Cookbooks for Making History: As Sources for Historians and as Records of the Past

In early 1888, Miss Margaret Pearson arrived in Melbourne under engagement to the Working Men’s College there to give cookery lessons to young women. The College committee had applied to the National School of Cookery in London—an establishment effusively praised in the colonial press—for a suitable culinary educator, and Pearson, a graduate of that institute, was dispatched. After six months or so spent educating her antipodean pupils she published a cookbook, Cookery Recipes For The People, which she described in the preface as a handbook of “plain wholesome cookery” (Pearson 3). The book ran to three editions and sold more than 13,000 copies. A decade later, Hanna Maclurcan, co-proprietor of the popular Queen’s Hotel in Townsville, published Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book: A Collection of Practical Recipes, Specially Suitable for Australia. A review of this work in the Brisbane Courier described it, positively, as a book of “good plain cooking”. Maclurcan had gained some renown as a cook after the Governor of Queensland, Lord Lamington, publicly praised the meals he had eaten at the Queen’s as “exceptionally good and above the average of Australian hotels” (Morning Bulletin 5). The first print run of Mrs Maclurcan’s Cookery Book sold out in weeks, and a second edition was swiftly produced. By 1903 there were 26,000 copies of Maclurcan’s book in print—one of which was deposited in the library of Queen Victoria. While the existence of any particular cookbook does not constitute evidence that any person ever reproduced a recipe from it, the not immodest sales enjoyed by Pearson and Maclurcan can, at the least, be taken to indicate a popular interest in the style of cookery, that is “plain cookery”, delineated in their respective works. If those who bought these books never actually turned them into working copies—that is, cooked from them—they likely aspired to do so. Practical classes in plain cookery were also popular in Australia in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The adjectival coupling of the word “plain” to “cookery” in colonial Australia can be seen then to have formed an appealing duet at that time If a modern author or reviewer described the body of recipes encapsulated in a cookbook as “plain cookery”, it would not serve to recommend it to the contemporary market—indeed it would likely condemn such a publication to pulping, rather than sales of many thousands—as the term would be understood by most modern cooks, and eaters, to describe food that was dull and lacking in flavour and cosmopolitan appeal. We now prefer cookery books that offer instruction on the preparation of dishes that are described as “exotic”, “global”, “ethnic”, “seasonal”, “local”, and “full of flavour”, and that lend those that prepare and consume the dishes they contain the “glamour of culinary ethnicity” (Appadurai 10). It would seem to be stating the obvious then to say that “plain cookery” meant something entirely different to colonial Australians, except that modern Australians commonly believe that their nineteenth century brethren ate an “abominable”, “monotonous”, “low standard” diet (Santich, The High and The Low 37), and therefore if they preferred their meals to be plain cooked, that these would have been exactly as our present-day interpretation would have them. Yet Pearson describes plain cookery as an “art” (3), arguably a rhetorical epithet, but she was a zealous educator and would not have used such a term to describe a style of cookery that she expected to turn out low quality dishes that were vile and dull. What Pearson and Maclurcan actually present in their respective books is English cookery: which was also known as plain cookery. The Anglo-Celtic population of Australia in the nineteenth century held varied opinions—ranging from obsequious to hateful—about England, depending on their background. The majority, however, considered it their natural home—including many who were colonial born—and the cultural model they reproduced, with local modifications, was that of the “mother country” (Abbott 10) some 10,000 long miles away. English political, legal, economic, and social systems were the foundation of white Australian society. In keeping with this, colonial cooks “perpetuated an English style of cookery, English food values, [and] an English meal structure” (Santich, Looking for Flavour 6) and English cookbooks were the models that colonial cooks and cookery writers drew upon. When Polly, the heroine of Henry Handel Richardson’s novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, teaches herself to make pastry from a cookbook in her rudimentary kitchen on the Victorian goldfields circa 1853, historical accuracy requires her to have employed an imported publication to guide her. It was another decade before the first Australian cookbook, Edward Abbott’s The English And Australian Cookery Book, was published in 1864. Prior to the appearance