Cooking the books!

Like many archives around the country, the team at Cheshire Archives have been working remotely from home during lockdown with no access to the original records. The role of archive staff has changed massively over the years and luckily there is plenty of digital engagement work and cataloguing improvements that we can do to occupy us from afar. However, the archives themselves are still at the heart of what we do.

No one could have envisaged this rather surreal and strange period of isolation, and even after the first week I found myself missing looking at and handling original archives. It’s the feel of archives and, dare I say it, the smell of them!

Amongst the archives you can’t help but have particular favourites, and I am certainly missing some of my ‘old friends’. Obviously all of the archives we have our special but there are some that you form a special attachment to or bond with; the quirky archives that are just plain weird and those that you are proud and excited to show off to the groups that come into the archives.

A number of years ago we hosted a ‘Cooking the Books - A culinary adventure through history’ event where we did a show and tell session focusing on some of the food related records in our collection. We looked at everything from recipes for quaking puddings and drunken loaves to remedies for the treatment of fiery noses and the plague! Many of the staff decided to try and recreate some of the recipes in the books. This proved to be interesting for some of the dishes where measurements and quantities aren’t always given. It was definitely a case of trial and experience. I do remember the very nice herb pie for lent though! You can find the recipe for this here.

We were quite taken by surprise with how popular the event was and it resulted in lots of publicity and even a radio interview that resulted in a whole show with folk ringing in about their remedies for ailments…

One such archive is Lady Stanley’s medical remedy and recipe book or DDX 361 if you want its official archive reference. It’s a small A5 size book bound in vellum and it definitely fits into the category of ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. On the outside it’s a rather battered, worn and unpromising volume but when you open it you are taken on a wonderful journey through 17th Century plants, herbs and medicine.

Lady Elizabeth Stanley began the book around 1620. The volume begins in a very neat secretary hand, and as the book goes on we get different handwriting. Subsequent members of the family, maybe? I like to think that it was a treasured book that was passed down through generations... It was important enough for Lady Stanley herself to inscribe ‘the ever honoured and right worshipfull Mrs Elizabeth Stanley of Alderley oweth this booke. July 16th 1653.’

The book begins with medical remedies, and towards the end of the book you are in the more familiar territory of ‘eel pye’, cooking partridge, veal and mutton and pickling red cabbage:

It wasn't until the end of the 17th century that a more clinical and scientific approach to the treatment of ailments and sicknesses began. Prior to this it would have been local folk with a knowledge of the virtues of plants and medicinal properties. The gardens would have been not only the larder for the family but also their medicine cupboard. 

Probably the first thing that strikes you as you look through the remedies in Lady Stanley's book isthat they cover everyday ailments for which we would nowadays pop to the pharmacy: remedies for colds using masses of honey, cures for gout and tooth ache, for freckles, a remedy for stinking breath and "an excellent water for the face to cleare the skinn and to keep it from wrinckles".

Other remedies were attempts to tackle some of the more serious, killer diseases about at that time- "a good drink for the pestilence" "to destroy all poison and plague" and "Mrs Katherine Booth’s recept to out pitts in the face after ye smallpox". 

It's hard to think from our modern vantage point with so much medical science and knowledge behind us that people were fighting these diseases with the help of what they could grow in their gardens. 

Some of the ingredients, such as ‘the six spoonfulls of dragons water’ and ‘treacle of jeane’ used in the pestilence remedy, sound rather alien to us nowadays but would have been popular and accepted ingredients at the time. (What is treacle of jeane you ask? A bit of further research tells me it was a genoa treacle or syrup recipe, a popular family medicine of the times which was often used to remove infections from the body. I’m still working on dragon’s water!)

Like us, when they discovered rememdies that worked for them and proved to be beneficial they shared them amongst their local community e.g. ‘Mrs Fallow’s syrup for the cold’, ‘Mr Crewe’s receipt for wormes’ and the ‘Countess of Derbye’s dyett drinke’.  At the end of many of the remedies you will find the words ‘probatum est’ which means that it had been proven to work. Although looking at some of the ingredients you wonder how and what side effects they would have had!

Finally the book conveys perfectly the superstition of the times and some of the more fantastical remedies are ‘how to bring forth haires upon a bald man’s head’, ‘to know whither a woman be with child of a male or female’ and perhaps most worryingly ‘to know whither one shall live or dye’.

You can’t get much better than a book that tells you what folk were eating in the past, which plants and herbs were readily available, the state of medicine and health in the 17th century and lots and lots of wonderful social history!

Time for Tea!

We’ve been browsing the collection at Cheshire Archives and Local Studies for all things tea-related, so pop the kettle on, relax with a brew, as we go on a tour of Cheshire tea-time traditions past and present…

Afternoon tea first became fashionable in the 19th century, when Anna, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, got peckish around 4 o’clock (who doesn’t?!) With dinner not being served till much later, she and her friends began to take cups of tea with bread, butter and cakes to sustain themselves through the afternoon and early evening. It became a fashionable social event, usually served between 4 and 5 o’clock.

