Original Victorian Recipes

The recipes in this blog are all culled from my collection of Victorian books and are 100% genuine. As I build this blog the variety of sources will expand but my first set of recipes eminates from Enquire Within and The Corner Cupboard. The series Enquire Within is a well known successful series of domestic works that were produced annually from around 1858. This became one of the first books to sell to a popular market in large numbers, some 100,000 annually being sold.

The target audience for this work was the lower middle class home, the aspiring working class home and it was also directed towards servants working in lower middle class homes. Effectively it presents an instruction manual for all aspects of Victorian family life. The reason why this work became so popular tells us something of Victorian values and life but there is also a structural mechanism behind the production of these volumes.

Prior to the 1850's there was a paper tax which made the mass production of books for a low cost uneconomic. Once the tax was removed around 1851 the opportunities changed the book market profoundly. Books could be produced for mass consumption at a price affordable with household budgets.

The Corner Cupboard is actually the forerunner of Enquire Within and is a particularly fascinating volume. We have to remember that not only was life very different but morals, values, expectations and domestic technologies represent a cultural archaeology when compared to how we live today. In terms of entertainment alone we are reading works set in a culture of communication where the post and the electric telegraph represent the heights of achievement. When these recipes say roast they are refering to putting a joint on a spit above or near the fire, they are not talking about ovens and baking trays! What is more alarming is that in the vast majority of cases these fires over which the meat is being roasted will be built of coal. I do not believe it is possible to "taste" such recipes where coal dust and the effects of coal smoke are absent!