It was a stroke of glorious silliness from Lewis Carroll to invent the character of the Mock Turtle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was a play on the fact that mock turtle soup was a popular soup in the Victorian period, for those who couldn’t afford the expensive delicacy of Green Turtle Soup itself. The “mock” version generally included heads, brains and offal from various creatures to recreate the turtle experience, a mash-up that’s demonstrated in John Tenniel’s illustration of the Mock Turtle, which is a kind of turtle-cow-pig.
Maybe a bit like this.
Anyway, here’s Mrs Dora Rea’s take on Mock Turtle soup from 1910, with the turtle being substituted with calf’s cheek and ham, which sounds a bit more palatable than brain soup. The forcemeat balls mentioned were stuffing balls of bread, herbs and meat, similar to stuffing today. I presume they’re meant to be floating in the soup, as they aren’t mentioned in the instructions.
MOCK TURTLE SOUP
3 pints brown stock
3/4 pound calf’s cheek
1 small onion
1 carrot
1 turnip
1 bunch of celery
Parsley and sweet herbs
1/4 pound ham
Juice of half a lemon
1 glass sherry
1/2 tsp peppercorns
2 oz butter
2 oz flour
Forcemeat balls
Heat the butter, fry the vegetables in it, cut up.
Add and brown the flour, pour in the stock, stirring.
Add herbs, seasonings, calf’s cheek, and simmer 2 1/2 hours, lift out meat.
Strain soup, rubbing vegetables through the sieve with a wooden spoon.
Reheat the soup, add lemon juice, sherry, and some of the meat cut into neat pieces and serve.
More from my Great-Grandma’s 1930s recipe book today. It’s Meat and Potato Turnovers, a pastie in other words.
Old family recipe book
Ingredients
1 lb flour
6 oz lard
1 tsp salt
A pinch cream of tartar
Filling for turnovers:
1 1/2 lb potatoes
2 oz meat minced
A little onion
Season with pepper and salt
Scatter a little flour in and boil until done.
Method
Rub lard into flour and [add] all other dry ingredients. Mix to a nice paste with cold water. Weigh 2 1/2 oz paste for each turnover. Roll out, out in the filling, fold up, egg wash, bake 25 minutes good hot oven top shelf.
Meat and Potato Turnovers, 1930s recipe
As this is a 1930s recipe, the meat saving element is very much to be seen with 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes to only 2oz of meat. I upped the meat to about 300g and reduced the potatoes to about 500g, browned with a fried onion, flour stirred in, just enough water to cover everything, and cooked until the potatoes were tender. There was too much filling for the amount of pastry I ended up with, but that’s fine – meat and potato leftovers are easy enough to use in other dishes, or just to eat by themselves, Nigella-style in front of the fridge.
I wasn’t sure what shape there were supposed to be, so made them in traditional half-moon pastie-style, and cooked them at 200 degrees for 25 minutes. As my daughter has an egg allergy, I brushed them with milk instead of egg.
As you’d expect they tasted comforting and old-fashioned, the lardy pastry feeling very traditional. Best eaten warm, and on an old plate – I got out my 1950s Ridgway Homemakers Woolworths plate for the occasion.
Before Irn Bru was Irn Bru, it was Iron Brew. Up until 1946 when a new law declared that drinks couldn’t be described as a “brew” if they weren’t actually brewed, and so the spelling, if not the pronunciation, was changed to keep within the letter of the law.
The basic Scottish hardness of Iron Brew’s advertising strategy is already in place in 1906, with the drink being endorsed here by champion wrestler and cable tosser Alex Munro, and all-round champion athlete of the world Donald Dinnie.
Falkirk Herald, 27th January 1906
Here’s an illustrated advert to show what they actually looked like.
Motherwell Times, 6th October 1905
Oh, for the days when you could be the all-round champion of the world and look like Donald Dinnie. He was a big celebrity of the day and well hard to boot. He’s been called “The Nineteenth Century’s Greatest Athlete”, and had the honour of heavy artillery shells used in the First World War being called “Donald Dinnie’s” in recognition of just how rock he was. To be fair, he was 69 in 1906, if this is when this illustration of him was made.
Motherwell Times, 6th October 1905
Here’s Alex Munro, who excellently won bronze at the 1908 Olympics and silver at the 1912 Olympics in the Tug of War event. Oh, how I wish they still had Tug of War, but sadly that ended as an event in 1920. It reminds me of all those strong man programmes you used to get on TV in the 80s, around the time World of Sport was on.