For those of you who favour coffee over tea, coffee houses were popular haunts in the 17th and 18th centuries for men to meet for conversation and business, whilst enjoying the drink newly arrived in Europe. Prior to this, coffee had only been considered as a form of medicine. Tea, hot chocolate, and light meals were also served in coffee houses. One such coffee house in Cheshire was King’s Coffee House, located on King’s Street, Knutsford. Opened in 1907, the building housed council offices, a coffee house and a memorial to novelist Elizabeth Gaskell.

What about a slice of cake or biscuit to go with your brew? You need look no further than Mrs Elizabeth Raffald (1733 – 1781), housekeeper at Arley Hall in the 18th century. She then went on to become a successful writer after her cookery book “The Experienced English Housekeeper” was published in 1769. Containing 800 recipes and pieces of advice for ladies, housekeepers and cooks, the book was so popular there were around 20 editions printed in her lifetime. Did you know that the origins of the modern wedding cake can be traced back to her? Why not try out her recipe for macaroons?!

Several of the recipes to be found in “The Experienced English Housekeeper” are for traditional cakes and tasty treats associated with Cheshire. They include: 

• The Old Chester Pudding – made from flour, milk, breadcrumbs, suet, castor sugar, blackcurrant jam, bicarbonate of soda and a pinch of salt. Steamed for 3 hours, then a blackcurrant sauce is made as an accompaniment
• Bun Loaf or “Bara Brith” – Welsh Bun Loaf, with origins in Cheshire. Made from raisins, currants, sultanas, sugar, lard, flour, candied peel, mixed spice, yeast, hot water, milk and eggs. Also known as speckled bread
• Chester Buns – made from butter, flour, castor sugar, egg, milk, and yeast
• Chester Cake – a simple and economical cake, made using flour, baking powder, stale cake (!), golden syrup, currants, and ground ginger.

Where could you buy your cake ingredients from, as well as tea and confectionary, in the 19th and early 20th centuries? Bollands in Chester was established in 1846, as a fine tea and coffee merchant, located on Eastgate Row. You could also give your patronage to Dutton’s in Chester, which served “dainty afternoon teas”.

So whatever your beverage of choice, and wherever you choose to enjoy it, we hope you have enjoyed this “dainty” look at the afternoon tea tradition in Cheshire!

Volunteer stories: Record Office staff get cooking

For our popular 'Cooking the Books' event staff at the Record Office volunteered their time and culinary skills to recreate recipes from the archives ... here is a modern take on the 18th century cook and businesswoman Elizabeth Raffald's herb pie!

Just nine lines of recipe but how to recreate the pie in a modern kitchen? I began with groats … any grain with the husk still on. Thought about going a bit Ottolenghi with freekeh which could work nicely with the other flavours but settled on pot barley to remain authentic local.

I decided early on that I wouldn’t be adding a pound of butter at the end but would cook with butter throughout – I wondered if the reasoning behind boiling all the ingredients and then adding such a large quantity of butter was to do with how tricky it may have been to control the heat on domestic fires and ranges so risk burning it, but how vital it would have been for flavour and calories during Lent? The fact that Elizabeth mentions the option of a raised crust made me opt for hot water crust pastry.

Serves 4-6

For the filling
75g unsalted butter
1 large onion, diced
200g pot barley
1 large leek, sliced
parsley
lettuce
beetroot tops or chard
baby leaf spinach
2 apples, sliced

For the pastry
300g plain flour
75g butter
75g lard
135 ml hot water
salt
1 egg


Take a large saucepan. Gently cook the onion in 25g of the butter, stir in the barley to coat and add enough boiling water to cover. Leave to simmer for around 40 minutes, topping up with boiling water as necessary. Test the barley can be bitten, turn off the heat and leave to cool with the lid on, any remaining liquid should be absorbed.

Make the hot water crust pastry. Rub the butter into the flour until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. In a small pan on a gentle heat melt the lard in the hot water, then pour onto the flour mixture. Mix with a knife and bring it together into a ball. Leave to cool until room temperature and finish making the filling.

Take a deep frying pan and gently fry the leeks in the remaining butter. Roughly chop enough lettuce, parsley and beetroot tops or chard to match the quantity of leeks and add them to the frying pan with the same quantity of baby spinach leaves. (If using chard add the chopped thicker stalks at the same time as the leeks). Cook until the leaves have collapsed and stir in the sliced apple and groats. Season well with salt and pepper to taste.

Roll out two thirds of the pastry and line a ten inch square baking tin. Add the filling and top with a lid rolled from the remaining pastry. Press the edges together and beat the egg with a pinch of salt and brush onto the pie.

Place in the middle of the oven preheated to 180 degrees centigrade and bake for about an hour, the pastry will be golden brown.