 playing with your food. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid stand mixer in attachments. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Cookery Book Collections. This is part of the British live food season supported by KitchenAid. I'm Ken Taylor, cultural producer and author of the British Library and this event is in partnership with Leeds Libraries and special collections at the University of Leeds. The idea for our event tonight sprung partially from the Collections United campaign. The same is to break down barriers and bring together material for a more than one cultural heritage collection in the UK, telling stories that connect them. I manage the cultural program for the British Library in the Leeds region. This is where we have one of the library's two sites, a Boston Spa outside of the city. This is actually where we keep 70% of the library's whole collection. We saw an opportunity to work with two of the significant library collections in the region to give a snapshot of how Cookery Books have been collected, used and created for our history. In particular the University of Leeds has a Cookery Book collection which is nationally designated. We're joined this afternoon by Polly Russell, who's founder and creator of the food season at the British Library, Rianne Isaac, collections manager at Leeds Central Library and Rianne and Laurence Francis, who's collections and engagement manager, rare books and maps at the University of Leeds. They've each selected a few items from the collections that they work with and I'll be telling you a little more about them. I'll now hand you over to my colleague Polly Russell who's going to start us off by talking about Cookery Books as a form of propaganda. Polly? Hello, my name is Polly Russell. It's wonderful to be here and to be here with colleagues from Leeds to find out more about their wonderful Cookery collections. What I'm going to do today is to a real romp through in the next 10 minutes to talk about the British Library's Cookery collections, Cookery Book collections and to give you a sense of like what are those collections and where are they and this is almost impossible to do in 10 minutes because the British Library collections are so huge but it is a real treat because food is spread out throughout the British Library's collections not just in Cookery Books but in almost every format that we have. So let me give you a sort of sense of that and then I'm going to come on to talking about Cookery Books as propaganda. So the first thing is to say that I'm, yeah we are, this is the British Library for any of you that haven't been here. That is just to give you a physical picture of it and this is just a sense of the sort of material that's there. So it's a national library of the UK. We're a legal deposit library. We have around 160 million items but that doesn't take into account all the digital content that we hoover on every year. We have about 700 miles of shelving, kilometers of shelving and we grow at the rate of about 12 kilometers per year. So really huge collections. We're based in London down in that pitch you saw before was in London and St Pancras but of course we also have a library up at Boston Spa much closer to many people probably who are listening to this today. And the point is that we collect material in almost every sort of format so anything that information is imparted on we collect it and because food is the stuff of trade and travel, of wars, of exchange, of the economy it is all the way through our collection. So I would say that all of these different collections listed here will have food related materials and because we are a legal deposit library it means that we have an enormous collection of cookery books, a huge collection of cookery books but people often ask me where is the cookery book collection? Well there isn't a cookery book collection. The cookery book collection is spread out amongst the whole of the library's collections because we take them in as legal deposits. There isn't one area, one designated area or space or collection of cookery books and that can mean that they can sometimes be slightly hard to find. So this is just a sense of the different sorts of formats where you will find cookery books and food related and cookery materials but for those of you who can't get to the British Library either because of geography or because nobody's traveling at the moment a space that's really worth looking at online that we have is this Books for Cooks resource which tells us which goes through a kind of history of cookery books. If you just type Books for Cooks into the website it will come up and it has lovely extracts digitized content around some of our cookery collections and then on the left here and I'll put this in the chat later on the left here my colleagues in the manuscripts department have just put together the most fantastic guides for manuscripts collections which contain cookery books recipes mostly of privately produced manuscript recipe books and these are fantastic so I'll put that in the chat later on. So that's a kind of very broad overview to say that there's a lot of food at the British Library there's a huge amount of cookery book collections there are a huge amount of cookery books but they're not located in one particular place and then just coming on to talk about cookery books themselves and to think about cookery books I'm really fascinated by cookery books I think they have a kind of totemic kind of power about them I think everybody loves cookery books and I make a real distinction between manuscripts cookery books which I think are largely for private personal use and they tell us quite a lot about what people did eat as compared to cookery books which I think were published usually published for an audience usually shared and I think that they