Motherwell Times, 6th October 1905
Here Iron Brew was apparently an essential part of the recuperation of “The Fasting Man” Mons. Beaute, who held the world record for fasting at the time. 40 days with only Barr’s Soda Water as sustenance, and recovering afterwards with a heady mix of Iron Brew and Bovril.
For something a little different this Valentine’s Day, why not make a little “Puff of Affection”, as apparently loved by the eminent eighteenth-century dictionary-compiler, Samuel Johnson. Or Robbie Coltrane, as he is forever in my mind’s eye.
I’d give one to Hugh Laurie, especially in the Prince Regent get-up. A puff of affection, that is.
As Johnson has it – it’s a little cake (“A kind of delicate bread”) for a Valentine (“a sweetheart, chosen on Valentine’s day”) to have for pudding (“1. a kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs. 2. The gut of an animal. 3. A bowel stuffed with certain mixtures of meal and other ingredients.”)
Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928
Dundee Courier, 14th February 1928
“Puffs of Affection”
It is recorded that Samuel Johnson was very fond of these puffs. He refers to them as having been first made in honour of St Valentine, but that in his calendar the saint’s day came often. Make a batter with 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 pint milk, then add a beaten egg, 1 teaspoon sugar, the same of grated lemon rind, and a tiny pinch of salt. Butter some small moulds, pour a little of the mixture into each, just half filling them, and bake in a slow oven for 30 minutes. Turn out, sprinkle liberally with sugar, and serve hot. Similar puffs are often served with syrup, and make quite a good stand-by pudding.
There’s a couple of odd things about the recipe. Firstly – flour, milk and eggs, flavoured with lemon, sugar and syrup. It’s pretty much a low-flour pancake, which seems a bit strange to have as a tradition merely a week after Shrove Tuesday. Secondly – one tablespoon of flour? I was interested to see how this would hold together with so little flour, and…well, it didn’t.
Not so much a Puff of Affection as a floppy slop. And no-one wants that on Valentine’s Day.
A Flop of Affection
I tried again, upping the flour to that of my normal pancake recipe, 125g of flour with all the other ingredients kept the same.
Sugared and syruped Puffs of Affection
These were much better in that they at least kept their shape, and they tasted, unsurprisingly, of fat pancake. But one of the charms of a pancake is its delicate thinness, and the fresh memory of a stack of them a week ago means this pales a bit in comparison. To be honest, I’d recommend a Valentine’s breakfast of a savoury bacon and cheese pancake instead.
Last year my mum revealed that she had what I’d always wished my family had – an old family recipe book belonging to my great-grandma, who I called “Nan”.
I’m an avid recipe scrapbooker, pasting cuttings and print-outs of interesting-looking recipes into a succession of notebooks. The best of those recipes, the ones that work and I will make for my family over and over, I write down in my ultimate notebook, which is a copy of River Song’s Diary from Doctor Who. I started doing this years ago in order to start my own family recipe book for my children. With my daughter’s allergies, the focus has changed a bit, and now I’m trying to find vegan baking recipes that we all can enjoy, seeing as it’s strangely very hard to find shop-bought baked goods that are both dairy and egg-free. Especially as those are two of the most common allergies for children.
I’m slightly baffled as to why me and my brothers, all of us interested in food and cooking, were never aware of the recipe book before, but that fact that this thin green exercise book exists at all is a cause for joy. There are no dates in it, but I think it’s from when my grandma was a teenager, as some of what looks like her school-era writing is in it, which would make it from the 1920s-30s.
I’m planning to work my way through making a selection of the recipes, and I started here, with “Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits”. I don’t know who Sarah was, but she evidently made biscuits which were good enough for my Nan to seek out the recipe. Also, as a bonus, there’s no dairy in them, the fat being made up of lard. In order to make them suitable for my daughter I included egg replacer instead of the egg, and soya milk to mix with the bicarbonate of soda. And I ended up using Trex vegetable fat instead of the lard too, but it’s a similar thing.
Old family recipe book
This is the recipe:
Sarah’s Ginger Bread Biscuits
Ingredients:
14 1/2oz flour
4oz lard
5oz syrup
8oz sugar
2 tspns ginger
1/2 tspn bicarbonate of soda
1 egg
Method:
Rub lard into dry ingredients, with a little salt.
