Cookery Book Collections

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Cookery Book Collections this is part of the British Library Food Season supported by KitchenAid I’m Kenn Taylor Cultural Producer North for the British Library and this event is in partnership with Leeds Libraries and Special Collections at the University of Leeds. The idea for our event tonight sprung partially from the Collections United campaign this aims to break down barriers and bring together material from more than one cultural heritage collection in the UK telling stories that connect them. I manage the cultural programme for the British Library in the Leeds region. This is where we have one of the library’s two sites at Boston Spa outside of the city. This is actually where we keep 70% of the library’s whole collection.

01:07 - We saw an opportunity to work with two other significant library collections in the region to give a snapshot of how cookery books have been collected, used and created throughout history. In particular the University of Leeds has a cookery book collection which is nationally designated. We’re joined this afternoon by Polly Russell who’s founding curator of the Food Season at the British Library, Rhian Isaac Collections Manager at Leeds Central Library and Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis who is Collections and Engagement Manager Rare Books and Maps at the University of Leeds. They’ve each selected a few items from the collections that they work with and we’ll be telling you a little more about them. I’ll now hand you over to my colleague Polly Russell who’s going to start us off by talking about cookery books as a form of propaganda, Polly.

Hello my name is Polly 01:51 - Russell it’s wonderful to be here and to be here with colleagues from Leeds to find out more about their wonderful cookery collections what I’m going to do today is to a real romp through in the next 10 minutes to talk about the British Library’s cookery collections cookery book collections and to give you a sense of like what are those collections and where are they and this is almost impossible to do in 10 minutes because the British Library collections are so huge but it is a real treat because food is spread out throughout the British Library’s collections not just in cookery books but in almost every format that we have so let me give you a sort of sense of that and then I’m going to come on to talking about cookery books as propaganda so the first thing is to say that um I’m there we are this is the British Library for any of you that haven’t been here that is just to give you a physical picture of it and this is just a sense of the sort of material that’s there. So it’s a national library of the UK, we’re a legal deposit library we have around 160 million items but that doesn’t take into account all the digital content that we hoover up every year we have about 700 kilometers of shelving and we grow at the rate of about 12 kilometers per year so really huge collections we’re based in London down in that that picture you saw before was in London’s St Pancras but of course we also have we also have a library up at Boston Spa much closer to many people probably who are listening to this today and the point is that we collect material in almost every sort of format so anything that information is imparted on we we collect it and because food is the stuff of trade and travel of wars of exchange of the economy it is all the way through our collection so I would say that all of these different collections listed here will have food related materials and because we are a legal deposit library it means that we have an enormous collection of cookery books a huge collection of cookery books but people often ask me where is the cookery book collection? Well there isn’t a cookery book collection there the cookery book collection is spread out amongst the whole of the library’s collections because we take them in as legal deposit so there isn’t one area one designated area or space or collection of cookery books and that can mean that they can sometimes be slightly hard to find so this is just a sense of the different sorts of formats where you will find cookery books and and food related and cookery materials but for those of you who can’t get to the British Library either because of geography or because nobody’s traveling at the moment a space that’s really worth looking at online that we have is this books for cooks resource which tells us uh which goes through a kind of history of cookery books if you just type books for cooks into the website it will come up and it has lovely extracts digitized content around some of our cookery collections and then on the left here and I’ll put this in the chat later on the left here my colleagues in the manuscripts department have just put together the most fantastic guides for manuscript collections which contain cookery books recipes mostly of private privately produced manuscript recipe books and these are fantastic so I’ll put that in the chat later on so that’s again a very broad overview to say that there’s a lot of food at the British Library there’s a huge amount of cookery book collections they’re a huge amount of cookery books but they’re not located in one particular place and then just coming on to talk about cookery books themselves and to think about cookery books I’m really fascinated by cookery books I think they have a kind of totally totemic kind of power about them I think everybody loves cookery books and I make a real distinction between manuscript cookery books which I think are largely for private personal use and they tell us quite a lot about what people did eat as compared to cookery books which I think were published usually published for an audience usually shared and I think that they tend to tell us what another