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.
Macaroni cheese is probably my ultimate in comfort food (well, second to my mum’s world-beating mashed potato). It sounds to me like a fairly modern, American invention – after all, I thought the British were introduced to proper pasta in about 1975. At least, I’ve got a promotional pasta cookery pamphlet from 1978 that talks about its chosen foodstuff as a new and original thing. (It also has a strange lasagne recipe too – no meat sauce at all, just béchamel on every layer with chopped ham. I need to try it one day.)
But no! I was as wrong in this assumption as I could be. It turns out a version of mac ‘n’ cheese is in what might be the world’s oldest cookery book, Forme of Cury, from the late fourteenth century. There, it consists of fresh dough boiled in sheets and sandwiched in layers of cheese and butter. A bit like that lasagne from 1978. Elizabeth Raffald provides the first macaroni cheese recipe we’d properly recognise, in her The Experienced English Housekeeper of 1769, and Mrs Beeton included two recipes for it in her 1861 Book of Household Management.
And my excellent copy of Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book from 1910 has its own version too, below.
Ruth Goodman’s Victorian Farm tells me that the word macaroni in 19th Century recipes was used to describe all shaped pasta and that the macaroni usually available in Victorian shops was very thick and required a long cooking time to soften. This explains the timing of an hour’s boiling in my Edwardian recipe, I expect, rather than a preference for boiling it to a mush, like their carrots. The macaroni also came in long tubes, which you had to cut into smaller lengths yourself. And apparently it also needed washing.
I gave it a go, changing a few things for the modern world.
No boiling of the macaroni for a hour, and no browning it in front of a fire, sadly. Also, I’m not sure how many people the recipe is intended for, as the book doesn’t mention this for any of the recipes. But 3oz of pasta was not enough for two greedy 21st century portions so I upped the amount to 5oz. It’s unusual that there is more cheese by weight than macaroni in the recipe – despite adding more pasta, I kept the sauce amounts exactly the same, and it worked fine. Although the recipe seems to guide you to throw all the sauce ingredients together without cooking but maybe white sauces were too obvious to give much direction for. I like that soft cheese curds were also an option instead of the grated hard cheese.
Wash the macaroni, drop it in short lengths into 1 pint boiling water.Add a little salt and 1/2 oz butter.Cook gently about 1 hour, then drain.
Grate the cheese or, if soft, press with a wooden spoon through a wire sieve.Put 1 oz of butter into a saucepan with the flour.Mix and add the milk and seasonings.Stir in 3oz of the cheese, add the macaroni, and mix.
Turn into a hot, greased pie dish.Sprinkle remaining cheese over.Brown in front of fire.Serve very hot.
Old fashioned macaroni and cheese, in a pie dish
It was definitely of the old, plain school of macaroni cheese, which would be too non-jazzed-up to be included in a recipe book these days. But that what I like about Mrs Rea – good, solid, day to day recipes that work, rather than a recipes dreamed up by a celebrity chef purely in order to have an original theme for their new cook book. Plain it might be, but lovely, smooth and tasty nonetheless. I will be making it again. In fact, writing this post now, I wish there was some left that I could eat Nigella-style in front of the fridge, but it’s all gone.
All the old school “Family Fun” games that I post from time to time remind me of just one thing – old fashioned cherry cake. Especially Up Jenkyns and Ghosts because those were the games we played with Grandad and Nan, and Nan generally provided the aforementioned cherry cake for tea. Proust had his madeleines, I have cherry cake.
Funny really, I’m not generally a fan of the glacé cherry, despite fresh cherries being maybe my favourite food ever – they’re what summer tastes like. But you need glacé cherries for this kind of cake. I had a hankering for one and searched through my old cookbooks for a suitably non-tarted-up recipe. I decided on one from The Radiation Cookery Book – originally published in the 1920s but updated and reissued for decades. I have the 1948 edition.
Radiation Cookery Book, 1948 edition
It’s the rich Madeira cake recipe, which has various alterations to make different cakes.
Radiation Cookery Book, 1948 edition
Radiation Cookery Book, 1948 edition
Radiation Cookery Book, 1948 edition
Cherry Cake
4oz/115g butter or margarine 4oz/115g caster sugar 4oz/115g glace cherries 2 eggs 6oz/170g plain flour 1/2 teaspoon baking powder Grated rind of a lemon Milk as needed
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the eggs one at a time, and beat until the mixture is stiff and uniform.
Stir in the sifted flour and baking powder, adding milk if necessary to form a soft mixture which will shake easily from the wooden spoon.
