Recipes from an Edwardian Country House: A Stately English Home Shares Its Classic Tastes

Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1. Breakfast

15 Recipes

Devilled Kidneys

Drop or Dropped Scones, or Scotch Pancakes

Pick and Mix Fry-up

Kedgeree

Pancakes

Hot Cross Buns

Loney’s Oatcakes

Armand 2001 Marmalade

Cinnamon Toast

Eggs

Poached Eggs

Fried Eggs

Oeufs En cocotte

Boiled Egg with Marmite Soldiers

Scrambled Eggs

Eggy Bread, or French Toast

Chapter 2. Sunday Lunch

9 Recipes

Mira’s Rack of Lamb with Herby Mustard Crust

Gammon with Parsley Sauce

Boiled Beef and Carrots with Diana’s Dumplings

Boeuf a La Mode

Shoulder or Leg of Lamb a La Boulangère

Steak and Kidney Pudding

Tarragon-Roasted Chicken,

Gerda’s Chicken

Big Granny’s Chicken and Ham Pie

Chapter 3. Monday Left-overs

13 Recipes

Bubble and Squeak (English), Colcannon(Irish)

Curried Chicken or Lamb

Devilled Turkey or Chicken

Pork and Beans

Hugh’s TV Chicken Dinner

Shepherd’s Pie

Rissoles

Red Flannel Hash

Savoury Pancakes

Stovies

Turkey Tonnato

Rob’s Turkeyburgers

Ham and Leek Parcels

Chapter 4. Mid-week Meals

19 Recipes

Cheese Pudding

Cheesy Eggs

Gloucestershire Squab Pie

Chipolata Casserole

Mary’s Proper Greek Moussaka

Macaroni Cheese

Cornish Pasties

Picnics

Risotto with Chicken Livers

Pork Chops Auberge Saint Pierre

Hungarian Goulash

Andrew’s Spinach Supper

Somerset Chicken

Braised Red Cabbage with Spicy Sausages

Souvlaki

Very Good Tomato Sauce for Pasta

Toad in The Hole

Leek and Bacon Tart

Head Mistress Chicken

Herby Lamb Chop Gratin

Chapter 5. Fish on Friday

11 Recipes

Fish Baked on a Bed of Leeks

Fish Cakes

Italian Baked Fish

Mum’s Fish Pie

Very Speedy Fish Pie

Moules Marinière

Rob’s Seduction Sole

Plaice Rolls

Tuna and Bean Salad

Stuffed Haddock Baked in Foil

Smoked Haddock with Poached Eggs

Chapter 6. Saturday Stews

14 Recipes

Billabong Stew

Bobotie

Anne’s Beef Stew

Coq au Vin

Lancashire Hot Pot

Navarin of Lamb

Rabbit with Lentil Pureée

Oxtail Stew

Slow Roasted Pork Belly with Cider

Poulet Grand-Mère

Pheasant and Chestnut Casserole

Spag Bol

Lamb with Aubergines and Cinnamon

Very Slow Shoulder of Lamb

Chapter 7. Vegetable Dishes and Salads

29 Recipes

Beans with Garlic and Pine Nuts

Greens with Bacon and Onion

Cauliflower Cheese

Creamed Spinach

Carrots Vichy

Courgette Frittatas

Creamed Sprouts with Chestnuts and Bacon

Gardener’s Pie

Cheesy Baked Aubergines

Jerusalem Artichoke Soufflé

Parsnip Fritters

Pea and Lettuce Risotto

Pease Pudding

Stuffed Peppers

Three Root Mash

Upside-Down Shallot Tart

Salads

Tomato Salad

Barley Salad

Salade Nicoise

Celeriac Remoulade with Walnuts

Chicory and Orange Salad

Rob’s Lunchtime Salad

Potatoes

Best Ever Roast Potatoes

Best Ever Mash

Potato Salad

Milly-Molly-Mandy Potatoes

Potato Gratins

Pan Haggerty

Mustard Potatoes

Champ

Chapter 8. Teatime

21 Recipes

Cakes, Large and Small

Angel Cake USA

Chocolate Cake

Custard Tarts

Chocolate Eclairs

Chocolate Biscuit Cake

Loney’s Sticky Ginger Cake

London Granny’s Crusty Sponge Cake

Nusskuchen

Madeleines

Lemon Drizzle Cake

Swiss Roll

All in One Fruit Cake

Biscuits

Brandy Snaps

Choc Chip Cookies

Gipsy Creams

Crow’s Nicky-Nacky Men

Orange Jumbles

Mary’s Biscuits

Fork Biscuits

Flapjacks

Chapter 9. Soups, Starters and Savouries

32 Recipes

Soups and Accompaniments

Bramley Apple and Celeriac Soup

Cullen Skink

Gazpacho

Potage Crecy

Parsnip with Orange and Ginger

Heinz Tomato Soup

Garlicky Spinach Soup

Minestrone

Green Pea Soup

Parsley Soup

Rob’s Veg Soup

Leek and Potato Soup

Veloute Johnny (Onion Boys Soup)

