30th November 2009

Last week I went to a talk in the Guildhall Library about their collection of cookery books. The first were written around 1500 by women wanting to jot recipes down, to pass them on or amend ones that they had been given. From the Seventeenth Century onwards, British publishers started printing and selling cookery books. These were utterly unlike the ones we use today: they were grand things, elaborate and showy; not to be followed by someone cooking, more the sort of expensive volume that ladies would use as an example of the fine dishes that they could afford to eat.

In the four hundred or so years that cookery books have been published, Mrs Beeton’s have become the most famous of them all, but there have been dozens of other hugely successful women who have made them into their living: pots on the stove, flour in their hair, scribbling away at their kitchen tables. Two examples are:

Hannah Glasse (1708-1770), who was one of the earliest ‘celebrity chefs’, her cookery books were for the emerging middle-classes and she was the first to use simple, specific language in her recipes. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which she started writing in 1746, continued selling until around the 1850s, but when people replaced their open fires with ovens its popularity waned.

And Florence White (1863-1940), who claimed to be the first professional food journalist. She was also a collector of recipes, including those by Hannah Glasse: her book Good Things in England was intended to be a preservation of traditional English cooking in the face of the growing influence of French taste and methods.

Christmas presents: we have already recommended Holz Toys but do look at Nigel’s Eco Store. Or we could buy multiple copies of David Kynaston’s Family Britain featuring, among so much else, Vere Hodgson and Mollie Panter-Downes.  How we wish we could get to the Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But at least we can get hold of a copy of Bauhaus Women by Ulrike Muller.

Finally, as we hang up our washing rather than putting it in the dryer the following article, about the fight to be allowed to do so in America, should make us smile, although rather sadly. (We have just watched The Age of Stupid, so these issues are rather on our mind.).

Nicola and Lydia
Lamb’s Conduit Street
30 November 2009