person expects us to eat or wants to persuade us to eat but they don’t necessarily tell us what people did eat so I make that distinction um but I think what’s really interesting is that because they are objects of kind of domestic practice they are also incredibly powerful and useful as tools of persuasion and propaganda and I think that cookery books have always been tools of persuasion and propaganda and I’m going to sort of go right back to the very beginning of our cookery action at the British Library to to illustrate that point with one of our oldest recipe manuscripts the oldest recipe manuscript in the collection from 1390 called the Forme of Cury which is an amazing 25-foot vellum scroll which was documents the recipes of the court of Richard II and this has been digitized by the British Library so you can see you can go online type in forme of cury on the British Library website and you can go and actually sort of root around this incredible document but what it tells us is that this is not a private manuscript for private consumption this is really a document of evidence evidence of Richard II’s wealth of his opulence of the opulence of his court and we know of Richard II that he was really invested in pageantry and this document shows how food was bound up with showing his power of displaying his wealth and his influence it’s a really fabulous document it’s very interesting but in the bottom there I’ve got one recipe which is just one of 196 in the document and this one is called rice of flesh which is very familiar we know it’s a document of wealth and opulence because it has so many recipes that call for spices sugar ingredients that would have been fantastically expensive at the time even this rice of flesh relatively simple cooked in almond milk with saffron only the very wealthiest in society so this is evidence used as evidence a document of his power and his wealth so that’s one example and then I’m going to fast forward some 300 and something years or 200 something years to one of my favorite cookery books in the collection this is The Queen’s Closet Opened and this is a fantastic example of a book being used to rehabilitate the identity or the the sort of reputation of someone the queen there is Henrietta Maria Henrietta Maria was the wife of the executed Charles I this was this was published in 1655. Charles has been executed Britain is under puritan rule and Henrietta Maria had been loathed by the British because she was seen to be too French too Catholic had too much control over her husband and the publishing of this book was an attempt to rehabilitate her and associate her with wifely womanly characteristics in order to to make to increase her popularity and it sold it sold many many additions and it provided a kind of tantalizing glimpse of royal life at a time of puritan rule and a kind of nostalgic reminder of that royal past and it reinvented the queen as an English housewife and it sort of put royalty back in fashion so I’ve got one more is it having to select could I say just three cookery books from the British Library collections it’s almost impossible but these are three of my favorites and this is my next one this is the Suffrage Woman’s Cookery Book compiled by Mrs Aubry Dawson who was a member of the Birmingham branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies it was published in 1912 and what I love about this is that it’s a really wonderful example of a campaigning cookery book a cookery book being used for political ends it contains the recipes of sovereign suffrage supporters from all over the UK from sort of the bottom end of Cornwall to the top end of Scotland it has all of their names so it’s really interesting as a kind of document of the geographic spread of suffrage and it has individual recipes and what you get a sense of is that these women were busy women practical women women on a mission the recipes are really mostly very very simple there’s one that I love which is for baked bananas which just says bake banana and eat which is almost the simplest recipe I’ve ever read but there’s also a kind of humorousness a humorous it’s like tongue-in-cheek and you can see here these menus here menus for meals for suffrage workers so very practical what you should feed people if they’re coming to speak and campaign in your area but then there’s this recipe for cooking and preserving a suffrage speaker which is really charming sort of amusing how to keep her spirits up when she’s tired um and I think it’s really interesting that they used cookery to sort of deploy womenly skills to a political end and to fundraise for the suffrage cause so an incredibly quick romp through the British Library’s cookery book collections three examples of cookery books cookery texts being used as forms of persuasion and propaganda from 700 years ago from the 17th century and then from the early 20th century so that is the end of my presentation and I’m going to hand over now to Rihannon Thank you gosh I’m quite breathless Polly after all of that there we are so hopefully you can now see the offerings from Leeds University library in contrast to Polly my choices have been informed by an interest less in the contents of the cookery books and and more in who owned and collected them and I’ve picked three items that show evidence of use and indeed abuse over time and connect us with either named individuals or particular moments in history but first I should say something about the origins of the cookery book collection held at the University of Leeds and it all started with a woman called Blanche Legat Leigh and there she is in a very rare photograph of her from a newspaper and Blanche was born in Sheffield in 1870 and she married a man called Percival Tookey Leigh in 1898 a dentist and they set up home and leads they were both heavily involved in the