Mary Hooper and Victorian cooking

The author of Mirrormist posted some great quotes which show a little more about Victorian dinner and cooking habits, like this one about ordering food to the house:

“Of the making of cookery books there is no end; and I hold it to be rather a public benefit than otherwise that there should be scarcely a solution of continuity in the production of culinary manuals; because, although in the vast majority of cookery books (always excepting the late Miss Acton and the Happily living Miss Mary Hooper) there is usually a considerable proportion of nonsense, there is scarcely one (especially if it be compiled by a lady) that does not contain hints always entertaining and occasionally useful on the subject of household management. As to the Art of Cookery, it is rapidly retrograding, and will retrograde more swiftly still, as well-to-do middle class people grow more and more “stuck up,” and have their “set dinners” sent in from the pastry cook’s instead of having them cooked at home.” (From “The Illustrated London News” in 1882)

And this one, from the book “Paris Herself again in 1878-9″
“I have always fancied that one reason why cookery books are, as a rule, such an excellent property to the publishers thereof is that newly-married couples are in the habit of presenting a copy of the last edition of Francatelli or Mary Hooper to their cooks. The volumes are reasonably well bound, to be sure; but of all Places of Destruction I know none more ruinous than a kitchen; and in a very short space of time the cookery book comes to grief. Either the cat steals it — a cat would steal the new chimes of St. Paul’s, belfry and all — or the kitchen-maid lights the fire with it, or it gets into the cook’s drawer — that ‘chaos come again’ — and is seen no more. So additional copies of Francatelli or Mary Hooper are demanded, and the publishers dance jigs of delight.”

You can read much more about Mary Hooper and read her books as well, here! There I found this recipe for Warwickshire Pudding, apart from the suet it sounds fairly good!

Warwickshire Pudding
Butter a pint-and-a-half tart-dish, lay it in a layer of
light bread, cut thin, on this sprinkle a portion of two
ounces of shred suet, and of one ounce of lemon
candid-peel, chopped very fine. Fill the dish lightly
with layers of bread, sprinkling over each a little of
the suet and peel.
Boil a pint of milk with two ounces of sugar, pour
it on two eggs, beaten for a minute, and add it to the
pudding just before putting it into the oven; a little
extract of lemon or shred lemon-peel may be added
to the custard. Bake the pudding in a very slow
oven for an hour.

The Times in 1832

Currently I’m reading the gossip columns of The Times, it’s very amusing. I’m sorry for the very small size, this is just how newspapers looked!

Gretna Green is where people eloped to who weren’t allowed to be married, it is quite a well-known thing in Victorian literature. You can read more about it here.

Also here you can see some Victorian advertisements, which I thought was nice.

Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture

My local museum is hosting an exhibition of some furniture from the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods. Since many people come here looking for Victor Horta, and there was a beautiful cabinet by Horta, I decided to show you some pictures.

The above is the item from Victor Horta.


This is a cabinet made by famous Dutch architect Henry van der Velde. It was made for a room especially, and the entire room was recreated in the museum!

This is the museum hosting the exhibition (the Drents Museum in Assen.)
To see much more pictures, go to the museum’s own Flickr page!

The museum is partially situated in an old trainstation, with Art Nouveau decorations that I think are very typical of trainstations.

These next images are not strictly Victorian but they’re nice and festive, so I thought you might like to see them as well.

The Young Victoria

It’s been out here for a while but on December 18th, the movie The Young Victoria will be released in the US! If you have the chance, make sure you go see it. There are brilliant costumes and a very dashing young Prince Albert!

This is the official trailer:

And a bit of Prince Albert, and the music in his heart… aww :)

Oh, the official website is here!

Victorian nature lithographs & a little Victorian party!

I would like to draw your attention to this post over at The Grand Tour, showing some beautiful coloured lithographs from the 1860s.