The Potter’s Loaf

Garlic Bread

Other Starters and Savouries

Lord Melville

Crudités

Warm Chicken Liver Salad

Egg Mousse

Marinated Kipper Fillets

Potted Shrimps

Devils on Horseback

Sardines on Toast

Janssen’s Temptation

Mushrooms on Toast

London Granny’s Cheese Straws

Granny B’s Sausage Rolls

Welsh Rabbit

Gougère

Devilled Biscuits

Soft Herring Roes on Toast

Stuffed Eggs

Chapter 10. Puddings

41 Recipes

Blackberry and Apple Pudding

Apple In and Out

Bramley Burnt Creams

Castle Puddings with Homemade Jam

Stodge

Steamed Syrup Sponge (not stodgy)

Guards’ Pudding

Jam Roly Poly

Fruit Fools, Pies, Tarts, Cobblers and Crumbles

Plum Crumble

Goosegog and Elderflower Fool

Blackberry Cobbler

Rum Baba

Cranachan

Crème Bruleée

Norwegian Cream

Crème Caramel (Crème renversée)

Plum Pudding

Rhubarb and Custard

Mini Apple Tarts

Kaiserschmarrn

Peach Melba

Pineapple Upside-Down Pudding

Port Wine Jelly

Rice Pudding

Hot Prune Soufflé

Queen of Puddings

Stone Cream

Treacle Tart

Tessa and Jane’s Apple and Chestnut Layers

Trifle

Granny’s Foam Pudding with Granny’s Custard

Meringues

Gateau Diane

Mont Blanc

Hot Chocolate Soufflés

Ice Creams, Sorbets and Toppings

Ovaltine Ice Cream

Rob’s Damson Ice Cream

Black-Currant Leaf Water Ice

Hugh’s Vanilla Fudge Ice Cream

London Granny’s Fudgey Gunge

Granny Ray’s Chocolate Sauce

Big Granny’s Butterscotch Sauce

Chapter 11. Treats and Sweets

9 Recipes

Peppermint Creams

Pecan Pralines

Fudge

Melting Moments

Ginger Beer

Damson Cheese

Bilbrook Uncooked Raspberry Jam

Chocolate Cornflakes

Granny’s Chocolate Sandwiches

Acknowledgements

About Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall

Index

With happy memories of my mother and grandmothers and their delicious food

Introduction

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My maternal grandparents linked me to the Edwardian Age. My grandfather’s career in the British Diplomatic Service took him to Peking, Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Helsingfors in Finland. In 1921, wishing to bring up his young family in England, he took early retirement and bought a country estate in Wiltshire, centred on a rambling manor house dating back to the 15th century.

It was to Hazelbury Manor that my mother and her sisters brought their babies at the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939, so the family could all be together while their husbands were away in the army and the Royal Navy. That’s how I came to spend the first six years of my life, and thereafter every summer holiday until I was fourteen, immersed in a way of life that pre-dated even the First World War. My grandparents’ house and lifestyle was not as grand as that of the TV families in ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘Upstairs Downstairs’. Footmen and grooms had left to fight for their country, maids had signed up for war work. Still, at Hazelbury pre-war standards were somehow maintained with a skeleton staff of butler, housekeeper, cleaner, cook and kitchen-maid, plus assorted nannies and nursery maids. Outdoors there were two gardeners and a retired groom who, in the absence of horses, stoked the coke boilers and split logs for the open fires. Although my grandparents no longer had the inclination or the means for large house parties, the dining table was still laid for at least three courses with silver and candles with hand-painted shades, and my grandmother always changed for dinner into a long velvet or brocade housecoat, laid out, in the absence of a ladies’ maid, by the over-worked but always amiable housekeeper, Aggie.

My memories are of total freedom for me, my brothers and our cousins. In good weather we were shoved out of doors to play in the garden or ride our bikes to the home farm. The sources of our food were all around us, in neat, weed-free vegetable rows, under fruit cages draped with black cotton fishing net, on the trees in the orchard, and in the chicken run. At the farm, the pigs were in their sty, future mutton and beef grazed the fields and the cows moved twice a day from meadow to farmyard with their full, low-slung udders swaying from side to side. In the dairy we watched the milk run through a separator, and had a go at turning the handle of the churn, making cream into butter.

Back in the kitchen we helped by slapping the butter with ridged wooden bats to get rid of any water and air pockets, and rolling nuggets of butter between two bats to make elegant balls with a criss-cross pattern. The butter balls were dropped into iced water until it was time to pile them on a small glass dish for the breakfast or tea table.