public life of the city lunch for example was on the committee of the Leeds maternity hospital and her husband was very much involved in establishing dental clinics around the city and indeed in recognition of their role in public life they were appointed lord and lady mayoress of the city in 1936. so Blanche was an avid collector of historic cookery books and in 1939 she presented her library of over 1500 rare and unique items to the university library I noticed in the chat there was a question about oldest cookery books well the oldest thing that Blanche left the University of Leeds wasn’t a book at all but a small Babylonian clay tablet on which in cuneiform is a receipt for barley that’s the oldest item in our cookery book collection at four and a half thousand years old Mrs Leigh also kept detailed records of her correspondence with book sellers and she gave several boxes of letters invoices receipted accounts to the university along with her collection and these documents reveal that she was in touch with booksellers and dealers from all over the country from London to Edinburgh as well as more locally in in Harrogate and they would write to her with her latest book lists clearly in the hope of securing a sale and it seems that Blanche was not afraid to negotiate a better price for books that she considered to be incomplete or otherwise in poor condition she’s a woman after my own heart I have a lot of admiration for Blanche so um with further bequests and acquisitions the cookery book collection has grown in scope and is now one of the most significant held in the university library and as Kenn mentioned earlier in 2005 it was recognized as being of national importance and awarded designated status by the Museums Libraries and Archives Council but onto the books the first book I’ve chosen is one of the treasures of Blanche’s collection and it’s by Bartolomeo Scappi, Opera dell’arte del cucinare and printed in Venice in 1570. Scappi was a very famous renaissance cook he served as chef to several cardinals in Italy and then began to serve Pope Pius the fourth so he entered the service of the Vatican kitchen and continued to work as a chef for Pius V I think it’s absolutely amazing to think that this man Scappi would have been cooking in the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the sistine chapel and I do wonder if they ever met so in 1570 at the year of his 70th birthday Scappi publishes his treatise on cookery it contains over a thousand food pressure preparation methods and fantastic illustrations showing in great detail the kitchen furniture utensils mechanical spits the different types of fireplaces that we used in Italy in the 16th century and the book also contains the first labeled picture of a fork there are separate chapters in the book for meat and fish and pastry as well as one on invalid cookery in which he tells us how to care for ailing cardinals so medieval tastes and cooking habits are still discernible in this book the use of sweet ingredients and spices such as ginger and nutmeg and also ingredients that have just arrived from the new world especially sugar which features as a pizza topping with pine nuts and rose water and Scappi has things to say about cheese too and he declares parmesan to be the finest cheese on earth The next book I want to talk about was published not so many years later in 1584.

this is an English publication A Booke of Cookry and in contrast to the 17:05 - previous heavily illustrated item this is a very very simple and straightforward book you might say the text is completely unconcerned with cooking times temperatures or amounts which makes some of the pages quite hard to fathom so here on the the left you can see two recipes to stew sparrows and to stew larks and then on the facing page how to do sparrows or larks I’m mystified but they are quite different recipes at Special Collections we own the only surviving copy of this little book Blanche acquired it for her collection was well aware of its rarity a second edition was printed only three years later in 1587 and that includes extra recipes for banqueting stuff or sweet dishes and we also have a copy of that second edition but the highlight for me of the second edition is the charming inscription in the front of the book and here you can see it ‘picked up in sandwich and rebound by father for Emily’ now who father was or whether Emily ever used these books for a practical purpose is is unknown but the handwritten note is is just lovely evidence of how books were collected and handed down and cherished um over the centuries before their arrival at Leeds now although we don’t know who Emily is I know that she was a lucky girl because she also received a copy of The Widow’s Treasure which is another Tudor cookery book which was also picked up at Sandwich and rebound by father for her. A few years ago we were contacted by lexicographers from the Oxford English Dictionary who had discovered that we had the only surviving copy of the first edition of this little book so they had the phrase fine herbs listed as being first used in 1587 in this copy that’s on the screen now but it seemed from our online catalogue that an earlier edition had survived we were able to consult our copy for them and confirm that the phrase does indeed appear in the second edition and so we were very pleased to see that the OED entry has been changed now to reflect that earlier date. Complete contrast now and coming up to the 1960s this is a book that was once in the Camden library in London and how on earth did it find its way to Leeds you might wonder well not quite so after the second world war the London borough libraries divided up the Dewey classification system and resolved to collect as many new books that were published classified in their section as they could and the Camden public