Transfer to a tin lined with greased paper and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 hour and 5 minutes with the Regulo at Mark 4 (but I baked it at 180C for around 45 minutes).
This was how it turned out. It’s an art ensuring the cherries don’t sink to the bottom – an art I have not mastered, although it doesn’t really look that way from the picture. Tasted nice though, although I’d used fancy morello glacé cherries, which new-fangled it up a bit too much. Plus, the ones I used to have were round cakes, but there wasn’t enough batter for my cake tin and so it became a cherry loaf. To be fair, the recipe does say to double the quantities for a larger cake, which you would need to do for a 20cm cake tin.
Cheery cherry cake
Next time I’m trying the reliable Mrs Rea’s 1910 version, below.
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910
The Radiation Cookery Book contains hidden treasure in the form of this scribbled recipe by the original owner for coconut ice, a none-more-Blyton kids treat, that I am planning to make soon:
A beautiful old advert for cookers and pans, from the very excellent Mrs Dora Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910.
Incidentally, a descendant of Mrs Rea’s has been in touch to correct my joke about Dora Rea being almost unfortunately named. Because “Rea” is pronounced “Ray”, not “Rear”. I am chastened and also honoured, thank you, Karen! Karen has kindly provided more information about Mrs Rea’s life in the comments here – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/the-good-the-bad-and-the-calfs-head/
*Holds back from making a “Dora, Rea, Me, Fah, Soh, Lah, Tee, Doh” joke*
Some possibly useful information on how to cook vegetables from The Essex Cookery Book, 1930.
I’ve never heard of the dark/light theory of cooking vegetables. Vegetables grown in the dark should be cooked in the dark (i.e. covered with a lid) and vice versa, or so it says.
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
More carrot destruction here with the timings. Not quite as bad as the advice to cook them for two and a half hours from 1910 (see below) but people apparently really liked carrot mush back then. Also – in what universe does it take 15 minutes to cook spinach? You can see why we got our reputation for soggy veg.
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, Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910
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.
I remember reading about blackcurrant tea in old children’s books when I was a kid. I really wished that I could try it myself, it sounded so delicious. It was most famously a favourite of Enid Blyton’s The Secret Seven, but despite what they seem to imply it wasn’t invented by them.
Here’s a 1910 recipe from “Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book” that I have tried:
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910
Blackcurrant tea
3 tablespoons Blackcurrant jam
1 tablespoon sugar
Boiling water to make the whole 1 pint
Stir well, pressing the fruit.
Let it stand 1/2 hour before using any.
Strain off the liquid as required.
It comes under the heading of invalid cookery, but was also a children’s nursery drink for a treat. The taste – well, Blackcurrant cordial really. My small son is a fan, although he forgets what it’s called and asks me if he can have some of that lovely raspberry coffee.
This is the almost unfortunately-named Mrs Dora Rea’s Cookery Book, from 1910.
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910.
This is a lovely cookbook, very sensible and everyday, and largely lacking in Victorian and Edwardian aspic-y froufrou. Full of recipes that are easily followed today.
A few cookery quirks of the time were the emphasis on “nitrogenous” foods (what we’d call protein now) and “invalid cookery”, sickroom cooking being taken very seriously before the advent of Heinz Tomato Soup.
It also turns out that there was good reason that British cooking was derided for its treatment of vegetables. Here’s a recipe instructing how to cook carrots:
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, 1910, how to cook carrots
Yes, that’s boil between one and two-and-a-half hours, then chop into mush. I wouldn’t boil carrots to make baby purée that long.
At this time they were also keen on cooking heads to make brawn. Otherwise known as “head cheese”, a name that gives me terrors.
It seems like a lot of effort to go to, when the end result is still a head. All that removing of snout bone, tongue and brains. Shudder.
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book: Boiling a calf’s head
But there are loads of great things in here. I’m as mad about cooking as I am about history and I love testing out old recipes. This is “Potato Surprise”, a 100% delicious concoction that I make with the leftovers from yesterday’s sausage and mash (I have to make extra especially so there’s enough for leftovers, of course).
Mrs Rea’s Potato Surprises
1/2 pound of cooked sausages
1 1/2 pounds mashed potato
Salt and pepper
1/2 ounce butter
(Unmentioned – an egg, breadcrumbs and oil)
Melt the butter and mix with the potatoes, also seasoning.
Divide sausages into small pieces.
Cover each with potato, make into a ball, brush with egg, cover with breadcrumbs.
Fry in hot fat.
Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book, Potato Surprises
My potato surprises
Nb. Love the old spelling d’oyley. Makes it infinitely posher-sounding.
