Two notebooks books belonging to Maude Wilson, an English housewife, containing a quantity of recipes for both food, medications and cleaning products.
The larger black book has been alphabetised; the letters being neatly drawn in ink at the head of the page. Recipes include Indian Pickle, Palestine Soup and Chocolate Bread. There are hints on cleaning playing cards with butter and flour, on making cold cream, socks, removing soot, cloths for cleaning silver and cough mixture using syrup of violet and syrup of squills. Some of the pages are blank, others have notes sewn over the script; newspaper cuttings are pasted onto some.
The slimmer grey book is older; my guess is late 1800’s. Recipes include Port Wine Jelly, Inexpensive Ginger Beer, one for pickling spanish olives and one for cooking spinach in the French way. Also a recipe for the treatment of diphtheria, for hair lotion, one for cleaning marble and another for keeping a bouquet fresh.
The books measure approximately 16 x 21 cms or 6 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches. Pages of script and cuttings number about 230.
Condition: Good. The bindings of both are broken and loose. Three of the four boards are detached, one hangs by a thread. A lot of pages in the black book are loose. The pages are foxed and otherwise marked possible by food.
These volumes make fascinating reading. They give a rare insight into the life of a housewife of the period.
