Publishing History: a Moment in [Post-War] Time

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay
Front cover of a book entitled 'Sweet-making for all' by Helen Jerome. A tasty assortment of home-made sweets is illustrated.

Relax, dear reader – this is not an incursion into my working research existence. I haven’t broken my resolution to take a well-earned holiday. Well, not exactly!

Going through the Thomas Nelson correspondence a few weeks ago, I came across a post-war letter celebrating the fact that sugar rationing was finally over, in which one editor suggested to another that now would be a good time to reissue Helen Jerome’s sweet-making book.

Now for a bit of history! It had first been published in 1924. In 1931, the author proposed another book, this time about baking cakes. The publishers declined it, since they felt the sweet-making one hadn’t sold very well.

Notwithstanding these observations, they revised the sweet-making book in 1936, and reprinted it in June 1939 (still pre-war). This publisher very much had their finger on the pulse, and books for adults quite often tapped into contemporary issues. So, right now they guessed – probably accurately – that people would enjoy making confectionery again after the years of privation. I obtained a revised edition with a foreword dated Spring 1954:-

FOREWORD TO THE REVISED EDITION. The effect of sweet and sugar rationing appears only to have increased the amount of sweets eaten in Great Britain, establishing us as one of the largest sweet-eating countries in the world. There is now much added interest in the actual making of sweets at home – whether as a skilled hobby … a family venture for special occasions, or as an experiment embarked upon by teenagers …

I’ll be honest – I bought this book intending to make some confectionery which I could photograph and write about. Now I’m on holiday, I imagined myself lovingly creating something delicious to intrigue and delight the family. However, I’ve looked through at the required equipment, the fancy syrups, and high boiling temperatures, and I have taken fright. It’s not going to happen! The first three chapters are terrifying enough: Utensils Required for Sweet-making; Materials Required for Sweet-making and Hints on their Preparation; and Sugar Boiling, Sugar Syrups, Spun Sugar, and Crystallisation.

I have a stove. And a sugar thermometer (unused). I don’t have a slab, be it marble, slate or heavy wood (‘covered with a sheet of enamelled iron’) or a ‘heavy white enamelled tray known as a “butcher’s tray”‘. Nor do I have a nylon or hair sieve, candy bars (not the edible variety – these are ‘a set of four steel bars cut from 1/2 in. cube steel, and 12-18 in. long, which help to obtain and professional finish’ and ‘can be obtained from a builder’s merchant’.) I’m mystified by sweet rings or cream rings, a caramel marker, a sugar scraper, a candy hook or a starch tray … need I continue? There are three more pages of equipment requirements.

As you can see, getting set up could be quite expensive! Not only are some of the above items going to be hard to source, but I had a bit of a problem establishing what, precisely, a gill measurement is. My first Google search did not go well …

The AI answer wasn’t quite what I expected!

If at first you don’t succeed – try, try, try again:-

Ah, that’s more like it!

Anyway, let’s look at the ingredients:- Loaf sugar, granulated sugar, demerara sugar, castor sugar, icing sugar, Raw West Indian or ‘soft’ sugar. Treacle, honey, glucose, cream of tartar, butter … so far, so good. But don’t get complacent. After various nuts and dried fruit, we find we need plain cooking chocolate (yes) and covering chocolate (what?), cocoa butter, various flavourings, gum arabic, gelatine, confectioners’ starch. Maple sugar, maple syrup, molasses, marshmallow cream … and then we get on to various techniques that you use to transform these ingredients into other more complex substances.

After all this, there are ten chapters devoted to different kinds of sweets, followed by advice about packaging them.

  • Fondants
  • Marzipan (you make this from scratch – don’t imagine you can buy a packet from Sainsbury’s!)
  • Toffees
  • Caramels
  • Candies and Fudges
  • Nougats
  • Chocolates
  • Jelly Sweets and ‘Delights’
  • Unboiled Bon-Bons
  • Miscellaneous Recipes

Now I’m feeling hungry, and my mouth is watering, but I am not equipped to start my confectionery journey. Not only that, but my ceramic hob is my pride and joy (or a ridiculous obsession, to quote my nearest and dearest), and I live in fear of pots boiling over at the best of times. Can I risk spilling boiling syrup on it? I cannot.

I take my hat off to the author, with her First-Class Diplomas, London and Paris (Cordon Bleu), who was a former staff Teacher of Cookery at the Polytechnic, Regent Street, London W1. I envy the skilled hobbyists capable of mastering ‘difficult processes’ (see? she admits they’re hard!). And I’m in awe of ‘teenagers who want to make their own “tuck”‘. I can well imagine their collective excitement at being able to buy all these sweet ingredients to create the treats they had missed out on for so long, and I hope many tasty confections were made by the purchasers of this book.

Next time I’m passing a shop, I’ll get some Fry’s Turkish Delight, and be grateful that I can!

The Grumpy Friar (okay, Air-Fryer)

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

Today’s the last-but-one day of annual leave that I’ll ever take as a librarian. (The day before my 66th birthday will be the absolutely final librarian’s annual leave day.) After that, I’ll be semi-retired, not a librarian, and any annual leave will be as a researcher.

