Recipes from an Edwardian Country House: A Stately English Home Shares Its Classic Tastes
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About this ebook
In this sumptuous cookbook, Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall takes us on a nostalgic culinary pilgrimage, rediscovering classic recipes from the Edwardian kitchen. With delicious dishes, adapted with today’s kitchen in mind and delightfully informed by reminiscences from Jane’s childhood, this is much more than a cookbook - it offers a slice of gastronomic history, reviving the flavours from the great English country houses.
Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall
Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall is the bestselling author of The Good Granny Guide, The Good Granny Cookbook, and The Pocket Book of Good Grannies and has written many books on plants and gardening. A grandmother of five and the mother of TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, she lives with her husband in Gloucestershire.
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Recipes from an Edwardian Country House - Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall
Contents
.
Introduction
Chapter 1. Breakfast
15 Recipes
Devilled Kidneys
Drop or Dropped Scones, or Scotch Pancakes
Pick and Mix Fry-up
Kedgeree
Pancakes
Hot Cross Buns
Loney’s Oatcakes
Armand 2001 Marmalade
Cinnamon Toast
Eggs
Poached Eggs
Fried Eggs
Oeufs En cocotte
Boiled Egg with Marmite Soldiers
Scrambled Eggs
Eggy Bread, or French Toast
Chapter 2. Sunday Lunch
9 Recipes
Mira’s Rack of Lamb with Herby Mustard Crust
Gammon with Parsley Sauce
Boiled Beef and Carrots with Diana’s Dumplings
Boeuf a La Mode
Shoulder or Leg of Lamb a La Boulangère
Steak and Kidney Pudding
Tarragon-Roasted Chicken,
Gerda’s Chicken
Big Granny’s Chicken and Ham Pie
Chapter 3. Monday Left-overs
13 Recipes
Bubble and Squeak (English), Colcannon(Irish)
Curried Chicken or Lamb
Devilled Turkey or Chicken
Pork and Beans
Hugh’s TV Chicken Dinner
Shepherd’s Pie
Rissoles
Red Flannel Hash
Savoury Pancakes
Stovies
Turkey Tonnato
Rob’s Turkeyburgers
Ham and Leek Parcels
Chapter 4. Mid-week Meals
19 Recipes
Cheese Pudding
Cheesy Eggs
Gloucestershire Squab Pie
Chipolata Casserole
Mary’s Proper Greek Moussaka
Macaroni Cheese
Cornish Pasties
Picnics
Risotto with Chicken Livers
Pork Chops Auberge Saint Pierre
Hungarian Goulash
Andrew’s Spinach Supper
Somerset Chicken
Braised Red Cabbage with Spicy Sausages
Souvlaki
Very Good Tomato Sauce for Pasta
Toad in The Hole
Leek and Bacon Tart
Head Mistress Chicken
Herby Lamb Chop Gratin
Chapter 5. Fish on Friday
11 Recipes
Fish Baked on a Bed of Leeks
Fish Cakes
Italian Baked Fish
Mum’s Fish Pie
Very Speedy Fish Pie
Moules Marinière
Rob’s Seduction Sole
Plaice Rolls
Tuna and Bean Salad
Stuffed Haddock Baked in Foil
Smoked Haddock with Poached Eggs
Chapter 6. Saturday Stews
14 Recipes
Billabong Stew
Bobotie
Anne’s Beef Stew
Coq au Vin
Lancashire Hot Pot
Navarin of Lamb
Rabbit with Lentil Pureée
Oxtail Stew
Slow Roasted Pork Belly with Cider
Poulet Grand-Mère
Pheasant and Chestnut Casserole
Spag Bol
Lamb with Aubergines and Cinnamon