of Abbott’s work, colonial cooks wanting the guidance of a culinary manual were reliant on the imported English titles stocked by Australian booksellers, such as Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families, Beeton’s Book of Household Management and William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle. These three particular cookbooks were amongst the most successful and influential works in the nineteenth century Anglo-sphere and were commonly considered as manuals of plain cookery: Acton’s particular work is also the source of the most commonly quoted definition of “plain cookery” as “the principles of roasting, boiling, stewing and baking” (Acton 167) and I am going let it stand as the model of such in this piece. If a curt literary catalogue, such as that used by Acton to delineate plain cookery, were used to describe any cuisine it would serve to make it seem austere, and the reputation of English food and cookery has likely suffered from a face value acceptance of it (and by association so has its Australian culinary doppelganger). A considered inspection of Acton’s work shows that her instructions for the plain methods of roasting, boiling, and stewing of food, cover 13 pages, followed by more than 100 pages of recipes for 19 different varieties of meat, poultry, and game that are further divided into numerous variant cuts. Three pages were dedicated to instruction for boiling potatoes properly. When preparing any of these dishes she enjoins her readers to follow the “slow methods of cooking recommended” (167) to ensure a superior end product. The principles of baking were elucidated across several chapters, taking under this classification the preparation of various types of pastry and a multitude of baked puddings, cakes and biscuits: all prepared from base ingredients—not a packet harmed in their production. We now venerate the taste of so-called “slow cooked” food, so to discover that this was the method prescribed for producing plain cooked dishes suggests that plain cookery potentially had more flavour than we imagine. Acton’s work also challenges the charge that the product of plain cookery was monotonous. We have developed a view that we must have a multitudinous array of different types of food available, all year round, for it to be satisfactory to us. Acton demonstrates that variety in cookery can be achieved in other ways such as in types and cuts of meat, and that “plain” was not necessarily synonymous with sameness. The celebrated twentieth century English food writer Elizabeth David says that Modern Cookery was the “most admired and copied English cookery book of the nineteenth century” (305). As the aspiration of most colonial cooks was the reproduction of English cookery it is not unreasonable to expect that Acton’s work might have had some influence on those that wrote cookery manuals for them. We know that Edward Abbott borrowed from her as he writes in his introduction that he has combined “the advantages of Acton’s work” (5) into this own. Neither Pearson or Maclurcan acknowledge any influence at all upon their works but their respective manuals are not particularly original in content—with the exception of some unique regional recipes in Maclurcan—and they must have drawn upon other cookery manuals of the same style to develop their repertoire. By the time they were writing, “large portions [of Acton’s] volume [had] been appropriated [by] contemporary [cookbook] authors [such as Abbott] without the slightest acknowledgment” (Acton 4): the famous Mrs. Beeton is generally considered to have borrowed heavily from Acton for the cookery section of her successful tome Household Management. If Pearson and Maclurcan did not draw directly on Acton—and they well might have—then they likely used culinary sources that had subsumed her influence as their inspiration. What was considered to constitute plain cookery was not as straightforward as Acton’s definition; it was also “generally understood” to be free of any French influence (David 35). It was a commonly held suspicion amongst nineteenth century English men and women that Gallic cooks employed sauces and strong flavourings such as garlic and other “low and treacherous devices” (Saunders 4), to disguise the fact that they had such poor quality ingredients to work with. On the other hand, the English “had such faith” in the superior quality of their native produce that they considered it only required treatment with plain cookery techniques to be rendered toothsome: this culinary Francophobia persisted in the colonies. In the novel, The Three Miss Kings, set in Melbourne in 1880, the trio of the title take lodgings with a landlady, who informs them from the outset that she is “only a plain cook, and can’t make them French things which spile [sic] the stomach” (Cambridge 36). While a good plain cook might have defined herself by the absence of any Gallic, or indeed any other “foreign”, influence in the meals she created, there had been a significant absorption of elem

