Tag Archives: Brotherton Library

First Monday Library Chats

First Monday Library Chat: The Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds

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Welcome to the March 2016 edition of the First Monday Library Chat. This month we have the great pleasure of traveling to Leeds and talking to Karen Sayers, Assistant Archivist at the University of Leeds.

The Cookery Collection is one of the key collections at the Brotherton Library and was awarded ‘designation status’ in 2005. Could you give us an overview of the collection?

‘The Art of Cookery’ Hannah Glasse, 1755. Cookery A/GLA. Title page of the 5th edition showing the index and the additional recipes in the appendix.
‘The Art of Cookery’ Hannah Glasse, 1755. Cookery A/GLA. Title page of the 5th edition showing the index and the additional recipes in the appendix.

The Cookery Collection is primarily focused on recipes for cooking, but also contains many works on food production, the medicinal use of food and gardening. An outstanding feature of the collection is the presence of various editions of popular texts such as Hannah Glasse’s ‘The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy’ and Eliza Acton’s ‘Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches’. These allow the researcher to track innovation and changes in taste and fashion. Glasse’s book was first published in 1747 and appeared in 20 editions in the 18th century. By the time of the fifth edition in 1755 Glasse was appealing to an audience with cosmopolitan tastes! A new appendix contains advice on how ‘to dress a Turtle, the West-India Way’ and ‘how to make India pickle’.

‘The Art of Cookery’ Hannah Glasse, 1755. Cookery A/GLA. Title page of the 5th edition showing the index and the additional recipes in the appendix.
‘A treatise on adulterations of food, and culinary poisons’, Friedrich Accum, 1822. Cookery A/ACC. Title page with a warning quotation from the Bible and an illustration of a snake and skull to reinforce the author’s message.

‘A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons’ by Friedrich Accum, (1820), is a practical text warning its readers of the dangers that can lurk in food including everyday items such as bread, beer and cheese. Accum was a practicing chemist who wanted to keep dangerous additives out of processed foods and to inform the public. His treatise was controversial as Accum was not afraid to name manufacturers who were adulterating food. However some of his revelations may have put readers off their favourite treats! Accum reveals that white wine can be adulterated with lead to make it clear, and ginger lozenges may contain pipe-clay as a part substitute for sugar.

We also have interesting cookery manuscripts including recipe books compiled by individuals. One 18th century notebook MS 894 signed by Mary Lee and Henry Danvers Hodges has recipes for ‘cake, a good one’ and, less appetisingly, ‘soop meagre’. Mixed in with the recipes are cures for various ailments such as ‘The American Receipt for the Rheumatism’. The recipe, which involves a lot of garlic, ought to be effective as the writer claims that ‘a hundred pounds has been given for it’.

For those of us interested in the history of archives, I wonder, could you tell us a little more about the history of The Cookery Collection?

The Cookery Collection began with a donation of 1,500 printed volumes and some manuscript volumes presented to the library by Blanche Legat Leigh in 1939. The oldest item in her collection is a Babylonian clay tablet of about 2,500 BC inscribed with a list of foods in cuneiform; and the oldest European book is Platina’s ‘De Honesta Voluptate’ in a 1487 edition printed in Venice.

In 1954 the Times Bookshop in London held an exhibition ‘Cookery Books 1500-1954. Some books from the Blanche Legat Leigh collection were on display. This encouraged a private collector, John F. Preston, to donate 600 British volumes published from 1584 to 1861 to Leeds in 1962. These include the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

In the 1980s Leeds acquired the Camden Library Cookery Collection. The most notable feature of this collection is its coverage of English cookery books published from 1949 to the mid-1970s. Special Collections acquired the Michael Bateman Collection in 2011. Bateman was a pioneering food journalist who wanted to enhance people’s diets and palates through his writing.

Beer and ale brewing has been a popular topic on our blog of late, I was delighted to see that the Brotherton has a rich collection of texts on the history of brewing. Could you tell us a little more about the Chaston Chapman collection?

Alfred Chaston Chapman (1869-1932) was an analytical and consulting chemist who worked primarily in relation to brewing. He was President of the Institute of Brewing from 1911-1913. His collection of books on the history of brewing was donated to the University of Leeds in 1939. The subjects covered include wine and winemaking, distillation and the distilling industry, drinking customs, ciders and whisky, and legal issues surrounding alcohol.

The brewing collection makes for fascinating reading and contains some entertaining and amusing titles. Of note are ‘The Anatomy of Drunkeness’ a Glaswegian publication from 1840, and ‘The History and Science of Drunkenness’ an illustrated volume published in 1883.