Add warmed syrup warmed and the soda dissolved in a little milk.
Add egg, well beaten.
Mix all well together, roll out.
Next day cut with an egg cup and bake in a hot oven.
Gingerbread biscuits
When I mixed the dough I didn’t roll it out, instead I kept it in a lump and put it in the fridge overnight. The next day I divided it into walnut-sized balls and flattened them with a fork rather than cut them with an eggcup. The biscuits spread and won’t keep their shape in any case. When you take them out of the oven they are soft, so wait a minute before moving them onto a wire tray to cool.
The verdict – they do indeed taste like gingerbread, and when freshly made are a delicious combination of crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. After a day they will have hardened a lot, and develop the classic crunchy texture of the gingernut biscuit. Which is nice, but not quite so delectable as the fresh version. They didn’t last long in my house, so thank you Nan!
This is a kind of anti-Rohypnol advert from 1909. It’s a product that you surreptitiously slip into the unaware’s drink in order to sober them up.
“No More Drunkenness” is promised with “the Great Coza Powder”, which has “the marvellous effect of producing a repugnance to alcohol in any shape or form.”
Hull Daily Mail, 14th January 1909
The USP for this product is that the user isn’t aware that they’ve taken it. It’s for other concerned members of the drunkard’s family for administer in “coffee, tea, milk, beer, water, liqueurs or solid food, without the partaker’s knowledge”.
The troublesome imbiber suddenly doesn’t fancy a drink anymore as the powder “does its work so silently and surely that wife, sister, or daughter can administer it to the intemperate without his knowledge and without his learning what has effected his reformation.”
I’m not sure exactly how it works – you can get a free sample sent out to you, so it’s obviously not a one shot deal. Maybe you have to take it every day.
Annoying as the drunkard is, I suppose it’s not technically moral behaviour to secretly slip them some Coza Powder. Or it wouldn’t be if this remedy wasn’t pure quackery, and easily made in your kitchen right now. One of my favourite publications, The British Medical Journal’s “The Composition of Certain Secret Remedies” of 1909, the very same year as this advert, was a take down of the old Victorian and Edwardian pharmaceutical industry with analyses of all those “never fail” medications. It dismisses Coza by its findings that all it consists of is ordinary bicarbonate of soda, cumin and cinnamon.
I came across this advert for Dundee Beer in an old newspaper – it grabbed my attention by its proud declaration that it had been found to be free of arsenic. Hooray! Hang on, though, isn’t that pretty much the least you can expect from a pint; for it to be, by and large, arsenic-free? Either this is the most desperate advertising campaign in history, or there was a bigger story behind it.
Dundee Evening Post, 15th January 1901
I looked further and found out a story I’d never been aware of – an spate of poisonings in Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and other places in the North-West in 1900, apparently caused by drinking beer which contained arsenic. At first, the true nature of the illness wasn’t apparent, as the victims were assumed to be suffering from some kind of alcohol poisoning caused by the sheer volume of alcohol drunk. However, the symptoms weren’t quite the same and many moderate drinkers were also affected, and eventually a doctor came up with the implausible idea that the beer they had drunk had poisoned them, not by alcohol, but by arsenic.
Testing confirmed that the glucose and sugars which had been supplied by Liverpool company Bostock, and used as a cheaper substitute for malted barley in the brewing process, had become contaminated with arsenious acid. The sugars had been made using sulphuric acid to strip the sugar from the cane, but instead of being made from pure sulphur, it had been made from pyrites or iron sulphide for cost reasons. The pyrites were, it turned out, the source of the arsenic, and this sub-par sulphuric acid had been sold to Bostock by their supplier Nicholson.
A Royal Commission was set up in 1901 to investigate and thousands of gallons of beer were thrown away, into the sewers – 267,000 gallons of them in Liverpool. In the end it was concluded that around 6000 people had been affected by the poison, 115 of which had died from it. Although due to the initial confusion as to the cause of the outbreak, it was hard to determine actual figures.
A very thorough and interesting account of the epidemic can be found on this Brewery History site.