The kitchen was the largest room in the house if you included the scullery and the larder with its cool marble shelves. An enormous Esse range with several ovens gobbled up coke and occupied the whole of one wall. Light poured in from leaded windows on two sides and between them were dressers and cupboards with work-tops of scrubbed pine, like the sturdy table in the centre of the room. Vegetables were prepared in the scullery, in shallow rectangular sinks with grooved wooden draining boards. There, bunches of carrots with feathery green tops still attached, and cabbages the size of footballs, mined and tunnelled by pale green Cabbage White caterpillars, waited to be dealt with. In summer my brother was seldom seen without a butterfly net, and therefore remained on fairly good terms with the gardener in spite of our raids on the fruit cage.

The kitchen was also the warmest room and when it was too wet or cold to go out, we rushed there to pester the cook, Mrs Malone. The kitchen was supposed to be out of bounds to us children, but we felt safe from detection. I suppose my grandmother sometimes visited the kitchen, but we never saw her there. Our excuse for being there was to collect outer leaves of cabbages to feed our rabbits and scrounge a carrot and some spent tea-leaves to make their coats glossy.

I don’t think Mrs Malone had ever been married, but cooks were always Mrs. She was known to us all as Loney. Her streaky grey hair was screwed into a bun and she wore a large white apron over a striped dress with the sleeves neatly rolled up to the elbow, exposing lean, strong fore-arms – not at all like Mrs Bun the Baker’s Wife in the Happy Families pack of cards, although, like Mrs Bun she often wielded a rolling pin. She was a brilliant cook and must have been as precious to my grandparents as Anatole was to Aunt Dahlia in P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster stories. Luckily Loney was a great deal less temperamental than Anatole. She seemed not to mind us hanging around in her kitchen, sticking our fingers in mixing bowls for a taste. But her answer to What’s for lunch? (or tea or supper) was invariably, Bread and look-at-it.

Beneath her stern looks was a soft heart. She let us sprinkle flour onto the pastry from the tin with holes in its lid, and gave us each our own scrap of pastry to make a little man with currants for eyes, nose and mouth, and currant buttons down his front. Our arms would ache as we struggled to cream the butter and sugar for a cake, earning the reward of being allowed to lick the bowl. All my family owe a debt of gratitude to Loney, who first triggered in us an interest in cooking and eating. She was one of those instinctive cooks who never referred to a cookery book or wrote down a recipe. When asked, for example, how much sugar she put into a particular dish, she would reply, Oh, just enough. Nevertheless, my mother and her sisters were able, by trial and error, to recreate some of her recipes, and they are included in this book.

The kitchen was more fun than the dining room, where formality reigned. A friend, Alison, remembers, of her own childhood, you never helped yourself, but sat waiting until you caught Grandma’s eye. She then asked you what you would like, and it was passed to you. Meal times were very formal, and Grace was always said before the meal. One day my grandfather was saying Grace and my grandmother said, ‘speak up, John, I can’t hear,’ to which he replied, ‘It is not you I am speaking to, Elizabeth.’

I don’t remember Grace being said in the dining room at Hazelbury except when the vicar came to lunch, when we were often caught unawares, earning a little admonishing frown from our grandmother. In the nursery, however, every meal started with For what we are about to receive… and ended Thank-God-for-my-good-lunch-please-may-I-get-down. In both dining room and nursery, we were expected to observe basic table manners, sitting up straight, keeping our elbows off the table, not speaking with our mouths full and not kicking the table leg. And we had to finish every last scrap of food on our plates.

At term time weekends we had Sunday lunch with our other, London grandparents. Their small flat in Putney was on the fifth floor with views up and down the River Thames. The kitchens of my two grandmothers could not have been more different. In London, Granny Lascelles cooked in a room where there was hardly space to swing a cat. There was a small electric cooker, a smaller fridge, a work table with a white enamel surface and a marbled lino floor. On the window sill there was always a large glass jar salvaged from the local sweet shop, no longer filled with bull’s-eyes or gobstoppers, but with Granny’s home-made potato crisps.

My father belonged to a rowing club just across the river (as a young man he rowed in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, for Oxford) and liked to go sculling on Sunday mornings. My brother and I would spend the time beach-combing along the tide line and playing ducks and drakes with smooth, flat pebbles. By lunch time we were starving. During the week Granny bustled around in her green WVS uniform, doing meals on wheels, but on Sunday she cooked for us, producing, from her tiny kitchen, wonderful roasts with all the trimmings, and my all-time favourite pudding, vanilla ice cream with fudge sauce made from condensed milk. Offers to help in the kitchen were always refused, but after lunch we dried up while she washed.

