Author: Estelle

I am Estelle, a small person who lives in Liverpool. I love all books apart from "The World According to Clarkson". Also very keen on comedy, cooking, octopods and other small people.

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

Vintage Recipes – Invalid Cookery, 1902-1930

Raw beef tea, Mrs Rea's Cookery Book, 1910

If you look at practically any general cookbook from Victorian times up to the 1940s, you’re likely to find a section that has now entirely fallen by the wayside in modern books – special recipes for the sickroom, often called “Invalid cookery”.

This is the kind of thing:

(This is where I had embedded a video of the Fry and Laurie period sketch on broth vs soup, and which doesn’t exist anymore, and is also not in any of their sketch books. Which is a shame because it sums up invalid cookery perfectly.)

Incidentally, I seem to remember the recipes for Talbot’s Broth and Henry’s Soup actually did appear on Ceefax as mentioned in the sketch.

Now we have Heinz Tomato Soup, Lucozade, and better medicine, perhaps these gently nourishing recipes aren’t needed so much anymore. But I do like the idea of a special menu if you’re unwell. It marks the occasion, in a way. Recipes included gruel in many forms, blackcurrant tea, barley water, invalid custard, toast water and beef tea.

I’ve also got a number of recipes for the slightly alarming-sounding raw beef tea. I haven’t got a certificate in food hygiene admittedly, but this sounds like rather a potential nightmare. I mean, it’s not quite Talbot’s fried bull penis, but still.

Raw Beef Tea

1/4 lb lean beef
1/4 pint water
Few drops of lemon juice

Remove all fat and cut the beef up finely.
Put into the water with the lemon juice.
Let it stand for 6 or 8 hours, pressing beef with a spoon occasionally.
Strain.
Serve in a covered spoon.

This is only given in cases where it could not be assimilated if cooked.

Here’s some more recipes for the sick. Not sure if I’d fancy tripe as the best of times, to be honest, let alone while under the weather.

From Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910:

From The Liverpool School of Cookery Book, 1902:

From The Essex Cookery Book, 1930:

If you’re interested in this, I’ve previously posted about gruel and how Horlicks is the modern equivalent here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-gruel/

And I’ve tested out the nursery treat of Blackcurrant tea here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/vintage-recipes-blackcurrant-tea/

Categories
1900-1949

First Drown your Kitten, 1935

Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts, 1935

Today – some rather upsetting advice from the 1935 Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts on how to kill unwanted kittens. Your choices are either to drown them in a bucket, or by administering chloroform onto their little kitten faces. Chloroform, you say…….hmmm, perhaps a bit of the old Owbridge’s Lung Tonic might do the trick.

From the matter-of-fact way this is described, it seems to be that as far as they were concerned this was the humane thing to do. One of the cats we had when I was a child was rescued by a family friend who discovered a man with a bag of kittens, preparing to drown them in a river. I bet (hope!) there’s not too much cat-drowning happening now.

“A healthy cat can bring up four kittens, but unless you are deliberately breeding cats, you will only want to keep one or two.”

Of course, if a cat accidentally nearly drowns itself, this is the thing to do. You can swing a cat in here apparently.

Resuscitating a drowned cat
Resuscitating a drowned cat
Categories
Food & Drink Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang Word of the Week – Staggering-Bob

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

This week – a term for ancient or sick animals used for rather unwholesome food purposes. What with all the food scandals and randomly-named meat products of late, perhaps we are unknowingly eating rather more Staggering-Bob than we would like.

“Staggering-Bob, An animal to whom the knife only just anticipates death from natural disease or accident,-said of meat on that account unfit for human food.”

Categories
1900-1949 Ephemera Food & Drink War

Art Butter, 1940

PTO Magazine, February 1940
Continue reading “Art Butter, 1940”
Categories
1900-1949 Adverts Ephemera Pharmaceuticals

Owbridge’s Lung Tonic, 1939

Owbridge's Table Companion, 1939

Owbridge’s Lung Tonic was a cure-all preparation invented in 1874 by Hull pharmacist Walter Owbridge. It was advertised as a cough medicine, a remedy for bronchitis, asthma, consumption (tuberculosis) and all manner of other throat, chest and lung afflictions – “It never fails”, or so it claimed.

It had a secret formula, but an archive analysis shows it to have consisted of chloroform, along with honey and alcohol in the form of ipecacuanha wine. Not recommended for babies under 6 months old, but fine after that, apparently.

(This archive text from 1909 is an interesting read on the subject of this and many other ancient pharmaceuticals – “Secret Remedies – What they cost and what they contain“)

They were also keen users of promotional merchandise. This small booklet, Owbridge’s Table Companion, is from 1939 and is designed to help schoolchildren with facts and figures, while advertising their wares.

The section on measurements of all manner of things interests me the most. All the befuddling names for specific amounts used just for that one item. I wonder if the schoolchildren were actually expected to know and remember all this information?

Categories
1900-1949

On Becoming Indifferent to the Fate of your Ship, 1938

The Weekend Book, 1938

What a fantastic phrase to describe sea-sickness.

