Conservative History Journal

It is a long time since this blog has had an entry about cookery books and their history. Indeed, it is too long since this blog has had an entry about anything and, really, it is time that was corrected.

So, cookery books, their history and the history of food that they describe. Readers (if there are any left) will recall that I find the history of food and historic recipes quite fascinating and often read cookery books and books about cooks and cookery writers for pleasure. Recently I was thinking that books which provide interesting background to the food and recipes fall into three very obvious categories: books that is a pleasure to read but one never cooks from and I have to admit all of Elizabeth David's books are in that category, books that are interesting merely for their recipes, and the third and best category of all, the ones that are a pleasure to read and whose recipes one tries out and uses over and over again.

One such book is George Lang's The Cuisine of Hungary that gives a fascinating history of food in Hungary, talks of the various regional specialities and customs surrounding them. And when one has read all that one can cook the food. My own copy has sadly become a badly stained collection of pages that seem to fall out whenever I pick up the volume to cook or bake something from it.

Another rather surprising book in that category is Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, edited by Hilary Spurling. It is a collection of sixteenth and seventeenth century recipes put together by Lady Fettiplace in the early years of the latter and handed down in the family till it arrived in the hands of John Spurling who handed it over to his wife. It is a fascinating piece of social history based on those receipts and marginalia but I have cooked a good deal from it.

The various preserves and marmalades I can now do more or less without bothering to consult the recipes and have long ago understood  how to make different coloured ones from the same fruit without adding food colouring. But I can also recommend A Tart of Spinage (Spinach Tart) for the month of January in which the filling is flavoured with cinnamon, currants and rose water, all very typical of the age but it works well. As for the ale and sherry pancakes with or without the addition of apples, they are out of this world. Should you be keeping Lent, these will set you up for the fasting period.

Elisabeth Ayrton's The Cookery of England, I believe, will fall into the third category as well. I have just finished reading it with great interest. She has collected traditional recipes of various parts of England (she has also another book about England's regional food) and of various period from both published and unpublished sources. As it happens, the publication of cookery books has been of importance in England since the sixteenth century and women authors produced notable examples from an early period. Ms Ayrton has also looked at domestic accounts of a few large houses to calculate how much was used of what ingredient and how much was bought from outside.

This is not as detailed a books as Hilary Spurling's, which concentrates on the cooking and distilling of just one household for a century or so. Ms Ayrton ranges further geographically and historically, having as her aim, the need to show that English food was not always bad or uninteresting. The book was first published in 1974 when this still seemed a rather outlandish idea. Since then, as we know, people have been rediscovering traditional English food and updating it to more modern tastes. We have Elisabeth Ayrton and Hilary Spurling (as well as Elizabeth David and sundry others) to thank for that interest and development.

Meanwhile, there are some interesting fish soups, an eighteenth century recipe of celery in cream as well as an intriguing hot cucumber in cream to try. And that is before I get to the glory of English cooking: pies and cakes.

The Guildhall Library is not known well enough. Admittedly, it is housed in a hideous building just round the corner from the Guildhall, in itself a fascinating place, but the collection, which is freely available to anyone who wishes to consult it, is stupendous. There really is no other word for it.

Among other collections there is an enormous one on food and drink that includes numerous cookery books of past and present. At the moment there is an exhibition there, that I can strongly recommend, of three Victorian cooks and writers of cookery books, Mrs Beeton, of course, her predecessor, Eliza Acton and the "people's chef" Alexis Soyer. The exhibition is quite small, with three glass topped stands, one for each personality and an amusing display of cardboard models of various deserts from Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

The accompanying notes give a good summary of the various cookery books and one or two utensils displayed. The story of Mrs Beeton and her books is well told and may not be of great interest to people who think they know everything about the lady and her work but I would advise paying a little attention as, for one reason or another, she has been traduced in popular opinion. One reason is that her widower (she died at the age of 28) found himself in deep financial problems and had to sell his journal and the rights to her book. This was subsequently republished with ridiculous additions, particularly of the grand Edwardian variety. The original text was not reprinted in facsimile till the 1980s, reprinted several times and has now become available on line. Readers who are interested can look at the book and see that far from flouncy it was a very straightforward manual that gave advice and instructions to middle class wives and mothers on how to produce reasonably nourishing food at reasonable prices (as well as the occasional grand dinner) and how to run their households.