The literature of domestic life in England was first used by eighteenth century antiquaries who found in household accounts, cookery manuscripts, and early printed cookbooks colorful material to enliven their views of life in Merrie England. Samuel Pegge, in 1780, and Richard Warner, in 1790, published their editions of the Forme of Cury, a late fourteenth-century cookery manuscript. The household accounts of the Percys of Northumberland were published by Henry Algernon Percy as Regulations and Establishment of the Houshold of Henry Algernon Percy in 1770. In the nineteenth century it was the turn of philologists, who found in such works unique sources for specialized words and usages. F. J. Furnivall and his associates published John Russell1 s Boke of Nurture and similar books on domestic management and etiquette in the 1860s, while Thomas Austin1 s Two Fifteenth-century Cookery Books appeared in 1888. The first bibliographical essay to appear was William Carew Hazlitt1 s Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine (1886), an enthusiastic if uncritical introduction to that field. Further steps were taken in 1913 when A. W. Oxford published his Notes from a Collector's Catalogue, with a Bibliography of English Cooking Books, and, in 1913, English Cookery Books to the Year 1850. The latter is far from complete, and it breaks off far too soon, but it was the best bibliography that we had until the Prospect Books bibliographies were published. I should note that Katherine G. Bitting1 s

The author analyses two well-known cookery and conduct books published in England during the nineteenth century -- Modern Cookery by Eliza Acton, first published in 1845, and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton, published in 1861, as well as a themed book targeted at an ethnic minority, The Jewish Manual, edited anonymously by a woman but attributed to Lady Judith Montefiore and published in 1846 -- and argues that English cookery and conduct books written by women during the nineteenth-century challenged traditional gender and social boundaries and undermined women’s submissive image by presenting modes of women’s empowerment at personal and interpersonal levels.

Cookery books are far from simple things: alongside the recipes we may find narrative, memoir, science, history, politics, travelogue and anthropology. The cookery book also reveals in a profoundly naked form the anxieties and paranoias of its precise historical moment. So the glamorous cookery books of the years between the wars try to persuade the newly servantless middle-class woman that the cooking she must now do herself is a creative and fashionable activity. And the postwar British, sick of the limited stodge of their still-rationed diet, clutched Elizabeth David to their collective bosom, unable to taste her pungent dishes, but in thrall to the sun-strewn fantasy of the good life her books offered. From Mrs Beeton, offering the mid-Victorian mistress of the house the instructions and routines she needed to hide the mechanisms of the domestic machine, to the potent contemporary fantasy of the Mediterranean peasant and his fabulously healthy lifestyle, Humble interrogates the cookery books of the last 150 years, asking what they can tell us about how changing attitudes to class, gender and domesticity intersect with the culture of food.

Many cookery books were compiled in the medieval Islamic times and thirteen of them were already indicated by Ibn al-Nadim (d. ca. 387/995) in the Fihrist. Although their importance as historical sources has been recognized, they have been a generally neglected subject of study.My main purpose of study of the Arab cookery books is to describe food availability and dietary life in the medieval Islamic period and to explicate the changes of dietary life under the constant influence of the various factors of political, economical and cultural activities. In this paper I intended to clarify their general character and to point out the strong textual similarities among eight books.As a result, it can be claimed, they were compiled as one of adab Literature. All those authors who compiled cookery books before the 11th century were on intimate terms with Abbasid caliphs in the courts in the capacity as physicians, musicians, bureaucrats and scholars; the authors who compiled them after the 13th century, on the other hand, they belonged to the urban society as the people of the educated class (khassah) like 'ulama's, jurists, scholars and poets. It alludes to the emergence and development of an urban high cooking after this period.Arad cookery books were, generally speaking, compiled with the aim of defining “the healthful diet (al-sahih min al-at'imah)” in accordance with the Islamic law and medical science. As for their contents, a wide variety of subjects are taken up; proper kitchen practices, the nature of various kinds of food stuffs, table manners and preparations for breads, condiments, preserves, sweetmeats, drinks and so on.The comparison of contents of eight cookery books reveals that these cookery books can be divided into four “extended families”.(1) Books that drew information from al-Warraq's work which was written around the end of the 10th century(2) Books that are strongly parallel with al-Baghdadi (d. 637/1239-1240)'s work(3) Books of which a number of recipes of preparations closely parallels those of Ibn al-'Adim (d. 660-1262)'s work(4) Books which were compiled in Maghrib-Andalus in 13th century Despite the similarities among those cookery books, each of them serves as a totally independent source with new information which reflected the social and economical conditions of the areas where they were compiled.In sum, Arab cookery books are important sources for the study of medieval Islamic societies in general.

The original 'Mrs Beeton' household management and cookery book had a recipe for jugged hare. This commenced, 'First catch your hare'. When considering the development of destination marketing strategies, one must determine at the outset what a destination is. The spectrum of definitions is extremely broad.