library was allocated cookery books by the late 1980s the library had run out of space the perennial problem as any collections manager in any library across the country will know and the books were being kept at a Pickford’s store in Swiss Cottage the Camden librarian had advertised in the library association record to seek a new home for the books and after many months of negotiation they arrived in Leeds the most notable feature of the Camden collection is coverage of English cookery books published between about 1949 and 1975 which dovetailed perfectly with the earlier historic books donated by Blanche and others and what i love about this book and why I’ve chosen it is that many of the pages show signs of having been borrowed and used in the kitchen they’re spattered with gravy stains and you can see viral scribbles and small children have evidently tried to be practiced their letters in a corner of one of the pages so this book is by Len Deighton and it’s called the Action Cookbook Len Deighton’s guide to eating you may or may not know that before Len Deighton achieved a success as a writer of thrillers such as the The Ipcress File he’s actually trained as a pastry chef and also as a graphic artist and so the Action Cookbook is the perfect combination of these two talents so Len Deighton originally created what he called the cook strip in this format he created for the Observer newspaper where he was the food writer and that series run for two years before it was published as a book in 1962. so the Action Cookbook was intended as an instruction manual for the bachelor male and a guide to sophisticated cooking in fact when The Ipcress File was made into a film starring Michael Caine as harry palmer you can see one of Len Deighton cook strips pinned to the wall in the hero’s kitchen so we can look out for that next time you see the film I’ll leave the last word to Michael Caine have a quote here apparently he said Len was a great cook a smashing cook I learned a lot about food from playing Harry Palmer so those are my three picks from our wonderful collection I’m sure we’ll talk more about it later um so I’ll hand over to Rhian now to tell us about items she’s picked from the collections at the Leeds Central Library thank you Thank you just share my screen so I work at Leeds Central Library and I’ve chosen a few later items from the 19th century and kind of items that you might find on your own bookshelves or your own local history libraries and I think these cooking books they give us an insight into what was happening lee’s in other big cities at the time and also how the ephemeral and what we might think of as mundane can perhaps tell the story of the city and its people and maybe influence some of the things we think about today so what was Leeds like in the 19th century well it developed from a small town into a large industrial city and the wealthy had moved away from the city centre and into the less polluted suburbs there’s a huge increase in working people to work in the factories in new industries there are a few different problems such as housing shortages and overcrowding and disease and there’s also a rising middle class with a more disposable income and to be consumers so all this had a really big impact on how people ate and how they cooked is I’ve chosen this first item so it’s Catherine Buckton’s Food and Home Cookery it was originally published in 1879 and I’ve chosen this because people might not be so familiar with the author Catherine Buckton but she was an amazing woman who was passionate about women’s suffrage education and social reform and she’s about the first woman to be elected into public office in Leeds and paving the way for all the women to come back behind her really and Catherine Buckton was really aware of the terrible living conditions industrial cities like Leeds and recognize the urgent need for public health reform and she believes that educating girls was really important in improving the lives of working-class communities in 1870 the elementary education act gave all children the right to education up to the age of 13 and school boards were set up across the UK to give all children an education and property owners could vote for people to be elected onto the boards and for the first time women who were property owners could vote and be elected in 1873 Catherine Buckton was elected onto the schools board and she made the only woman until her retirement and she was a committed campaign of the girls to be taught to cook and she volunteered to teach the classes herself and drew her own curriculum and even paid for the ingredients and Food and Home Cookery is the book of her lessons and once this subject was accepted onto the curriculum and became the template for most school boards and I just love this engraving of the girls in the middle of one of their lessons and the lessons were given fortnightly which you can see on the sides here and the girls could take printed recipes home with them and the book is divided into 19 lessons and includes sections on things like bread making, roasting and cooking for the sick now at the end of each lesson there’s a series of questions as well which you can see on the slide here things like why is it both dirty and dangerous to wrap up your food in newspaper and so lots of interesting bits in this book and it really resonated with me really because of all the recent conversations people had about food poverty and Buckton’s work really recognizes that lots of different factors into why people might not be eating healthily or nutritionally and that might be because lack of an outdoor space to grow their own food lack of knowledge these girls were probably the first generation to have cookers at home and lack of space the girls would probably share one room with a family so learning how to be neat was a