Very Slow Shoulder of Lamb
Chapter 7. Vegetable Dishes and Salads
29 Recipes
Beans with Garlic and Pine Nuts
Greens with Bacon and Onion
Cauliflower Cheese
Creamed Spinach
Carrots Vichy
Courgette Frittatas
Creamed Sprouts with Chestnuts and Bacon
Gardener’s Pie
Cheesy Baked Aubergines
Jerusalem Artichoke Soufflé
Parsnip Fritters
Pea and Lettuce Risotto
Pease Pudding
Stuffed Peppers
Three Root Mash
Upside-Down Shallot Tart
Salads
Tomato Salad
Barley Salad
Salade Nicoise
Celeriac Remoulade with Walnuts
Chicory and Orange Salad
Rob’s Lunchtime Salad
Potatoes
Best Ever Roast Potatoes
Best Ever Mash
Potato Salad
Milly-Molly-Mandy Potatoes
Potato Gratins
Pan Haggerty
Mustard Potatoes
Champ
Chapter 8. Teatime
21 Recipes
Cakes, Large and Small
Angel Cake USA
Chocolate Cake
Custard Tarts
Chocolate Eclairs
Chocolate Biscuit Cake
Loney’s Sticky Ginger Cake
London Granny’s Crusty Sponge Cake
Nusskuchen
Madeleines
Lemon Drizzle Cake
Swiss Roll
All in One Fruit Cake
Biscuits
Brandy Snaps
Choc Chip Cookies
Gipsy Creams
Crow’s Nicky-Nacky Men
Orange Jumbles
Mary’s Biscuits
Fork Biscuits
Flapjacks
Chapter 9. Soups, Starters and Savouries
32 Recipes
Soups and Accompaniments
Bramley Apple and Celeriac Soup
Cullen Skink
Gazpacho
Potage Crecy
Parsnip with Orange and Ginger
Heinz Tomato Soup
Garlicky Spinach Soup
Minestrone
Green Pea Soup
Parsley Soup
Rob’s Veg Soup
Leek and Potato Soup
Veloute Johnny (Onion Boys Soup)
The Potter’s Loaf
Garlic Bread
Other Starters and Savouries
Lord Melville
Crudités
Warm Chicken Liver Salad
Egg Mousse
Marinated Kipper Fillets
Potted Shrimps
Devils on Horseback
Sardines on Toast
Janssen’s Temptation
Mushrooms on Toast
London Granny’s Cheese Straws
Granny B’s Sausage Rolls
Welsh Rabbit
Gougère
Devilled Biscuits
Soft Herring Roes on Toast
Stuffed Eggs
Chapter 10. Puddings
41 Recipes
Blackberry and Apple Pudding
Apple In and Out
Bramley Burnt Creams
Castle Puddings with Homemade Jam
Stodge
Steamed Syrup Sponge (not stodgy)
Guards’ Pudding
Jam Roly Poly
Fruit Fools, Pies, Tarts, Cobblers and Crumbles
Plum Crumble
Goosegog and Elderflower Fool
Blackberry Cobbler
Rum Baba
Cranachan
Crème Bruleée
Norwegian Cream
Crème Caramel (Crème renversée)
Plum Pudding
Rhubarb and Custard
Mini Apple Tarts
Kaiserschmarrn
Peach Melba
Pineapple Upside-Down Pudding
Port Wine Jelly
Rice Pudding
Hot Prune Soufflé
Queen of Puddings
Stone Cream
Treacle Tart
Tessa and Jane’s Apple and Chestnut Layers
Trifle
Granny’s Foam Pudding with Granny’s Custard
Meringues
Gateau Diane
Mont Blanc
Hot Chocolate Soufflés
Ice Creams, Sorbets and Toppings
Ovaltine Ice Cream
Rob’s Damson Ice Cream
Black-Currant Leaf Water Ice
Hugh’s Vanilla Fudge Ice Cream
London Granny’s Fudgey Gunge
Granny Ray’s Chocolate Sauce
Big Granny’s Butterscotch Sauce
Chapter 11. Treats and Sweets
9 Recipes
Peppermint Creams
Pecan Pralines
Fudge
Melting Moments
Ginger Beer
Damson Cheese
Bilbrook Uncooked Raspberry Jam
Chocolate Cornflakes
Granny’s Chocolate Sandwiches
Acknowledgements
About Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall
Index
With happy memories of my mother and grandmothers and their delicious food
Introduction
.