tend to tell us what other people's another person expects us to eat or wants to persuade us to eat but they don't necessarily tell us what people did eat so I make that distinction but I think what's really interesting is that because they are objects of kind of domestic practice they are also incredibly powerful and useful as tools of persuasion and propaganda and I think that cookery books have always been tools of persuasion and propaganda and I'm going to sort of go right back to the very beginning of our cookery collection at the British Library to to illustrate that point with one of our oldest recipe manuscripts the oldest recipe manuscript in the collection from 3090 called the form of curry which is an amazing 25 foot vellum scroll which was documents the recipes of the court of Richard the the second and this has been digitized by the British Library so you can see you can go online type in form of curry on the British Library website and you can go and actually sort of route around this incredible document but what it tells us is that this is not a private manuscript for private consumption this is really a document of evidence evidence of Richard the second's wealth of his opulence of the opulence of his court and we know of Richard the second that he was really invested in Pad gentry and this document shows how food was bound up was showing his power of displaying his wealth and his influence it's a really fabulous document is very interesting but in the bottom there I've got one recipe which is just one of 196 in the document and this one is called rice of flesh which is very familiar we know it's a document of wealth and opulence because it has so many recipes that call for spices sugar ingredients that would have been fantastically expensive at the time even this rice of flesh relatively simple cooked in almond milk with saffron only the very wealthiest in society so this is evidence used as evidence a document of his power and his wealth so that's one example and then I'm going to fast forward some 300 and something years or 200 something years to one of my favorite cookery books in the collection this is the queen's closet opened and this is a fantastic example of a book being used to rehabilitate the the identity or there's the sort of reputation of someone the queen there is Henrietta Maria Henrietta Maria was the wife of char the executed Charles the first this was this was published in 1655 Charles has been executed Britain is under Puritan rule and Henrietta Maria had been loathed by the British because she was seen to be too French too Catholic had too much control over her husband and the publishing of this book was an attempt to sort of rehabilitate her and associate her with wifely womanly characteristics in order to to make to increase her popularity and it sold sold many many editions and it provided a kind of tantalizing glimpse of royal life at a time of Puritan Puritan rule and a kind of nostalgic reminder of that royal royal past and it reinvented the queen as an English housewife and it sort of put royalty back in fashion so I've got one more is it having to select could I say just three cookery books from the British Library collections it's almost impossible but these are three of my favorites and this is my next one this is the suffrage woman's cookery book compiled by Mrs Aubrey Dawson who was a member of the Birmingham branch of the national union of women's suffrage societies it was published in 1912 and what I love about this is that it's a really wonderful example of a campaigning cookery book a cookery book being used for political ends it contains the recipes of suffrage supporters from all over the UK from sort of the bottom end of Cornwall to the top end of Scotland it has all of their names so it's really interesting as a kind of document of the geographic spread of suffrage and it has individual recipes and what you get a sense of is that these women were busy women practical women women on a mission the recipes are really mostly very very simple there's one that I love which is for baked bananas which just says bake banana and eat which is almost the simplest recipe I've ever read but there's also a kind of humorous nurse a humorous it's like tongue in cheek and you can see here these menus here menus for meals for suffrage workers so very practical what you should feed people if they're coming to speak and campaign in your area but then there's this recipe for cooking and preserving a suffrage speaker which is really charming sort of amusing how to keep her spirits up when she's tired and I think it's really interesting that they used cookery to sort of deploy womenly skills to a political end and to fundraise for the suffrage cause so an incredibly quick romp through the British libraries cookery book collections three examples of cookery books cookery texts being used as forms of persuasion and propaganda from 700 years ago from the 17th century and then from the early 20th century so that is the end of my presentation and I'm going to hand over now to Riaman thank you gosh I'm quite breathless Polly after all of that there we are so hopefully you can now see the offerings from Lee's University Library in contrast to Polly my choices have been informed by an interest less in the contents of the cookery books and and more in who owned and collecting collected them and I've picked three items that show evidence of use and indeed abuse over time and connect us with either named individuals or particular moments in history but first I should say something about the origins of the cookery book collection held at the University of Leeds and it all started with a woman called Blanche Leggett Lee and there she is in a very rare photograph of her from a newspaper and Blanche was born in Sheffield in 1870 and she married a man called Percival Tukey