There was a worry that jams and syrups also produced by Bostock were contaminated with the poisoned sugars. Leeds Times, 15th December 1900
“The Coroner remarked it was for the police to take action if they could prove that anyone was to blame.” Gloucestershire Echo, 26th December 1900
Bostock took Nicholson to court for damages of £300,000 for not supplying them with what they thought was pure sulphuric acid made from brimstone, which had been their previous arrangement. Nicholson had changed to the cheaper pyrite version, without Bostock’s knowledge. They said that Bostock had not told them what they used the acid for, and could have supplied the pure version had they known it was for consumption. Nicholson claimed the difference in colour in the pyrite acid should have alerted Bostock to the change. The judgement was made against Nicholson, but with the recognition that Bostock was also negligent. Nicholson was ordered to recompense the actual costs of the acid and sugar, but no damages on top.
Yorkshire Post, 13th January 1904
Yorkshire Post, 13th January 1904
Yorkshire Post, 13th January 1904
Yorkshire Post, 13th January 1904
Yorkshire Post, 13th January 1904
It was later claimed that malt and hops could also be a source of arsenic themselves, although in smaller quantities. “While it may be possible to produce beers absolutely “arsenic free”, the majority, when brewed mainly or entirely from malt and hops, will contain minute traces, which will, however, be below the amount likely to produce any harmful effects.”
Canterbury Journal, 10th February 1906
Canterbury Journal, 10th February 1906
Canterbury Journal, 10th February 1906
Canterbury Journal, 10th February 1906
Canterbury Journal, 10th February 1906
An order was produced by the Treasury prohibiting the use of glucose or sugar containing arsenic in the production of beer. Aberdeen Journal, 23rd October 1901
It took a while for the problem to finally go away. Arsenic was detected in beer in Wolverhampton in 1914. Nottingham Evening Post, 15th January 1914
Even in 1950, a claim was made by a consumer that they had been the victim of arsenic poisoning in their beer. Although whether this was true or not is another matter. The report sounds very sceptical, and put it in the same bracket as another customer who complained of buying “a loaf containing a seagull”. Must have been a big loaf. Western Evening News, 12th October 1950
Another worry about the consumption of arsenic in 1952, with the inclusion of potassium bromate in flour, which has an arsenic content. Inclusion of potassium bromate in food is now banned in many countries, although not the USA. Dundee Courier, 3rd October 1952
A revised report for the recommended arsenic limits in food was made in 1955. “…Evidence led to the view that water and milk should not normally contain arsenic but in any case should not contain more than .1 parts per million.” Aberdeen Evening Express, 9th March 1955
Having never worried about my accidental arsenic consumption up until now, I decided to look into the situation today. It turns out that rice absorbs arsenic pretty well during the growing process and the Food Standards Agency is working on recommended limits right now. Apparently cooking rice in a coffee percolator is the answer – according to this anyway.
Also – brussels sprouts are pretty good at absorbing natural arsenic from the soil, so that’s a good enough reason for to me avoid the blighters.
Oh, and it’s still in beer, by the way – beers and wines are made clearer through filtering using diatomaceous earth, which contains arsenic. Unfiltered beers and wines are the way to go….
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928
So it’s back to work for me today. Can’t complain really – it’s in distinct contrast to the days when I was a shop-girl and had to work the busiest day of the year on Christmas Eve, with it all happening again on Boxing Day.
This year it’s been wall-to-wall truckles of brie, salted caramel cream liqueur, marshmallow snowmen and bubble and squeak, and so perhaps it’s time for a more austere diet to kick in. As the recipe below says (before giving the instructions in one, long sentence) “After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change…”
It’s a kind of digestive biscuit which was, as evident in its name, was considered an aid to the digestive system due to the presence of bicarbonate of soda. Notwithstanding the fact that most of it decomposes into sodium carbonate during the cooking process and so having little actual effect, this particular recipe only calls for a pinch of the stuff anyway.
Nb. This is the first time I have come across the concept of a “saltspoon” as a means of measurement. Apparently 1 saltspoon equals 1/4 of a teaspoon so this would mean 1/8 teaspoon of salt in the recipe below.