My maternal grandparents linked me to the Edwardian Age. My grandfather’s career in the British Diplomatic Service took him to Peking, Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Helsingfors in Finland. In 1921, wishing to bring up his young family in England, he took early retirement and bought a country estate in Wiltshire, centred on a rambling manor house dating back to the 15th century.
It was to Hazelbury Manor that my mother and her sisters brought their babies at the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, so the family could all be together while their husbands were away in the army and the Royal Navy. That’s how I came to spend the first six years of my life, and thereafter every summer holiday until I was fourteen, immersed in a way of life that pre-dated even the First World War. My grandparents’ house and lifestyle was not as grand as that of the TV families in ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Upstairs Downstairs’. Footmen and grooms had left to fight for their country, maids had signed up for war work. Still, at Hazelbury pre-war standards were somehow maintained with a skeleton staff of butler, housekeeper, cleaner, cook and kitchen-maid, plus assorted nannies and nursery maids. Outdoors there were two gardeners and a retired groom who, in the absence of horses, stoked the coke boilers and split logs for the open fires. Although my grandparents no longer had the inclination or the means for large house parties, the dining table was still laid for at least three courses with silver and candles with hand-painted shades, and my grandmother always changed for dinner into a long velvet or brocade housecoat, laid out, in the absence of a ladies’ maid, by the over-worked but always amiable housekeeper, Aggie.
My memories are of total freedom for me, my brothers and our cousins. In good weather we were shoved out of doors to play in the garden or ride our bikes to the home farm. The sources of our food were all around us, in neat, weed-free vegetable rows, under fruit cages draped with black cotton fishing net, on the trees in the orchard, and in the chicken run. At the farm, the pigs were in their sty, future mutton and beef grazed the fields and the cows moved twice a day from meadow to farmyard with their full, low-slung udders swaying from side to side. In the dairy we watched the milk run through a separator, and had a go at turning the handle of the churn, making cream into butter.
Back in the kitchen we helped
by slapping the butter with ridged wooden bats to get rid of any water and air pockets, and rolling nuggets of butter between two bats to make elegant balls with a criss-cross pattern. The butter balls were dropped into iced water until it was time to pile them on a small glass dish for the breakfast or tea table.
The kitchen was the largest room in the house if you included the scullery and the larder with its cool marble shelves. An enormous Esse range with several ovens gobbled up coke and occupied the whole of one wall. Light poured in from leaded windows on two sides and between them were dressers and cupboards with work-tops of scrubbed pine, like the sturdy table in the centre of the room. Vegetables were prepared in the scullery, in shallow rectangular sinks with grooved wooden draining boards. There, bunches of carrots with feathery green tops still attached, and cabbages the size of footballs, mined and tunnelled by pale green Cabbage White caterpillars, waited to be dealt with. In summer my brother was seldom seen without a butterfly net, and therefore remained on fairly good terms with the gardener in spite of our raids on the fruit cage.
The kitchen was also the warmest room and when it was too wet or cold to go out, we rushed there to pester the cook, Mrs Malone. The kitchen was supposed to be out of bounds to us children, but we felt safe from detection. I suppose my grandmother sometimes visited the kitchen, but we never saw her there. Our excuse for being there was to collect outer leaves of cabbages to feed our rabbits and scrounge a carrot and some spent tea-leaves to make their coats glossy.
I don’t think Mrs Malone had ever been married, but cooks were always Mrs
. She was known to us all as Loney. Her streaky grey hair was screwed into a bun and she wore a large white apron over a striped dress with the sleeves neatly rolled up to the elbow, exposing lean, strong fore-arms – not at all like Mrs Bun the Baker’s Wife in the Happy Families pack of cards, although, like Mrs Bun she often wielded a rolling pin. She was a brilliant cook and must have been as precious to my grandparents as Anatole was to Aunt Dahlia in P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories. Luckily Loney was a great deal less temperamental than Anatole. She seemed not to mind us hanging around in her kitchen, sticking our fingers in mixing bowls for a taste. But her answer to What’s for lunch?