Lee in 1898 a dentist and they set up home in Leeds they were both heavily involved in the public life of the city Blanche for example was on the committee of the Leeds maternity hospital and her husband was very much involved in establishing dental clinics around the city and indeed in recognition of their role in public life they were appointed lord and lady mares of the city in 1936 so Blanche was an avid collector of historic cookery books and in 1939 she presented her library of over 1500 rare and unique items to the University library I noticed in the chat there was a question about oldest cookery books well the oldest thing that Blanche left the University of Leeds wasn't a book at all but a small Babylonian clay tablet on which in cuneiform is a receipt for barley that's the oldest item in our cookery book collection at four and a half thousand years old. Mrs Lee also kept detailed records of her correspondence with booksellers and she gave several books of letters invoices recited accounts to the University along with her collection and these documents reveal that she was in touch with booksellers and dealers from all over the country from London to Edinburgh as well as more locally in in Harrogate and they would write to her with her latest book lists clearly in the hope of securing a sale and it seems that Blanche was not afraid to negotiate a better price for books that she considered to be incomplete or otherwise in poor condition she's a woman after my own heart I have a lot of admiration for Blanche so with further bequests and acquisitions the cookery book collection has grown in scope and is now one of the most significant held in the University library and as Ken mentioned earlier in 2005 it was recognised as being of national importance and awarded designated status by the museum's libraries and the arch house council but onto the books first book I've chosen is one of the treasures of Blanche's collection and it's by Bottolomeo Scappi opera dell'arte del cucinare and printed in Venice in 1570. Scappi was a very famous Renaissance cook he served as chef to several cardinals in Italy and then began to serve Pope Pius IV so he entered the service of the Vatican kitchen and continued to work as a chef for Pius V I think it's absolutely amazing to think that this man Scappi would have been cooking in the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and I do wonder if they ever met so in 1570 at the year of his 70th birthday Scappi publishes his treatise on cookery and it contains over a thousand food preparation methods and fantastic illustrations showing in great detail the kitchen furniture utensils mechanical spits the different types of fireplaces that were used in Italy in the 16th century and the book also contains the first labelled picture of a fork there are separate chapters in the book for meat and fish and pastry as well as one on invalid cookery in which he tells us how to care for ailing cardinals so medieval tastes and cooking habits are still discernible in this book the use of sweet ingredients and spices such as ginger and nutmeg and also ingredients that have just arrived from the new world especially sugar which features as a pizza topping with pine nuts and rose water and Scappi has things to say about cheese too and he declares parmesan to be the finest cheese on earth the next book I want to talk about was published not so many years later in 1584 this is an English publication a book of cookery and in contrast to the previous heavily illustrated item this is a very very simple and straightforward book you might say the text is completely unconcerned with cooking times temperatures or amounts which makes some of the pages quite hard to fathom so here on the left you can see two recipes to stew sparrows and to stew larks and then on the facing page how to stew sparrows or larks and I'm mystified but they are quite different recipes at special collections we own the only surviving copy of this little book Blanche acquired it for her collection was well aware of its rarity a second edition was printed only three years later in 1587 and that includes extra recipes for banqueting stuff or sweet dishes and we also have a copy of that second edition but the highlight for me of the second edition is the charming inscription in the front of the book and here you can see it picked up in sandwich and rebound by father for Emily and who father was or whether Emily ever used these books for a practical purpose is is unknown but the handwritten note is is just lovely evidence of how books were collected and handed down and cherished and over the centuries before their arrival at Leeds now although we don't know who Emily is I know that she was a lucky girl because she also received a copy of the widow's treasure which is another Tudor cookery book which was also picked up at sandwich and rebound by father for her and a few years ago we were contacted by lexicographers from the Oxford English dictionary who had discovered that we had the only surviving copy of the first edition of this little book so they had the phrase fine herbs listed as being first used in 1587 in this copy that's on the screen now but it seemed from our online catalogue that an earlier edition had survived we were able to consult our copy for them and confirm that the phrase does indeed appear in the second edition and so we were very pleased to see that sir the OED entry has been changed now to reflect that earlier date complete contrast now and coming up to the 1960s this is a book that was once in the Camden library in London and how on earth did it find its way to Leeds you might wonder well not quite so after the second world war the London borough libraries divided up the Dewey classification system and resolved to collect as many new books that were published classified in their