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 29th December 1928
After-Christmas Recipe
Wholemeal Biscuits
After the surfeit of the festival season it is often a relief to see something that is not garnished with clotted cream or chocolate icing. Wholemeal biscuits seem an eminently suitable change. Here is a good recipe for them:-
Ingredients:
1/2lb wholemeal flour
1/4 pint milk (about)
1oz caster sugar
1oz butter
1/2 saltspoonsful salt (1/8 tsp)
A pinch of carbonate of soda
Dissolve the butter and soda in the milk by warming, mix the flour, sugar and salt together, add the milk, mix the whole into a stiff paste, roll out thinly, cut in rounds, pierce all over with a fork, place on a greased tin and bake 25 minutes.
Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat. Unless you’re having mock goose instead.
Mock versions of various meat dishes used to be fairly common in recipe books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but you don’t tend to see recipes that seriously do this anymore. Thanks to Lewis Carroll, Mock Turtle Soup is probably the best-known example now.
I think the most recent recipe book I have that includes a mock creation was a 1970s Linda McCartney, which had a mock turkey for Christmas, mainly made of textured vegetable protein if I remember rightly. But there weren’t too many options for veggies in those days, you had to make your own fake meat if you wanted it. I was a vegetarian for seven years, during which time Linda McCartney first brought out her food range and it’s fair to say she was almost entirely responsible for bringing ready-made, specialised vegetarian food into the mainstream. I’m a big fan.
On that subject, in my vegetarian days, I remember eating something I bought from an international supermarket which was called “Mock Duck”. You can still get it, if you really want it. On the tin it says it’s made from “abalone”, but as I didn’t know what that was, I thought it must be something like tofu. Because why would you bother mocking meat unless it was to make it meat-free? Now I know that abalone is actually a kind of sea snail and so it was not only non-veggie, it was massively more hideous to boot. It did taste pretty bad, I have to say.
Oh, and to round up my knowledge of mocked food, there was also “mockolate” in Friends, as sold by the divine Michael McKean. That was disgusting too.
Anyway, it turns out then that the duck wasn’t being mocked for veggie reasons, but possibly for cost reasons instead (unless it was for “vegetarians” who still ate seafood, I suppose. That’s something I’ve never understood the reasoning for.) And cost used to be the reason these types of recipes existed at all. Which is why the mock goose below, from the 1930 Essex Cookery Book, is designated “Poor Man’s..”
Essex Cookery Book, 1930
I’m not too sure how much like goose it would actually have been as it’s mainly made from liver and potatoes. In fact, it’s not just liver, the recipe specifies a strangely non-specific “pig’s liver, etc”. There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in that “etc” – it could contain pretty much anything. Apart from sea snails, hopefully.
Essex Cookery Book, 1930
Poor Man’s Goose
1/2 lb. pig’s liver, etc
1 lb. potatoes
2 small onions
Pepper and salt
1/2 tsp chopped sage
Water
Prepare potatoes and onions, cut into slices.
Wash liver and cut into slices.
Put all ingredients in layers in a pie-dish.
Cover with potato, add sufficient water to half fill the dish.
Put layer of caul or greased paper on the top.
Cook for 2 hours.
If covered with paper, remove 1/2 hour before serving and brown the potato.
If you fancy making a Christmas Pudding with a real vintage pedigree, here it is, a recipe from the Savoy in 1925. It might be too late to make a proper Christmas Cake, but it’s never too late to make a pudding – as long as you have 10 hours boiling time to spare.
Good luck finding both the specified large and small raisins.
27th November 1925, Ballymena Observer
A Christmas Pudding Recipe
The Chef of the Savoy Restaurant has been persuaded to reveal another of his famous recipes.
Although not quite so elaborate as that of the puddings he makes himself, it is of a fine, rich flavour, and simple to make.
He was kind enough to write it out for me, and here it is. It is a recipe for a seven-pound pudding.
Twelve ounces of large raisins, twelve ounces of small raisins, twelve ounces of currants, twelve ounces of crystalized peel, four ounces of chopped apple, one ounce of orange peel, one ounce of citron peel, two ounces of crystalized ginger, twelve ounces of suet, nine ounces of flour, ten ounces of bread crumbs, eight ounces of brown sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, six eggs, half a pint of milk, quarter of a pint of brandy or sherry.
All the dry ingredients should be mixed together. A little extra mixing well repays the trouble, he says. Beat the eggs and add them to the milk and brandy, then pour over the dry ingredients and again thoroughly mix. Pack into greased moulds and boil for six hours at the time of making. The puddings should be boiled for a further four hours when wanted for use. The best sauce is white, custard or brandy sauce.
