Huffkins and Fleads, Surry Ponds and Manchets, Frumenty, Minnow Tansies and Fidget Pie. These evocative recipe titles were what first hooked me; fantastical-sounding to my ear, they might have sprung from the pages of a Lewis Carroll story. They were, in fact, authentic recipes in an extraordinary volume I found in a second-hand bookshop more than a decade ago called Good Things in England, by Florence White. It wasn’t Alice in Wonderland, but it led me down a rabbit hole of sorts. I’ve been obsessed with the book and its author ever since.
For readers unfamiliar with it, let me explain. Good Things in England is a cookery book or perhaps, more precisely, a compendium of 853 recipes, some dating from the fourteenth century, that White collected from or traced to specific regions of England. When it was published in 1932, The Times hailed it as ‘one of the most romantic cookery books ever written’ and Lady Hope in the Guardian declared, ‘No household should be without this most original cookery book.’ The public adored it too. The first edition flew off the shelves and the publishers rushed to issue a second imprint within a couple of months. Since then, Good Things in England has been a crucial source of recipes for most other books on English cookery, while chefs, food writers and historians have showered it with praise. Elizabeth David was a devotee and so was Jane Grigson.
As a testament to its continued relevance and undiminished charm, Persephone reissued it in 1999 (of the many editions I now own, this is the one I cook from, its splattered pages evidence of my Florence White fixation). And in 2010, the Observer listed Good Things in England in its Top 50 cookbooks ever written, pronouncing it part cookbook, part historical document and ‘a lost classic’. The question is: why was it ever lost in the first place? By rights, it should be as renowned as Mrs Beeton’s B
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Subscribe now or Sign inHuffkins and Fleads, Surry Ponds and Manchets, Frumenty, Minnow Tansies and Fidget Pie. These evocative recipe titles were what first hooked me; fantastical-sounding to my ear, they might have sprung from the pages of a Lewis Carroll story. They were, in fact, authentic recipes in an extraordinary volume I found in a second-hand bookshop more than a decade ago called Good Things in England, by Florence White. It wasn’t Alice in Wonderland, but it led me down a rabbit hole of sorts. I’ve been obsessed with the book and its author ever since.
For readers unfamiliar with it, let me explain. Good Things in England is a cookery book or perhaps, more precisely, a compendium of 853 recipes, some dating from the fourteenth century, that White collected from or traced to specific regions of England. When it was published in 1932, The Times hailed it as ‘one of the most romantic cookery books ever written’ and Lady Hope in the Guardian declared, ‘No household should be without this most original cookery book.’ The public adored it too. The first edition flew off the shelves and the publishers rushed to issue a second imprint within a couple of months. Since then, Good Things in England has been a crucial source of recipes for most other books on English cookery, while chefs, food writers and historians have showered it with praise. Elizabeth David was a devotee and so was Jane Grigson. As a testament to its continued relevance and undiminished charm, Persephone reissued it in 1999 (of the many editions I now own, this is the one I cook from, its splattered pages evidence of my Florence White fixation). And in 2010, the Observer listed Good Things in England in its Top 50 cookbooks ever written, pronouncing it part cookbook, part historical document and ‘a lost classic’. The question is: why was it ever lost in the first place? By rights, it should be as renowned as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Florence White (1863–1940) was born and raised in Peckham, London. She lost her mother when she was 6, and soon after was blinded in one eye (which ended her marriage prospects, so she was told). She worked variously as a governess, teacher, journalist, lady’s companion and cook-housekeeper into her late fifties. Then, when poor health forced her to give up domestic service, she set out to become the first freelance journalist specializing in food and cookery. She wrote prolifically – her work appeared in the Edinburgh Evening News, The Times, the Spectator, the Listener and the Lady – and along the way she discovered her passion for traditional English cookery. When she sat down at her typewriter in her Earls Court flat in the winter of 1931–2 to write Good Things in England, she was attempting a different kind of cookbook from those that had gone before. In 1927, fed up with England’s reverence for French cuisine, she had set out to ‘capture the charm of England’s cookery before it is completely crushed out of existence’. She travelled from county to county, ‘tumbling on and off trains’, and approached housewives and farmers, household cooks, dairymaids and mistresses of stately homes. Essentially, she spoke to anyone from whom she could coax a recipe by, as she put it, ‘stirring up their memories and inspiring them to hunt up written and printed records’. She also wrote to The Times, appealing to readers for their own favourite old English recipes. The public responded in droves. By the end of 1928, not only had she amassed sufficient recipes for two books (the second, Good English Food, was published posthumously in 1952), she had also established the English Folk Cookery Association to fly the nation’s culinary flag. White was hoping to rescue England’s food heritage from oblivion and to challenge the commonly held view that English food was abominable. She believed that well-executed English cookery ranked among the best in the world. By this she meant dishes prepared down the ages by proficient home cooks who lived close to the source of their food in farmsteads and country houses (although she acknowledged that English cookery was profoundly shaped by recipes, ingredients and culinary traditions from other lands, including those of Empire). She was exasperated that England had all but forgotten the delicious treasures under its own nose. Good Things in England would be her manifesto. White didn’t want her book to be a museum piece; she hoped readers would keep the recipes alive by cooking them, as evidenced by its subtitle, A Practical Cookery Book for Everyday Use. She arranged the chapters in an orderly manner, dividing them into courses and sub-courses, and devoted a section to particularly wonderful regional and national specialties. She also included an index, invaluable for the home cook. The following recipe is one of my favourites. Sir Charles Bernard, Chief Commissioner of Burma, gave it to White, explaining that his wife made it for him every day for ‘tiffin’. White’s disdain for inferior versions is palpable in her end note.Many of the old recipes strike me as thoroughly contemporary. This one, from Charles Elmé Francatelli, chef to Queen Victoria, would be at home on any modern British restaurant menu.Baked Rice Pudding 1887
Ingredients: rice 2oz; milk 1 pint; sugar 2oz; butter or finely chopped suet 1oz; nutmeg. Time: To bake 4 hoursMETHOD
1. Wash the rice. 2. Put it in the bottom of a pie dish. 3. Sprinkle the sugar over it. 4. Then the suet. 5. Pour in the milk. 6. Stir well. 7. Grate some nutmeg over the top and put the dish into a very slow oven. 8. If by any chance it looks as if it is getting too dry, add a little more milk. NB: Properly cooked the rice and milk at the end of 4 hours are deliciously creamy, and the top a ‘symphony’ in delicate gold and brown. A veritable poem of a pudding. Prepared in this way, nursery children love it. It is its degenerate form that is so much disliked.