(or tea or supper) was invariably, Bread and look-at-it.
Beneath her stern looks was a soft heart. She let us sprinkle flour onto the pastry from the tin with holes in its lid, and gave us each our own scrap of pastry to make a little man with currants for eyes, nose and mouth, and currant buttons down his front. Our arms would ache as we struggled to cream the butter and sugar for a cake, earning the reward of being allowed to lick the bowl. All my family owe a debt of gratitude to Loney, who first triggered in us an interest in cooking and eating. She was one of those instinctive cooks who never referred to a cookery book or wrote down a recipe. When asked, for example, how much sugar she put into a particular dish, she would reply, Oh, just enough.
Nevertheless, my mother and her sisters were able, by trial and error, to recreate some of her recipes, and they are included in this book.
The kitchen was more fun than the dining room, where formality reigned. A friend, Alison, remembers, of her own childhood, you never helped yourself, but sat waiting until you caught Grandma’s eye. She then asked you what you would like, and it was passed to you. Meal times were very formal, and Grace was always said before the meal. One day my grandfather was saying Grace and my grandmother said, ‘speak up, John, I can’t hear,’ to which he replied, ‘It is not you I am speaking to, Elizabeth.’
I don’t remember Grace being said in the dining room at Hazelbury except when the vicar came to lunch, when we were often caught unawares, earning a little admonishing frown from our grandmother. In the nursery, however, every meal started with For what we are about to receive…
and ended Thank-God-for-my-good-lunch-please-may-I-get-down.
In both dining room and nursery, we were expected to observe basic table manners, sitting up straight, keeping our elbows off the table, not speaking with our mouths full and not kicking the table leg. And we had to finish every last scrap of food on our plates.
At term time weekends we had Sunday lunch with our other, London grandparents. Their small flat in Putney was on the fifth floor with views up and down the River Thames. The kitchens of my two grandmothers could not have been more different. In London, Granny Lascelles cooked in a room where there was hardly space to swing a cat. There was a small electric cooker, a smaller fridge, a work table with a white enamel surface and a marbled lino floor. On the window sill there was always a large glass jar salvaged from the local sweet shop, no longer filled with bull’s-eyes or gobstoppers, but with Granny’s home-made potato crisps.
My father belonged to a rowing club just across the river (as a young man he rowed in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, for Oxford) and liked to go sculling on Sunday mornings. My brother and I would spend the time beach-combing along the tide line and playing ducks and drakes with smooth, flat pebbles. By lunch time we were starving. During the week Granny bustled around in her green WVS uniform, doing meals on wheels, but on Sunday she cooked for us, producing, from her tiny kitchen, wonderful roasts with all the trimmings, and my all-time favourite pudding, vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce made from condensed milk. Offers to help in the kitchen were always refused, but after lunch we dried up while she washed.
At home, on the other hand, our help in the kitchen was taken for granted. My mother adored food and loved cooking; it would never have occurred to her that helping prepare food was a chore; to her the whole process was a delight. We inherited this attitude and, I hope, have passed on to our children and grandchildren. She was entirely self-taught. The abrupt transition from Hazelbury where Loney’s delicious food appeared on the table as if by magic, to cooking in her own small London kitchen, at a time when post-war food rationing continued, must have been a shock, but she rose to the occasion.
Cooking did not come so easily to all of my mother’s contemporaries. One tried to heed her own mother’s advice, Darling, never learn to cook, and then you won’t have to.
But along came the war, and she did have to. Some women never learned. A friend put it down, in the case of her own mother, to a combination of a wartime Scottish girlhood, eating institutional food first at school then in the Wrens, then early married life without much money and still on rations… Oddly enough she really enjoyed good food – it’s just that she couldn’t create it herself, and her wartime upbringing ran too deep ever to be properly eradicated.