section as they could and the Camden public library was allocated bookery books by the late 1980s the library had run out of space a perennial problem as any collections manager in any library across the country will know and the books were being kept at a Pickford store in Swiss cottage the Camden librarian had advertised in the library association record to seek a new home for the books and after many months of negotiation they arrived in Leeds but the most notable feature of the Camden collection is coverage of English cookery books published between about 1949 and 1975 which dovetail perfectly with the earlier historic books donated by Blanche and others and what I love about this book and why I've chosen it is that many of the pages show signs of having been borrowed and used in the kitchen they're spattered with gravy stains and you can see byro scribbles and small children have evidently tried to be practice their letters in a corner of one of the pages so this book is by Len Dayton and it's called the Action Cookbook Len Dayton's Guide to Eating you may or may not know that before Len Dayton achieved success as a writer of thrillers such as the Ipcress file he'd actually trained as a pastry chef and also as a graphic artist and so the Action Cookbook is the perfect combination of these two talents so Len Dayton originally created what he called the cook strip and this format he created for the Observer newspaper where he was the food writer and that series ran for two years before it was published as a book in 1962 so the Action Cookbook was intended as a an instruction manual for the bachelor male and a guide to sophisticated cooking in fact when the Ipcress file was made into a film starring Michael Cain as Harry Palmer you can see one of Len Dayton's cook strips pinned to the wall in the hero's kitchen so we can look out for that next time you see the film I'll leave the last word to Michael Cain have a quote here apparently he said Len was a great cook a smashing cook I learned a lot about food from playing Harry Palmer so those are my three picks from our wonderful collection and she'll talk more about it later so I'll hand over to Freya now to tell us about items she's picked from the collections at the Leeds Central Library thank you to share my screen so I work at Leeds Central Library and I've chosen a few later items from the 19th century and the kind of items that you might find on your own bookshelves or in your own local history libraries and I think these cooking books they give us an insight into what was happening in Leeds and other big cities at the time and also how the ephemeral what we might think of as mundane can perhaps tell the story of the city and its people and maybe influence some of the things we think about today so what was these like in the 19th century well it developed from a small town into a large industrial city and the wealthy had moved away from the city centre and into the less polluted suburbs there's a huge increase in working people to work in the factories and new industries and there were a few different problems such as housing shortages and overcrowding and disease and there was also a rising middle class with a more disposable income and to be consumers so all this had a really big impact on how people ate and how they cooked as I've chosen this first item so it's the Catherine Bookton's Food at Home Cookery it was originally published in 1879 and I've chosen this because people might not be so familiar with the author Catherine Bookton but she was an amazing woman who was passionate about women's suffrage education and social reform and she was about the first woman to be elected as public office in Leeds and paved the way for all the women to come back behind her really and Catherine Bookton was really aware of the terrible living conditions in industrial cities like Leeds and recognised the urgent need for public health reform and she believes that educating girls was really important in improving the lives of working class communities. In 1870 the Elementary Education Act gave all children the right to education up to the age of 13 and school boards were set up across the UK to give all children an education and property owners could vote for people to be elected onto the boards and for the first time women who were property owners could vote and be elected. In 1873 Catherine Bookton was elected onto the school board and she remained the only woman until her retirement and she was a committed campaign of the girls to be taught cookery and she volunteered to teach the classes herself and drew her own curriculum and even paid for the ingredients and Food and Home Cookery is the book of her lessons and once this subject was accepted onto the curriculum and became the template for most school boards and I just love this engraving of the girls in the middle of one of their lessons and the lessons were given fortnightly which you can see on the side here and the girls could take printed recipes home with them and the book is divided into 19 lessons and includes sections of things like bread making, roasting and cooking for the sick. At the end of each lesson there's a series of questions as well you can see on the side here things like why is it both dirty and dangerous to wrap up your food and newspaper. There's lots of interesting bits in this book and it really resonated with me really because of all the recent conversations people have had about food poverty and Bookton's work really recognised that there's lots of different factors into why people might not be eating healthily or nutritionally and that might be because lack of outdoor space to grow their own food and lack of knowledge these girls were probably the first generation to have cookers at home and lack of space. The girls would probably share one room with a family so