Helen Parker-Drabble | Author | Speaker | Former counsellor | Family historian

Available in my shop as an eBook 978-1-9162466-4-5 , paperback 978-1-9162466-5-2 or hardback 978-1-9162466-6-9.

See a sample here

What did a Victorian woman’s kitchen actually hold? Mary Allott’s handwritten recipe book, kept from 1860 to 1912, is a rare surviving document from a life the historical record noted and failed to follow. Over 280 recipes, remedies, and household entries fill its 115 pages: cakes, cordials, preserves, medicines for children with croup, instructions for pickling, and a Bakewell pudding attributed to Miss Evinson at the Angel Hotel in Chesterfield.

Half of the entries are attributed to named contributors, the sisters, neighbours, and friends who sustained Mary across the fifty-two years she kept the book. Mrs Holland of Oaks Bank, a young widow earning her own living as a dressmaker. Elizabeth Bunting, Mary’s sister, who contributed cowslip wine and butterscotch before her death from typhoid in 1874. The attributions alone trace a tangible social world.

This facsimile reproduces every page as it survives. Mary’s own handwriting, the annotations she added when she cooked with a new stove in 1882, the ink that darkens and lightens across the decades, the pins and paste that hold slips of paper to earlier pages. No modernisation. No editorial correction. Mary’s own working document, preserved as a historical artefact.

Book One of Mary: A Victorian Life Recovered, a three-volume box set. Book Two, Neither Wife Nor Widow, is the biography that reads the recipe book as a life. Book Three, Interpreting Mary’s Recipe Book, is the analytical companion, tracing ingredients from Jamaican ginger fields to Mary’s kitchen and mapping the women who shared their knowledge. Both are in production.

For family historians, women’s-history readers, food historians, and anyone curious about the lives Victorian women rarely left in letters.

Follow the project here.

Recipes starting with ‘A’. Extract from A facsimile reproduction of Victorian Recipe Book: A Handwritten Book of Family Receipts started by Mrs C. A. Allott of Sheffield, (England), 1860.