practical necessity and Buckton clearly saw the link between nutrition and public health and developed this really practical book and that was adopted not just in Leeds but across the country moving on to my next item my favorites and just moving away from the inhabitants of the city to the factories that drew people there I’ve always really liked this really pretty recipe book good things made said and done and it’s printed by the leads firm Goodall Backhouse & Company the makers of the famous Yorkshire Relish which is the best selling source in the Victorian era and to me it really captures some of the ideas around marketing um advertising branding that are becoming so prevalent at this time so the company was established in 1858 by chemist Goodall Backhouse and Powell and by 1874 Goodall was the largest sauce factory in the world it was steam powered and occupied a six-story building in Whitehall Street in Leeds and the book itself does things combines traditional recipes which of course can be improved by Goodall’s own products such as Yorkshire Relish advertised s the most delicious sauce in the world and it was probably given away for free as a marketing strategy with the advocates of their products disguised amongst the recipes so you can see here that even the gravy can’t be part of a dining table until Yorkshire Relish has been added to it and as competition increase between different companies as they try to tap into new markets and they need lots of new marketing tricks and the Victorian innovation was including these adverts in the front and back of books and good things is a good example of this so you can see there’s Pears Soap and Fennings that are pasted into the book and Goodall’s themselves invested really heavily in advertising and their marketing spend around 40 to 50,000 pounds a year drove sales from 670,000 bottles in 1872 to 13 million in 1907 it’s a huge amount and established a branch that was well known across the world but there was a downside to this fame as other companies tried to take advantage of the famous Yorkshire Relish brand and pass off their own imitation products and Goodall found themselves enrolled in a lengthy house floors landmark dispute against the Birmingham Vinegar Company who had begun to manufacture their own Yorkshire Relish and Yorkshire relish actually one of the first names to be registered when trademarks were introduced you can see this in our trademarks journal 1877 and after so much that they spent on advertising marketing you can see why they want to protect their brand and the Birmingham Vinegar Company argued that Yorkshire Relish was just a descriptive name and they should be able to use it but scientists disproved their claims and said the sauce was different and they couldn’t use it and so Goodall’s won the case and it’s so important that it still cites some trademark disputes today and the bottled sauces themselves showed how food production was changing at the time to meet the needs of the growing urban population not everyone was close to where food was being produced and different ways of storing and transporting food was needed such as bottled sauces and you can see in this recipe that they suggest buying cheaper canned oysters from America this recipe showing that people were able to start buying food from across the world really of course has led to something that we’re all painfully familiar with and the explosion of rubbish and packaging and unfortunately I think it’s only got worse since you’ve got more used to mass-produced food and then finally just to finish on how the other half ate this item mysteriously appeared on one of our library desks one day it’s a fascinating ledger belonging to caterer and confectioner of Godfrey Woods and it contains behind the scenes information for events and banquets between 1840s and 1870s and these and this item’s both practical and personal telling us exactly how to pull together an event with menus staff costs and prices as well as different comments about waiting staff and lessons to be learnt so if there was enough table or line for the event and ward must have been really well respected as he landed one of those prestigious commissions and Leeds at that time catering the opening of Leeds Town Hall in 1858 by Queen Victoria and we’re told that there was 274 guests at 17 shillings per head and were even given a menu and you can clearly see the difference in the type of food being presented here than what we find in Buckton’s and Goodall’s a lot of it is in French and it’s not really described so familiarity French cuisine is assumed you can see this again with these lovely little menu cards that are also in our collections and they’re very decorative and collectible and probably found their way to us through an avid collector of leads memorabilia and then mostly for events held in Leeds Town Hall and hosted by the lord mayor for dinners for the Leeds Corporation as well as welcoming international guests from China, Persia and British colonies and we can see a mixture of high French cuisine as well as we might call local delicacies like Yorkshire ham which seems to pop up all the time as well as influences from overseas and I think that these banquets and fancy dinners show us how Leeds was positioning itself nationally and internationally the impact of colonialism on cuisine and how food interlinked with politics and prestige at a time when the city was establishing itself on the world stage so although all these items are quite different I think through these different cookbooks you catch a glimpse of a 19th century city through its relationship with food and how these maybe unassuming items could impact on how well people ate what they spent their money on and in the case of the little menu cards communicate importance and prestige thank you so much for listening you .