As you know, I’ve been thinking about healthy eating and more home cooking – although, since I’m not passionate about cookery, the less time I spend on it, the better. Tidying the lounge, I found the book I’d bought during the worst of the energy crisis. I had recently bought my first air-fryer – an appliance that a colleague assured me was the best invention ever. Less time means less energy, too.

Hannah Patterson, The UK Brand New Air Fryer Cookbook. 2023 edition. First published by the author in 2022. ISBN 9798360567448

Whilst enjoying my mini-holiday loafing around at home (getting things done, in a leisurely, unstructured way), I used the slow-cooker to cook some chicken. And then pork chops, which were very tasty but looked over-done. Surely, I reasoned, there must be more to it than this!

There is, however, a problem. As Patterson explains, there are different kinds of air-fryers. I knew mine was a small one – I thought it would do for three people – but along with being small, it’s also unsophisticated.  I didn’t know, until I opened her book at the beginning, that what I have is a Cylindrical Basket Air Fryer. As Patterson says,

‘Aside from the noise and the size, another downside is the functionality, as it only has one function.’

Mine isn’t noisy, but I was beginning to see what the problem was. Reading on, I discovered – as I had suspected from the recipes – that ‘basket’ means different things in different air-fryers. Mine is not open like a chip-frying basket. It’s basically a non-stick deep tin. And although there’s a ‘crisper’ – or whatever you call the round removable component that keeps the food off the bottom of the tin/basket – if you put the food on the crisper, it stays dry, but if you remove the crisper, everything is in the bottom and I’d worry about it burning the bottom of the tin.

And it got worse. Many of the recipes needed a baking tray or metal bowl that would actually go in the air-fryer. There isn’t room for either, in my wee machine. (Why did Russell Hobbs make a machine with so many limitations? Can I really only cook chicken or chips?!) Some recipes could be halved in quantity, but I still doubted that the food would fit with room for the air to circulate.

Sometimes, I fear people think I’m terribly negative. I prefer ‘cautious’ or ‘realistic’. Anyway, since I am at home reviewing a cookery book, I thought I’d just go with the flow and be myself. I went through EVERY recipe, and marked the index with whether it was technically feasible in my wee air-fryer. I honestly only marked a very few more that would need too many new ingredients, ingredients I would struggle to source, or that wouldn’t suit the tastes of my slightly conservative family. I haven’t done a statistical calculation, but it’s pretty clear that I’ve ruled out easily half the book – and possibly more than that.

Grumpy Friar (Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay)

It’s a pity – the book is good value, and the food looks tasty. Perhaps much of it is not in our usual repertoire, but that’s not a bad thing. With some meals, I suspected that the preparation would be longer than I usually spend, partly due to unfamiliarity, or the faff of stuffing or rolling stuff into flattened chicken breasts or steaks.

Anyone got a book of recipes for a small, cylindrical air-fryer with minimal functionality? Until then, I’m off to make a quiche. In the oven.

Missing! The Cook’s Oracle!

Posted on by Dr Karen E McAulay

A lecturer (William Kitchiner) about to address a lecture on Wellcome V0015819
On the left – Dr William Kitchiner, lecturing on optics

Kitchiner cookbook dedication
Since my kitchen is littered with (most of) the ingredients for our Christmas cake, it seems appropriate to devote a short post to a significant publication from 1817 (yes, my new favourite year!) – Dr William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle. We’ve encountered Dr Kitchiner before, on account of his patriotic and sea song books. They weren’t particularly well-received.

Dr Kitchiner had other interests, though.  He lectured on optics, and was a published expert on cookery and nutrition. He hoped that his cookbook would provide good, solid nutritional guidelines. Wikipedia reports that he was an exceptional cook, and his was a household name. I haven’t gone so far as to check this out, but I’ve found you a simple suet pudding to try!

You can read the ENTIRE book online, if you’re so inclined:-

Apicius Redivivus: Or, The Cook’s Oracle

(The 2nd edition even begins with an Anacreontic Song, if you please, combining his passions for music and food.)

Whilst checking the King’s Inns guardbooks for national songbooks, I naturally looked for Kitchiner, though I didn’t really imagine there would be much appetite for English national songs. I was unsurprised to find it absent from the catalogue – but there was clearly an appetite for Apicius Redivivus! There it was, in the guardbook under Kitchiner’s name.  Perhaps struggling to decide where to shelve it, the Victorian librarians ended up putting it in the “literature” section – the same as the minstrelsy material.

But it wasn’t on the shelves. (Someone kindly checked for me!) Who borrowed the cookbook and didn’t return it? Or misshelved it? Or dropped it in the broth, or used it until it fell to bits? I have a good imagination, but maybe I should stick to hard facts. And, tempting as it is to try the recipes straight away, I should probably bake our own Christmas cake first!  My family will probably be glad to learn that Dr Kitchiner only mentions Christmas in connection with the seasons for oysters and House Lamb – which differs from Grass Lamb , and is eaten from Christmas until Lady-Day.  So their annual treat won’t be any different from previous iterations!