It has been said with some justification that Mrs Beeton, unlike some though not all modern cookery writers did not bother to test all the recipes (there was no time for that, given the speed with which she produced the installments that became the book eventually) and that she plagiarized a great deal, particularly from Eliza Acton.

We run into difficulties here. As the exhibition and the notes explain, Eliza Acton, though less well known, is more highly regarded by a number of experts like Elizabeth David and Delia Smith. Her life appears to be somewhat more glamorous than the overworked Mrs Beeton's and recently it has become fashionable to elevate her while denigrating her successor.

A few years ago Sheila Hardy produced a biography of Eliza Acton and called it The Real Mrs Beeton. I have not yet read the book but fully intend to and may well find it very interesting but I do think that is a silly title. Eliza Acton was not the real Mrs Beeton unless you use that name to describe any cookery writer; she was the real Eliza Acton and not, by a very long chalk, the first cookery writer for middle class families in England.

Kathryn Hughes, Isabella Beeton's biographer and the promulgator of the dubious theory that Sam Beeton had syphilis with which he infected his wife who died of it, reviewed Sheila Hardy's book with some irony:

Miss Acton has long been set up as the saint to Mrs Beeton's sinner. Where Isabella Beeton (pictured) is Victorian in a stodgy, over-boiling the veg, old biddyish kind of way, Eliza Acton is an Austenish heroine: a stylish Regency spinster, a poet rather than a journalist, a committed cookery writer rather than an opportunistic hack. Elizabeth David, herself a patron saint of food writing, enshrined Acton's superiority to Beeton in a couple of important revisionist articles that appeared in the 1960s. Jane Grigson, also generally agreed to be on the side of the cookery angels, further hymned Acton's greatness as the true founder of modern recipe making. So, too, does Delia Smith in her foreword to this new biography. In short, anyone who wants to be in the kitchen cool gang knows that the name to drop is Acton's.

There's an added frisson to the Acton/Beeton face-off, which comes from Beeton lifting scores of "receipts" from Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, stitching them into her own Book of Household Management as if they had emerged from her own steamy kitchen. Household Management went on to become a cultural behemoth, lumbering through the 19th and 20th centuries gathering millions of readers as it went, while Acton's Modern Cookery remained a minority taste. To like Acton, then, is to assert not just your culinary discrimination but your sense of moral justice too.

Without knowing what Miss Acton's poetry was like it is hard to glamorize that aspect of her literary activity but restoring her name in the ranks of top cookery writers is a reasonable enough exercise though I do not think it had ever been really dropped. But does it have to be one or the other? Can one really not read both if interested in nineteenth century cooking and make decisions about quality of recipes on the basis of that?

While we are on the subject of Austenish heroines, let it be noted that Miss Austen's heroines did not cook and only secondary characters supervised the kitchen. Mrs Bennett makes it very clear twice that her daughters did not have anything to do with cooking, baking or any kitchen activity.

It is not great literature that tells us how people lived at any time, it is the secondary or what is rather disdainfully referred to as genre version of it. Detective stories are, apart from everything else, a mine of useful information about the past. Then there are non-fiction books devoted to themes such as gardening or, most of all, cookery.

Browsing through the shelves of a second-hand bookshop I came across a copy of Agnes Jekyll's Kitchen Essays as reprinted by Persephone Books. This is a fascinating collection of essays about food and cooking, originally published for a year in The Times and collected, in response to popular demand, as a volume in 1922.

Intrigued by the essays themselves and the name of the author, I proceeded to search for information. Mr Google yielded a certain amount, mostly to do with the book in my hands, which had already informed me that Agnes Jekyll was "the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite patron William Graham", married to soldier-diplomat Herbert Jekyll and "the guests at her first dinner party [the subject of one of her essays] were Browning, Burne-Jones and Ruskin". She was also Gertrude Jekyll's sister-in-law and the biographer of that formidable lady described Agnes as "an artist-housekeeper".

