipe, I was none the wiser. What was she making?
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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 recipe is at the bottom of the first page of Maimie’s recipe book. As with the recipe above it, Cold Fruit Pudding, it is difficult to date it exactly but I would estimate it to be from the mid-1880s.
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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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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 