Tag: vegetables

Categories
1900-1949 Food & Drink

How to Cook Vegetables, 1930

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

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
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.

The Essex Cookery Book, 1930
The Essex Cookery Book, 1930

Previous post here on Mrs Rea’s Cookery Book from 1910 – https://skittishlibrary.co.uk/the-good-the-bad-and-the-calfs-head/

Categories
Victorian

This Reminds Me of our Wedding Night, 1894

Turnip, the Strand Magazine, 1893

Comedy vegetables. Never not funny. I see these as a staple of British humour. Medieval peasants surely found most of their laughs from rude veg, and thanks to Blackadder and That’s Life, they reached a certain cultural highlight in the 1980s. The Victorians, despite their dour reputation, were often as skittish as the next man, and they were no exception to the delights of the naughty tuber.

There was a series in The Strand magazine celebrating them. Baldrick would be proud of the turnip below. Especially the second picture of the same turnip with a hat on.

And here are some potatoes:

(Although I suspect Mr Fox’s “duck potato” is ever so slightly doctored.)