I love boats myself, but I do have a tendency to become indifferent to their fate quite badly. Unfortunately, not having a 1930s pharmacy available to me, I can’t try out their cure:

Categories
Food & Drink Victorian Victorian Slang

Victorian Slang of the Week- Gallimaufry, Pudding-head (and Robot of Sherwood)

The Slang Dictionary, 1865

Oh yes! Last Saturday’s Doctor Who, Robot of Sherwood, was so entirely up my street that I think I actually live there.

Robin Hood, Ben Miller, Peter Capaldi’s vibrantly grumpy Doctor, robots for the robot-obsessed small boy in my house, Clara continuing as my style icon with a magnificent red gown, (and getting a good part to play this week). All that and the use of slang…well, that was just the cherry on the cake for me.

I came across Gallimaufry a few weeks back, while putting together my post on Gander-month, as it’s on the same page of The Slang Dictionary of 1865 – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/victorian-slang-word-of-the-week-gander-month/

Gallimaufry here means a type of jumbled stew of all kind of things chucked in the pot. It’s not quite the Doctor’s cheese sandwiches in cling film that Ben Miller’s Sheriff of Nottingham referred to in the episode, but at the time I was struck by its similarity to Gallifrey and how it sounded like something that Time Lords should eat. So I was overjoyed that someone else had found that word and also thought it suitably Timey Lordy.

Of course, that someone is Mr Mark Gatiss, writer of this episode, and frankly if anyone is also likely to own the Victorian Slang Dictionary, it’s him.

The Slang Dictionary, 1865
The Slang Dictionary, 1865

It’s followed by Gallipot, meaning apothecary (and also the pot where the ointments were kept), which isn’t a million miles away from “Doctor” either.

Oh, and there was also a mention of one of my favourite “head” insults – I’ve covered Cupboard-head, Chuckle-head, Buffle-head and Culver-head already, but here we had Pudding-head, still an excellent word to be used wherever possible today, I would say. Maybe this episode will bring it back to life? I hope so.

Categories
1900-1949 1950-1999

Unforgiven – An Epigram, 1955

The Weekend Book, 1955

A little epigram by Colin Ellis that amused me from The Weekend Book, 1955 edition (but written in the 1930s):

A little digging reveals there was a companion epigram:

Unforgivable
With Peter I refuse to dine:
His jokes are older than his wine.

Colin Ellis had one of those properly varied, illustrious lives that people used to have – he was a poet in his youth, but went on to become Director of Home-Grown Cereals at the Ministry of Food during the Second World War, held various public offices in Leicestershire, was a historian and archeologist, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and an author.

Apparently a Leicestershire man to the core, I rather enjoy another of his poems on the subject, from 1932 – Living in the Midlands. I might have been born 80 years later than Mr Ellis, but I still recognise this bucolic nostalgia (although in my case, it’s for the farms, orchards and oast houses of Kent and my girlhood).

Living in the Midlands

When men offer thanks for the bounties
That they in their boyhood have known
When poets are praising their counties
What ought I to say of my own?

Its highways are crowded with lorries
And buses encumber its lanes;
Its hills are used chiefly as quarries,
Its rivers used chiefly as drains.

The country is all over-ridden
By townsmen, ill-mannered and proud
And beauty, unless it is hidden
Is trampled to death by the crowd

Disforested, featureless, faded-
Describe me a place if you can
Where Man was by Nature less aided
Or Nature less aided by Man.

And yet though I keep in subjection
My heart, as a rule, to my head,
I still feel a sneaking affection
For ___________*, where I was bred.

For still, here and there, is a village,
Where factories have not been planned,
There still are some acres of tillage,
Some old men still work on the land.

And how can I help but remember
The Midsummer meadows of hay,
The stubbles dew-drenched in September,
The buttercups golden in May?

For we who seek out and discover
The charms of my county can be
As proud as a plain woman’s lover
Of beauties the world does not see.

*Shall we say “Middleshire”? (Author’s note)

Categories
1900-1949

An Absurdity of Plurals, 1938

Animal collective nouns, The Weekend Book, 1938

Who came up with the pluralisations of animals? When and, also, why? They are gloriously poetic but useless – you can hardly use most of them in real life without looking like a self-satisfaction of tossers.

And whoever invented “A Singular of Boars” is just taking the piss.

Animal collective nouns, The Weekend Book, 1938
Animal collective nouns, The Weekend Book, 1938
Categories
1900-1949 Music

Golden Slumbers, 1938 and 1969

The Weekend Book, 1938

I was an enormous Beatles fan as a teenager (well, I still am). In fact, they’re the reason I live in Liverpool now. I came up here for a University Open Day twenty-two years ago, spent all of ten minutes in the history department, then took the rest of the day off to look for another kind of history – old Beatles haunts around the city.

I remember reading about how their song Golden Slumbers from the 1969 album Abbey Road came about. Paul McCartney was saying he had seen a music book at his dad’s house with a old song of that name in it. He liked the title and, as he couldn’t read music to find out how the tune went, he wrote his own melody instead.

This is the original, from The Weekend Book, 1938. As you can see, Paul kept part of the lyric mostly intact.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4spkG8LizyE