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This article aims to throw new light on the representation of women who cook as necessarily perpetuating a domestic ideology in which women are confined to the home. Traditionally, cookbooks written by women have disseminated both cooking information and rules and practices for running an effective household, which have contributed to the ideologies that underpin female domestic practice. However, the evolution of social media platforms, such as Pinterest, which enable the user to actively select and visually display culinary masterpieces on a digital pinboard, have provided a forum for women's voices and a novel means of expression that is available to the amateur cook and professional chef alike. This article will argue that the creation of a virtual cookbook, via Pinterest, is a means of empowering women, which is central to the lexicon of feminist debate. Rather than being the victims of domestic servitude, this article will argue that the women who create virtual cookbooks do so by choice, and as a means of pleasing the self, irrespective of achieving domestic or marital bliss.

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In this study of food and cooking in 1900, the emphasis is essentially on that of the working class. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, published 1861, the great standby of the middle class housewife, is useless in providing any information on the subject. Likewise the cookery books with traditional local recipes, for example in the North, the Lakeland Cookery or Lancashire Recipes printed by the Dalesman Press, give very little light on the subject. These do not usually describe the food of the working man, even though they claim to include dishes which have been peculiar to the district for decades. Almost without exception, such dishes are ‘farmhouse cooking’ and depend for their popularity and attraction on the good quality and quantity of the ingredients. An example of this is to be found in a Yorkshire cookery book, published within the last few years, with the very localized name of ‘Ilkla Moor Pie’.

Renée Erdos was a history teacher and distance educator whose significance to Australian and international education was recognised in 2021 with an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. During her lifetime Erdos published a memoir, Teaching Beyond the Campus, and has left a collection of papers with the National Library of Australia. However, this material deals almost exclusively with her professional life. Her family history and personal life have been difficult to reconstruct even though the digital revolution and access to online resources such as Trove and Ancestry.com have helped to reveal more of the traces of her past. This article reflects on the way in which old-fashioned serendipity and collaboration resulting from chance encounters with researchers in different fields have played a role in providing access to otherwise hidden sources and information. The stories that emerge are interesting and add new dimensions to our understanding of Erdos's early life. Even though the serendipity and collaboration have been mediated by the internet and its instantaneous international reach, they highlight the way in which life writing can thrive on personal meetings across the range of historical practice, including family history.

A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields. By Philip Temple. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002. Pp. 584. NZ$69.95 cloth. The Irish in New Zealand: Historical Contexts and Perspectives. Edited by Brad Patterson. Wellington: Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, 2002. Pp. xiv + 212. NZ$34.95 paper. Shifting Centres: Women and Migration in New Zealand History. Edited by Lyndon Fraser and Katie Pickles. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2002. Pp. 213. $43.95 paper. Milk and Honey — but No Gold: Postwar Migration to Western Australia, 1945–1964. By Nonja Peters. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 336. $54.95 cloth. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration. By James Jupp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp xi + 243. $29.95 paper. The Australian People; An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins. Edited by James Jupp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 940. $150 cloth The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History. Edited by Wilfred Prest, Kerrie Round and Carol Fort. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001. Pp. xx + 635. $79.95 cloth. Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 16, 1940–1980, Pik‐Z. Edited by John Ritchie and Diane Langmore. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. 611. $82.50 cloth. Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island. By Rebe Taylor. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2002. Pp. 385. $29.95 paper. Looking for Blackfellas’ Point An Australian History of Place. By Mark McKenna. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 269. $39.95 paper. Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of indigenous Child Separation. Edited by Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2002. Pp. xi + 324. $29.95 paper including CD. A History of Criminal Law in New South Wales: The Colonial Period, 1788–1900. By G.D. Woods. Sydney: The Federation Press, 2002. Pp. 460. $63 cloth. Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth‐Century Australia and New Zealand. By Mimi Colligan. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi +250. $59.95 cloth. Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia. By Philippa Martyr. Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002. Pp. 394. $39.95 cloth, $34.95 paper. Alamein: The Australian Story. By Mark Johnston and Peter Stanley. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp 240. $45.00 cloth. The Brisbane Line: A Reappraisal. By Drew Cottle. Leicestershire: Upfront Publishing, 2002. Pp. 258. $20.00 paper. Australia's Ever‐changing Forests V. Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on Australian Forest History. Edited by John Dargavel, Denise Gaughwin and Brenda Libbis. Canberra: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, The Australian National University, 2002. Pp. 442. $30.00 paper. Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Edited by Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 342. $39.95 paper.