At home, on the other hand, our help in the kitchen was taken for granted. My mother adored food and loved cooking; it would never have occurred to her that helping prepare food was a chore; to her the whole process was a delight. We inherited this attitude and, I hope, have passed on to our children and grandchildren. She was entirely self-taught. The abrupt transition from Hazelbury where Loney’s delicious food appeared on the table as if by magic, to cooking in her own small London kitchen, at a time when post-war food rationing continued, must have been a shock, but she rose to the occasion.

Cooking did not come so easily to all of my mother’s contemporaries. One tried to heed her own mother’s advice, Darling, never learn to cook, and then you won’t have to. But along came the war, and she did have to. Some women never learned. A friend put it down, in the case of her own mother, to a combination of a wartime Scottish girlhood, eating institutional food first at school then in the Wrens, then early married life without much money and still on rations… Oddly enough she really enjoyed good food – it’s just that she couldn’t create it herself, and her wartime upbringing ran too deep ever to be properly eradicated.

My mother, and others like her, turned for knowledge to the few cookery books that were available: Mrs Beeton’s Household Management of course, from which my brother and I learned how to fold table napkins into boars’ heads and waterlilies, just as Joel, our grandmother’s butler used to. Then in 1956 along came The Constance Spry Cookery Book. Connie was the Bible, a friend explained, my godmother had Constance Spry on her bedside table and read nothing else to my knowledge. Other housewives kept kitchen notebooks, full of recipes, handwritten or cut out from newspapers and pasted in. Inherited cookbooks with worn-out spines fall open at favourite pages, splattered with fat or chocolate, and, in one case, still redolent of 1960s cigarette fumes. My mother’s bedtime reading included Ambrose Heath’s Good Food and Good Savouries. She inherited her mother’s copy of Lady Jekyll’s Kitchen Essays: with Recipes and their Occasions. The chapter headings give a vivid picture of Edwardian country life: A Little Dinner before the Play and A Little Supper after the Play. A Winter Shooting-Party Luncheon and Luncheon for a Motor Excursion in Winter. Food for Artists and Speakers and Dance and Supper. Perhaps surprisingly, some of her recipes have stood the test of time well. See here and Jam Roly Poly here.

When TV cooks Philip Harben and Fanny Craddock came on the scene, my mother enjoyed their programmes as entertainment rather than looking to them for serious instruction. Plus ça change.

My mother’s sister Ray was, like Loney, one of those rare and gifted cooks needing no books. She cooked four meals a day using only fresh ingredients, and rarely consulted a recipe, her daughter Prue wrote, Certainly, to my knowledge, she never wrote one down. Each of us, though, has managed to continue with at least one speciality that we all recognise as hers. My oldest sister has followed my mother’s tradition of making marmalade: a unique, strong, even harsh, chunky version. Another sister makes a dynamite Summer Pudding using blackcurrants picked from her garden; the youngest has a great way with potatoes. And my brother makes her curries and kedgerees. The closest I’ve come to emulating one of her distinctive creations is in her recipe for chocolate sauce, which she dictated to me a few years ago at my children’s request.

Ray’s chocolate sauce, and some of her other recipes are in this book, together with other cherished family recipes that have, by great good luck, been written down at some stage.

Our mothers and grandmothers achieved their results without the benefit of freezers, microwaves, food processors, blenders, or even dishwashers, and, in the absence of mechanical aids, an extra pair of hands was always welcome. As a result we absorbed much of their knowledge effortlessly, just by being in the kitchen.

Loney’s vast kitchen and my grandmother’s tiny one had something in common: both were spotlessly clean and orderly: a place for everything and everything in its place. Compared to these models of tidiness my mother’s kitchen, was chaotic. Mum, adept at multi-tasking, liked to read while she stirred a sauce or waited for milk to come to the boil. She always had more than one book on the go, so there might be several on the kitchen table, her place marked with a spill charred from lighting the gas, or, if nothing else came to hand, the outside leaf of a leek. Novels jostled for space with recipe books, half drunk mugs of tea, half-eaten biscuits, and pots of cooked vegetables waiting to be sieved into soup.

Like all good meals, ours began with shopping. I used to pass one of the first ever supermarkets in London daily, on the way home from school, and, seduced by the prospect of Green Shield Stamps, I urged Mum to use it, but she was slow to take advantage of its convenient one-stop shopping facilities. She stayed loyal to her suppliers and trusted them to provide ingredients of the best quality. We shopped in what we called the village, a row of shops a short walk from home, in an otherwise residential area. It consisted of a chemist, a grocer, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, a butcher, a baker (but no candlestick maker) and a newsagent. Milk was delivered daily to our doorstep, and errand boys on bicycles delivered meat and bread to people who lived further away from the shops, or didn’t want to walk back with laden shopping bags. The boys whistled tunefully, and as they pedalled past you would hear snatches of Put another nickel in and "How much is that