All very interesting but that does not, for example, explain why Lady Jekyll, as she became, was also Dame Agnes Jekyll. Even the publishers say vaguely that she was " created DBE for her involvement in numerous good causes".

I abandoned Mr Google and the internet and went back in true conservative fashion to the printed word, the Dictionary of National Biography, to be quite precise. Its entry on Agnes Jekyll was, naturally enough, shorter than that on her sister-in-law but full of information.

To start with, dates. Dame Agnes Jekyll was born in Ayrshire in 1861 and died at her home near Godalming in 1937. Her father was a Liberal MP as well as an art collector and her husband, Sir Herbert Jekyll was in the Royal Engineers with an extensive political and diplomatic career on the practical side. Among other assignments he was sent to inspect fortifications in Ceylon and Singapore and his wife travelled with him each time, whether to Paris, Dublin, Gibraltar or further afield.

They settled near Godalming where Lady Jekyll became a well known political and artistic hostess with what was considered to be an exceptional aptitude for presentation of food and wine as well as general housekeeping. But that was not all.

The mystery of her Damehood is explained. She was given a DBE in the New Year Honours of 1918 for her war work, which consisted partly of the chairmanship of St John of Jerusalem's warehouse for hospital supplies in Clerkenwell. Apparently she prided herself on answering every demand for supplies promptly. She was also one of the first volunteers to provide ambulance service when the air raids on London started.

Her public career neither began nor ended with the First World War. From 1884 to her death she was a member of the East End maternity hospital committee. For ten years she was chairwoman of the visiting committee of the Borstal Institution for Girls at Aylesbury and, according to the DNB, served frequently on juries if women were in the dock. I find this hard to understand as I do not think one can choose either the frequency of one's jury service or the cases on which one sits.

From 1925 she was a magistrate on the Guildford Bench and sat on the panel of children's courts. In response to her obituary, published in The Times on January 29, 1937, a letter described her as "exceptionally able amateur" and added that she would have been a great public servant had she been a man. That, one must admit, is a curious comment and shows how early the notion that public servants are only those who make a professional and paid career out of it. Amateur Dame Agnes may have been but she was a great public servant, all the greater for not getting any money for her various activities.

In all that period she managed to run a large and hospitable home and bring up three children. Of course, there were servants of different variety. The essays show an interesting society in which servants were still around but there were far fewer of them and they were becoming more noticeable as crucial members of the household.

The lady of the house, in Agnes Jekyll's estimation, has to run matters herself, be aware of the food that is prepared, think ahead about provisions and inject new ideas and menus. It is up to the cook to deal with the practical matters though there is one delightful essay with some helpful recipes, entitled "In the Cook's Absence".

Other essays deal with new names and ideas for old recipes, favourite or otherwise (Gigot de six heures being somewhat more complicated but also more attractive than roast mutton with caper sauce), tea time dainties, dinners before theatre and suppers after, cooking for bachelors and for those who have found themselves considerably poorer after the war, picnics in winter as the average English hostelry was as unspeakable then as it remained for many decades afterwards, Christmas and Easter goodies, Italian food, cooking for the too fat or the too thin, and breakfast food.

What emerges is a clear picture of a hastily changing society or, maybe, a society that tried to return to pre-war norms and failed to do so, not least because the people themselves no longer liked those. In a number of essays the author talks about the pleasure of serving food in bright and heat-preserving pottery dishes (marmites for soup turn up repeatedly in the recipes) rather than on silver that, presumably, made every dish, regardless of what it was intended to be, tepid and somewhat tasteless. Finding bright pottery for the table and the kitchen, patterned table cloths and napkins was no longer just for bohemians but for the respectable middle classes as well.

At the same time the recipes are difficult: they tend to be far too complicated, made possible by the continuing presence of servants in the kitchen, aspic is still much used and the number of dishes that require the use of a salamander before serving is high. I may consider making one or two of the dishes. On the other hand, I know I shall re-read the book at some future date and enjoy the style and the descriptions, even the mild witticisms as much as I did the first time round.