Also, it’s time for a little Victorian party! Recently, this blog has welcomed its 200.000th visitor. I’m really and truly happy and thankful for everyone who came to visit and read a little about the nineteenth century. I started this blog because I felt many people saw the nineteenth century just as a boring period full of prudish people, and I wanted to show how much more fun it was than that. So I’m glad to see so many people seem to agree with me! (Even though some people only find their way here for the “victorian vibrators”…. Haha!)

Anton Mauve

I went to a Anton Mauve exhibition in the Springer museum. Mauve was a nineteenth-century painter, painting Dutch weather and rural scenes. I was especially charmed by his depictions of farmer’s gardens.

The museum’s website, do visit it if you get the chance!
You can read some more about his life here.
There is no online gallery, only Google images.

Victorian Halloween!

A bit of a Halloween spirit with this cute Victorian witch!

(Her dress seems inspired on 18th century Rococo dresses and paniers, how intriguing! If anyone wants to analyse that, please feel free!)

Jane Austen’s Emma (or BBC’s Emma!)

By accident I caught the second episode of BBC’s recent adaption of Jane Austen’s Emma this weekend. It’s beautiful! I didn’t catch the story at all but sat for an hour, fascinated by the beautiful costumes, settings, and filming.



Apparently, almost all clothes were recycled from other movies and tv shows! You can read the list here.

I got so excited, I wanted to read the novel as well, which you can find here: Project Gutenberg

And if you like screenshots and icons, or you missed the first two episodes and would like to see them on your computer, go here: Livejournal’s BBC Costume Drama community.

Learning to knock like a gentleman.

Here is a quote from an article called “British Politeness and the Progress of Western Manners: An Eighteenth-Century Enigma” by Paul Langford. It’s eighteenth century but it speaks mostly of visitors to Great Britain after the peace treaty of Amiens, so after 1802!

It was easy to fall foul with of a system which like the British Constitution itself was unwritten yet intimidatingly authoritative. One subject that features frequently in the accounts of visitors to London was the seemingly trivial yet evidently perplexing matter of door-knocking, something that did not feature in conduct manuals. Servants were trained to respond to a hierarchy that extended from the single and almost silent touch of a milkman to the five deafening onslaughts of a duke or his footman. Foreigners initially adopted a hesitant, degerential approach which brought humiliation at the hands of servants. In due course the practise found its way to other cities, reminding visitors that learning to knock like a gentleman was an essential art in Britain.

Glass, greenhouses, & Dahlias

This is from a book I read called Tuinieren Door de Jaren Heen (I can’t find the English title for this! ) by A. Huxley and M. Michael.

In England between 1695 and 1699 there was a tax on glass objects. In 1746 it was re-instated, but at that time mostly for glass plates and windows. In 1810 the tax on windows was raised, and in 1812 the tax for all glass objects was raised so much that production began to slow down. Then the tax was slowly lowered again, until the entire tax ended in 1845. because of the rarity of large parts of glass and the high price of it, it was really in demand with the upper classes, who showed off their riches by building enormous glass greenhouses and winter gardens, which were greenhouses that looked like gardens and would protect plants and flowers from cold weather, so you could enjoy them even in winter.
Undoubtedly, the removal of the glass tax had something to do with the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851, which was at the time the largest glass construction ever build.

Dahlia’s were a very popular flower in the nineteenth century:, from 1813 on it was the most important flower for distributors, in 1830 there were 1500 varieties. Of course this fragile flower had to be preserved carefully, so protective cases were invented to protect the flowers from rain. Often these were very luxurious and decorated cases which could be placed over the flower.
Many other flowers got cases as well, or were protected by glass cases. The Victorians liked showy, fragile flowers like Dahlia’s and Lillies, flowers that required a lot of care and money to display to the best of their ability.

Here are a bunch of pictures from the book! Victorian lawnmowing:


A greenhouse or large case build against the window, which was very fashionable

A Wardian case, in which ferns were grown, and which was kept for decoration.