My mother, and others like her, turned for knowledge to the few cookery books that were available: Mrs Beeton’s Household Management of course, from which my brother and I learned how to fold table napkins into boars’ heads and waterlilies, just as Joel, our grandmother’s butler used to. Then in 1956 along came The Constance Spry Cookery Book. Connie was the Bible,
a friend explained, my godmother had Constance Spry on her bedside table and read nothing else to my knowledge.
Other housewives kept kitchen notebooks, full of recipes, handwritten or cut out from newspapers and pasted in. Inherited cookbooks with worn-out spines fall open at favourite pages, splattered with fat or chocolate, and, in one case, still redolent of 1960s cigarette fumes. My mother’s bedtime reading included Ambrose Heath’s Good Food and Good Savouries. She inherited her mother’s copy of Lady Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays: with Recipes and their Occasions. The chapter headings give a vivid picture of Edwardian country life: A Little Dinner before the Play
and A Little Supper after the Play
. A Winter Shooting-Party Luncheon
and Luncheon for a Motor Excursion in Winter.
Food for Artists and Speakers
and Dance and Supper
. Perhaps surprisingly, some of her recipes have stood the test of time well. See here and Jam Roly Poly here.
When TV cooks Philip Harben and Fanny Craddock came on the scene, my mother enjoyed their programmes as entertainment rather than looking to them for serious instruction. Plus ça change.
My mother’s sister Ray was, like Loney, one of those rare and gifted cooks needing no books. She cooked four meals a day using only fresh ingredients, and rarely consulted a recipe,
her daughter Prue wrote, Certainly, to my knowledge, she never wrote one down. Each of us, though, has managed to continue with at least one speciality that we all recognise as hers. My oldest sister has followed my mother’s tradition of making marmalade: a unique, strong, even harsh, chunky version. Another sister makes a dynamite Summer Pudding using blackcurrants picked from her garden; the youngest has a great way with potatoes. And my brother makes her curries and kedgerees. The closest I’ve come to emulating one of her distinctive creations is in her recipe for chocolate sauce, which she dictated to me a few years ago at my children’s request.
Ray’s chocolate sauce, and some of her other recipes are in this book, together with other cherished family recipes that have, by great good luck, been written down at some stage.
Our mothers and grandmothers achieved their results without the benefit of freezers, microwaves, food processors, blenders, or even dishwashers, and, in the absence of mechanical aids, an extra pair of hands was always welcome. As a result we absorbed much of their knowledge effortlessly, just by being in the kitchen.
Loney’s vast kitchen and my grandmother’s tiny one had something in common: both were spotlessly clean and orderly: a place for everything and everything in its place. Compared to these models of tidiness my mother’s kitchen, was chaotic. Mum, adept at multi-tasking, liked to read while she stirred a sauce or waited for milk to come to the boil. She always had more than one book on the go, so there might be several on the kitchen table, her place marked with a spill charred from lighting the gas, or, if nothing else came to hand, the outside leaf of a leek. Novels jostled for space with recipe books, half drunk mugs of tea, half-eaten biscuits, and pots of cooked vegetables waiting to be sieved into soup.
Like all good meals, ours began with shopping. I used to pass one of the first ever supermarkets in London daily, on the way home from school, and, seduced by the prospect of Green Shield Stamps, I urged Mum to use it, but she was slow to take advantage of its convenient one-stop shopping facilities. She stayed loyal to her suppliers and trusted them to provide ingredients of the best quality. We shopped in what we called the village,
a row of shops a short walk from home, in an otherwise residential area. It consisted of a chemist, a grocer, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, a butcher, a baker (but no candlestick maker) and a newsagent. Milk was delivered daily to our doorstep, and errand boys on bicycles delivered meat and bread to people who lived further away from the shops, or didn’t want to walk back with laden shopping bags. The boys whistled tunefully, and as they pedalled past you would hear snatches of Put another nickel in
and "How much is that