Join the waitlist for ‘The Recipe Book That Sustained a Life’ and receive updates on the Mary project.
Mary is a three-volume box set that reconstructs the life of a Victorian woman whose voice survives not in letters or diaries, but in a handwritten recipe book.
Preserved page by page—marked by use, correction, and time—Mary’s recipes form the foundation of a larger historical biography. Together, they reveal a life shaped by abandonment, social disruption, resilience, and survival in nineteenth-century Britain.
This project brings Mary back into view through original material culture, genealogical research, and historical scholarship, transforming a domestic manuscript into biography, evidence, and analysis.
The Three-Book Box Set
Book One: The Recipe Book (Published)
A complete facsimile of Mary’s original handwritten recipe book.
Every page is a facsimile: handwriting, crossings-out, insertions, stains, and wear. No modernisation. No editorial correction. This volume presents Mary’s own working document as a historical artefact, preserving her voice without interpretation.
Book Two: The Life (Work in Progress)
The Victorian Recipe Book That Sustained a Life: Mary Allott’s Story of Abandonment, Scandal, and Survival (Work in Progress)
In 1860, a twenty-four-year-old mother abandoned by her husband opened a blank notebook and began to write.
Mary Allott’s handwritten recipe book became her lifeline: evidence of competence when Victorian society blamed women for failed marriages, proof of belonging when scandal threatened reputation, and a record of resilience when many women in her position disappeared from the historical record.
Through Mary’s recipes and household remedies, supported by genealogical and archival research, this volume reconstructs an extraordinary ordinary life: the daughter of a prosperous leather merchant educated for middle-class respectability, a young bride whose husband sailed to New Zealand, and a woman navigating the impossible space between ‘improperly married’ and ‘respectably widowed’.
Mary did not simply survive. She created community, maintained purpose, and ultimately found love at an age when Victorian women were expected to fade into invisibility. Her recipe book, containing over 280 entries—many attributed to friends, sisters, and neighbours—reveals the informal networks that sustained women through crisis.
This volume reads the recipe book as biography, testimony, and social record, illuminating how domestic documentation could become an act of quiet defiance.
Book Three: The Scholarship (Work in Progress)
A critical and contextual study of Mary’s recipes.
This volume provides transcription, analysis, and interpretation, examining what Mary’s cooking reveals about Victorian technologies, global trade networks, medical beliefs, and women’s social lives. It situates a single woman’s manuscript within wider economic, cultural, and technological systems of nineteenth-century Britain.
Why Three Books?
Mary’s story cannot be told in a single form.
To reproduce the recipe book without interpretation preserves her voice.
To write the biography without the document would erase its authority.
To analyse the material without both would flatten its meaning.
Together, the three volumes restore a life overlooked by traditional historical records, allowing Mary to be seen both as an individual woman and as part of a broader Victorian world.
Research, Articles, and Context
The Mary project is supported by ongoing research into Victorian women’s history, material culture, genealogy, and food history.
Related articles explore themes such as women’s domestic labour, historical identity, memory, and the interpretation of everyday documents as evidence. These essays provide context for the box set and expand on the ideas that underpin the biography and scholarship.
Selected articles and research notes are published in the Articles section of this site and updated as the project develops.
About the Project
This is a long-form work of historical recovery grounded in primary sources, genealogical detective work, and interdisciplinary scholarship. It is written for readers interested in Victorian history, women’s lives, genealogy, food history, and the psychology of lives lived under constraint.
Updates on the project, research insights, and publication news are shared through the newsletter.
Recipe sample here
Join the waitlist to receive an advance copy before publication and be among the first to discover how Mary transformed a recipe book into proof of her worth when Victorian society condemned her for being ‘improperly married’.
Read more about Mary here.
This image taken from a recreated Victorian kitchen in a period property captures the practical, working atmosphere of a middle-class 19th-century cooking space.
The workspace centres around a sturdy wooden preparation table, its well-worn surface testament to countless hours of labour. A traditional set of scales with brass weights sits ready. The earthenware mixing bowl has recently been used, suggesting recent baking.
The wall displays an impressive collection of copper and brass cookware, its burnished surfaces reflecting the care Victorian servants lavished on their equipment. These weren’t merely decorative; copper’s excellent heat conductivity made it essential for delicate sauces and preserves. The well-used implements in their container, alongside chopping boards showing years of knife marks.
Storage vessels include stoneware jars with their characteristic salt-glazed finishes, used for everything from preserves to pickles. The green-checked tea towel with its crocheted edging represents the kind of textile work that filled rare idle moments.
Much kitchen work happened in dim conditions, particularly in basement kitchens. The wooden shelf holds additional storage jars.
This was a space of constant activity, where the labour of food preparation was arduous, skilled work carried out largely by women whose expertise went largely unrecorded except in manuscript recipe books like Mary Allott’s.
Join the waitlist to receive an advance copy before publication and be among the first to discover how Mary transformed a recipe book into proof of her worth when Victorian society condemned her for being ‘improperly married’.