And the following confections are so utterly delicious I make them often, using ready-ground almonds as a shortcut.Marrow Toast 1846
Ingredients: A marrow bone; boiling water; salt; pepper; chopped parsley; lemon juice; shallot, a mere suspicion; squares of hot crisp toast. Time: Sufficient to make the toast, chop the parsley and cook the marrow for a minute.METHOD
1. Get the butcher to break the marrow bone. 2. Cut the marrow into small pieces the size of a filbert. 3. Just parboil them in boiling water with a little salt for one minute. 4. Drain instantly upon a sieve, keep hot. 5. Season with a little chopped parsley, pepper and salt, lemon juice and a mere suspicion of finely chopped shallot. 6. Toss lightly altogether, spread it out upon squares of hot crisp dry toast, and serve immediately.
For me, recipes from the general public are the real treasures. White refrains from editing their words, so allowing us to hear their voices, and this imbues the dishes with extra flavour. Of a Sheep’s Trotters recipe, a Bolton lady writes: ‘We eat sheep’s trotters boiled in Bolton, it is a sort of ritual. When the Football Wanderers bring home the Cup, they are received with sheep’s trotters decorated with white and blue ribbons.’ Or of a Fish Roll recipe, Miss Cullen from Leamington, Warwickshire, explains: ‘To be quite honest this is a wartime [1914–18] emergency dish for a meatless day, but it’s too good to lose.’ Like Mrs Beeton before her, White intended Good Things in England to be relevant for both the mistress of the house and the household cook (as well as the many women who, by this time, performed both functions). She also assumed a level of intellectual curiosity among her readers. The book has its idiosyncrasies. White can be rather doctrinaire, adamant that the traditional method is the best and only way to cook a dish. On apple pie, for example, she writes:Almond Puffs 1769
Ingredients: sweet almonds 2oz; orange flower water; eggs, the whites of 3; caster sugar 6oz. Time: About 1 hour or longer in a very cool oven, till a delicate brown and crisp.METHOD
1. Prepare a flat baking sheet, brush it over with oiled butter and when that is cold and set dredge it with flour; give it a knock to distribute the flour and shake out any that may be loose. 2. Blanch the almonds, and pound them fine in a stone mortar with some orange flower water. 3. Beat the whites of the eggs to a very stiff froth (quite dry). 4. Add about one ounce of sugar, folding it in from the side so as not to break the egg froth. 5. Add the pounded almonds in the same way. 6. Then fold in the rest of the sugar. 7. Lay it in dessertspoonfuls in little round cakes on the tin and bake as directed. But Good Things in England is more than just a volume of recipes. White was a gifted social historian and an accomplished writer. She whisks you away on a journey that traverses England and crosses the social divide, stopping at farmhouses and rectories, royal castles and stately homes, grand hotels and domestic kitchens. And she has you yearning one minute for buns slicked with golden syrup and cream, as scoffed by schoolboys in Devon, the next for roast chicken with prunes sizzling in the oven of a Lancashire farmhouse. A recipe for bilberry pies evokes the Yorkshire parsonage where the Brontë sisters enjoyed them for tea, while a tart of artichoke bottoms conjures the days of Queen Anne.
A horrible plan is frequently adopted in cheap or middle-class restaurants of simply stewing some apples, baking a sheet of pastry on a tin, and serving a wedge of it on the stewed apple and calling it apple pie. This is a direct insult to the real thing, and to the customer who knows better.Elsewhere, though, she is reflective and lyrical. She ponders: ‘Think what a poem a salad might be if “dressed” with primrose vinegar.’ More than a decade after first picking up the book, I still find the recipe titles in Good Things in England alluring. And the temptation to cook them is irresistible, as White draws back the curtains and offers me a peek inside the kitchens of the past. Fidget Pie was the last dish I cooked. It’s simply made with sliced potatoes, apple and bacon layered in a baking dish and draped in ‘a rather good short crust’. Once upon a time, it was devoured by famished harvesters for supper. And it still tastes as delicious as it sounds.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 75 © Sue Quinn 2022
About the contributor
Sue Quinn is a cookbook author and food writer. Her most recent book, Cocoa: An Exploration of Chocolate, with recipes, is published by Quadrille. She is now writing a biography of Florence White.
The illustrations in this article are by Gillian Zeiner and first appeared in Jane Grigson’s English Food (1974).