learning how to be meet as a practical necessity and Bookton clearly saw the link between nutrition and public health and developed this really practical book and that was adopted not just in Leeds but across the country. Moving on to my next item, my favourites. So it's moving away from the inhabitants of the city to the factories that drew people there. I've always really liked this really pretty recipe book good things may said and done and it's printed by the Leeds firm Goodhold Backhouse and Company the makers of the famous Yorkshire relish which is the best selling source in Victorian era and to me it really captures some of the ideas around marketing advertising and rounding that were becoming so prevalent at this time. So the company was established in 1858 by chemist Goodhold Backhouse and Powell and by 1874 Goodholds was the largest source factory in the world. It was steam powered and occupied a six-storey building in Whitehall Street in Leeds and the book itself Good things combines traditional recipes which of course can be improved by Goodholds own products such as Yorkshire relish and advertises the most delicious sauce in the world and it was probably given away for free as a marketing strategy with the adverts their products disguised amongst the recipes so you can see here that even the gravy can't be on the dining table until Yorkshire relish has been added to it and as competition increased between different companies as it tries to tap into new markets and they needed lots of new marketing tricks and the Victorian invasion was including these adverts at the front and back of books and Good Things is a good example of this so you can see there's pairs of soap and fennings that pasted into the book and Goodholds themselves invested really heavily in advertising and their marketing spend around 40 to 50,000 pounds a year drove sales from 670,000 bottles in 1872 to 13 million in 1907 it's a huge amount and established brands that was well known across the world but there was a downside to this fame as other companies try to take advantage of the famous Yorkshire relish brand and pass off their own imitation products and Goodholds found themselves embroiled in a lengthy House of Lords landmark dispute against the Birmingham vinegar company who had begun to manufacture their own Yorkshire relish and Yorkshire relish was actually one of the first names to be registered when trademarks were introduced and you can see this in our trademark's journal 1877 and after so much that they spent on advertising and marketing you can see why they want to protect their brand and the Birmingham vinegar company argued that Yorkshire relish was just a descriptive name and they should be able to use it but scientists disproved their claims and said the source was different and they couldn't use it so Goodholds won the case and it's so important that it still sites in trademark disputes today and the bottle sources themselves showed how food production was changed at the time and to meet the needs for growing urban population not everyone was close to where food was being produced and different ways of storing and transporting food was needed such as bottle sources and you can see in this recipe that they suggest buying cheaper canned oysters from America this recipe showing that people were able to start buying food from across the world really but of course it's led to something that were all painfully familiar with the explosion of rubbish and packaging and unfortunately I think something got worse as we got more used to mass produced food and then finally just to finish on how the other half ate this item mysteriously appeared on one of our library desks one day it's a fascinating ledger blinded caterer and confection of Godfrey Woods and it contains behind the scenes information for events and banquets between 1840s and 1870s and these and this item's both practical and personal telling us exactly how to pull together an event with menus, staff costs and prices as well as different comments about waiting staff and lessons to be learned so that there's enough table or wine for the event and Ward must have been really well respected as he landed one of those prestigious commissions in Leeds at that time catering the opening of Leeds Town Hall in 1858 by Queen Victoria and we're told that there was 274 guests at 17 shillings ahead and were even given a menu and you can clearly see the difference in the type of food being presented here than what we find in booktons and good things a lot of it is in French and it's not really described so familiarity with French cuisine is assumed and you can see this again with these lovely little menu cards they're also in our collections they're very decorative and collectible and probably found their way to us through an avid collector of Leeds memorabilia and they're mostly for events held in Leeds Town Hall and hosted by the Lord Mayor of the Leeds Corporation as well as welcoming international guests from China, Persia and British colonies and we can see a mixture of high French cuisine as well as we might call local delicacies like Yorkshire ham which seems to pop up all the time as well as influences from overseas and I think that these banquet and fancy dinners show us how Leeds was positioning itself nationally and internationally the impact of colonialism on cuisine and how food interlinked with politics and prestige at a time when the city was established itself on the world stage so although all these items are quite different I think food is different cookbooks we can catch a glimpse of a 19th century city through its relationship with food and how these maybe unassuming items could impact on how well people ate what they spent their money on in the case of the little menu cards communicate importance and prestige thank you so much for listening