The Chaston Chapman collection is relevant to student social life both past and present, containing an 1835 edition of ‘Oxford Night Caps: Being a Collection of Receipts for Making Various Beverages Used in the University’. An intriguing collection of concoctions, it contains a recipe for Oxford Punch. Among the required ingredients are six glasses of calves-feet jelly, the juice of four oranges and ten lemons, half a pint of white wine, a pint of French brandy and a pint of Jamaica rum.

Can you highlight one or two of your favourite items?

3)‘Pomona: or the Fruit Garden Illustrated’, Batty Langley, 1729. Large Cookery A/LAN. Plate 3, showing the blossom on different varieties of peach trees.
3) ‘Pomona: or the Fruit Garden Illustrated’, Batty Langley, 1729. Large Cookery A/LAN. Plate 3, showing the blossom on different varieties of peach trees.

As a keen gardener one of my favourite items in the collection has to be ‘Pomona: or the Fruit Garden Illustrated’ by the delightfully named Batty Langley. It is full of practical advice for the gardener on the growing of fruit including peaches, cherries, plums and grapes. Langley gives practical advice on pruning and caring for plants and about picking and preserving their fruit. He asserts that cherries ‘are best eaten from the Trees, after a shower of rain’, adding helpfully ‘but most commonly out of spring water after dinner’. Langley has drawn detailed illustrations of the blossom, buds and fruit of various trees.

3)‘Pomona: or the Fruit Garden Illustrated’, Batty Langley, 1729. Large Cookery A/LAN. Plate 24, showing different varieties of plums.
3) ‘Pomona: or the Fruit Garden Illustrated’, Batty Langley, 1729. Large Cookery A/LAN. Plate 24, showing different varieties of plums.

 

What tips can you offer to help users find them via your catalog or finding aids?

The best tip is to access the Cookery Collections Guide on Special Collections’ webpages. This is a good way to gain an overview of the content of the collection. A dedicated search box enables the users to carry out searches within the cookery collections only. The webpage for the collections’ guide provides direct links to some of our major holdings including Cookery Printed Books and the Michael Bateman Archive.

We have also grouped all our Cookery Printed Books and Cookery Manuscripts together in two distinct collections to help researchers to navigate the catalogue. If you want advice or wish to visit Special Collections please email us.

17th Century, British Studies, Early Modern, Education, Manuscripts, Records, Documents and Notes, Series: Hannah Wolley

Learning to cook in early modern England. Part I

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By Sara Pennell

Where do recipes fit into historical understanding of pedagogical processes around food? Various scholars (including myself) have speculated about the compilation of manuscript recipe collections as part of a domestically-located education for young girls and teens prior to marriage. Some seventeenth-century English printed recipe collections also speak explicitly of who they are intending to educate in the ‘art and mystery’ of cookery (and, in William Rabisha’s case, who not: those without any culinary aptitude, for one).[1]

But here I want to focus on the early modern provision of what some of us might have undertaken ourselves: commercial cookery courses. Today, cookery schools are experiencing a renaissance. In London, the Waitrose Cookery School’s courses are often sold out within hours of being advertised, while eager cooks can enrol for classes on everything from the basics of egg-boiling to sushi-rolling and charcuterie masterclasses. The relative decline of school-based cookery (domestic science or home economics) has created a generation of cooks at a loss of where to start, while TV cookery has encouraged those with basic skills to seek tuition in the more arcane techniques shown on the screen.

<Wellcome Library MS 1176, attributed to Hannah Bisaker, c. 1692, designs for minced pies. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
Wellcome Library MS 1176, attributed to Hannah Bisaker, c. 1692, designs for minced pies. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

This sort of demand – prompted by a skills gap and by aspirational appetites – arguably also existed in late seventeenth-century London, where a commercial market for cookery tuition flourished from the 1660s. Our sources for this are print and manuscript recipe collections. While many earlier cookery writers had been gentry or aristocratic experimenters, or members of manuscript coteries with specific intentions, or encyclopaedic hack writers, by the end of the seventeenth century, a new type of author had entered the field: the commercial teacher-cooks.

Perhaps the first, and best known of these, is Hannah Woolley (or Wolley). Woolley’s troubled biography – twice married and twice widowed – is often highlighted as her motivation for having to enter the commercial sphere, and market her domestic knowledge. At the same time, her experience of being a school-master’s wife, and undoubtedly involved teaching herself, make her publications domestic teaching tools, as much as portfolios of professional skills.[2] The last publication that can be securely attributed to Woolley, A Supplement to the ‘Queen-like Closet’, or A Little of Everything (London, 1674), made this explicit. In it, Woolley offers at-home tuition in a range of domestic arts, from preserving to needlework, at the rate of four shillings per diem.[3]

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, three rare texts demonstrate the connection between face-to-face instruction, and cookery books as handbooks to accompany such instruction:

  • The True Way in Preserving and Candying (London, 1681; second edition 1695)
  • The Young Cook’s Monitor; or Directions for Cookery and Distilling Being a Choice Compendium of Excellent Receipts. Made Public for the Use and Benefit of My Schollars… by M.H. (London, 1683; second enlarged edition, 1690)
  • Mary Tillinghast’s Rare and Excellent Receipts, Experienc’d and Taught by Mrs Mary Tillinghast and now Printed for the Use of her Scholars Only (London, 1690).[4]

As Elizabeth Spiller’s recent edition of Tillinghast acknowledges, little is known in any of the existing specialist bibliographies about the anonymous author of True Way, Tillinghast or ‘M.H.’. The 1690 second edition of M. H., ‘with large additions’ is given on the title page as ‘Printed for the author at her House in Lime Street, 1690’, in a relatively wealthy part of the City, which suggests that ‘M.H.’ was at least attempting to appear well-heeled.[5]

Rarer still is the trade card, masquerading as an ‘invitation’, amongst the John Johnson Collection (Bodleian Library), dating to approximately 1680. This ‘invites’ women (it is addressed explicitly to ‘Madam’), to attend a dinner put on by the ‘Ladies & Gentlewomen Practitioners in the Art of Pastery and Cookery’ taught by one Nathaniel Meystnor; acting as a decorative border near the base of the card is a sequence of highly decorated pastryworks, presumably Meystnor’s stock-in-trade.[6]

Perhaps the best known teacher-cook is Edward Kidder (c. 1665/6-1739), whose published Receipts of Pastry and Cookery exist in variant forms (both as engraved and latterly printed texts), from the first two quarters of the eighteenth century (first dated printing in 1720). Kidder was a celebrated teacher of pastrymaking: his obituary in the London Magazine claimed that he had taught ‘near 6000 Ladies the Art of Pastry’.[7]

Exaggerated though this may be, Kidder was quite the pastry entrepreneur (the Magnolia Bakery of his day, perhaps?), running schools in several different central London locations from at least the early 1700s.[8] Indeed, although the published works date to no earlier than the 1720s, a number of manuscript versions of Kidder’s receipts might date to an earlier period, indeed possibly as early as 1702: the engraved, printed titlepage of Brotherton Library (Leeds University) MS 75 is inscribed ‘London 1702’, and is followed by 71 folios of manuscript recipes similar to, if not verbatim copies of, the recipes which appear in the published Kidder texts.[9]

As these publications suggest, there was thus an acknowledged market for didactic materials recording commercial tuition in pastrymaking and cookery skills in and around London, in existence well before 1700. Who took these courses, and why, will be explored in a later post.

[1] William Rabisha, The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected (London, 1661; subsequent editions in 1673, 1675 and 1683), sig. A4r.

[2] John Considine, ‘Woolley, Hannah, (b. 1622?-d. in or after 1674)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), accessed 4 June 2013.

[3] Hannah Woolley, A Supplement to the ‘Queen-Like Closet’, or A Little of Everything (London, 1674), pp. 82-3.

[4] The British Library copies of the Tillinghast and second edition of the Young Cooks Monitor were bound together, sometime during the 19th century: BL shelfmarks C.189.aa.10 (1) and (2).

[5] Elizabeth Spiller (ed.), Seventeenth Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Queen Henrietta Maria and Mary Tillinghast (Aldershot, 2008), p. xli.: see BL shelfmark C. 189.aa.(1). So far no other data for this address or author has been uncovered.

[6] Illustrated in Ivan Day, ‘From Murrell to Jarrin: Illustrations in British cookery books, 1621-1820’, in Eileen White (ed.), The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays (Totnes, 2004), pp. 98-151 (on p. 130).  Meystnor may be the ‘Mr Meystnor’ who occurs in several of Windsor’s parochial records in the 1680s: James Hakewill, The History of Windsor (London, 1813), p. 17.

[7] London Magazine 8 (1739), p. 205. See also Simon Varey, ‘Kidder, Edward (1665/6-1739)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), accessed 3 June 2013.

[8] See Peter Targett, ‘Edward Kidder: his book and his schools’, Petits Propos Culinaires [PPC] 32 (June 1989), pp. 35-44; Simon Varey, ‘New light on Edward Kidder’s Receipts’, PPC 39 (Dec. 1991), pp. 46-51 (esp. p. 48); and David Potter, ‘Some notes on Edward Kidder’, PPC 65 (Sept. 2000), pp. 9-27.

[9] Varey, ‘New light’, p. 48; Leeds University, Brotherton Library, Special Collections, Blanche Leigh Collection, MS 75, titlepage.