Stories and information from the farm, family and ancestors of Joe & Bessie Cooper

hand written recipes

Amongst a bag of recipe books and leaflets with such titles as Favourite Cake Recipes from Yorkshire Housewives and cook with ketchup, there are a lot of handwritten recipes  including a tattered notebook with a lot of recipes in Grans handwriting, in the book there are also poems, also written out in her handwriting.

The book was obviously well used as it has lots of marks on it  - even a circle where something has been put down on top of it.

Cooking temperatures aren't mentioned and times only occasionally.  I guess that this was because she knew by experience what temperature her fire oven needed to be. Its also interesting to see the quantities, Christmas Bread with 2 pounds of flour, a half a pound of lard and a pound of fruit is quite a cake.

There are a lot of recipes with ginger in them -  I seem to recall that Gran really liked ginger.   I haven't tried any of the recipes yet.

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Dressing for potato Salad and Green Salad

Plum Pudding & Mincemeat

These two recipes seem to have come from Mrs Crookes and aren't the recipes which were passed on by Gran  

Snow Cake & Fig pudding

Cough Mixture

1lb black treacle

2oz best Spanish juice - liquorice I think

1 quart water

1d oil of peppermint

1d aniseed

1d chloric- ether

dose a small tablespoon 3 times a day

Another

1d white wine vinegar

1d essence of aniseed

1d essence of peppermint

1d Panegoric (a tincture of opium)

1d Laudanum

1lb treacle

two recipes for cough mixture

Recipes for remedies were common in earlier times but I didn't realise that it was common as late as this.   

I assume that 1d means a pennyworth, imagine going to a pharmacy and asking for a pen’orth of laudanum.

Summer Drink (elderflower)

This is in a different handwriting which I think is Mary Cooper (Grans mother in law) There is a letter on the back which  talks about Cis and Fred and Ambrose - all names from the Cooper side of the family rather than the Steedmans.

Baked Lemon Pudding

using breadcrumbs and mashed potato

and on the same page

a recipe for

Constipation mixture

I like the comment that it takes a lot of mixing

Three sorts of buns on one page, Ginger, Plum and Drop Buns

Ginger beer

Christmas bread

This is written in biro so it must be much later, its written on the back of a letter from Edith

Almond cake

batter for fish tripe etc

boiled batter pudding

Bolton pudding

Cake without eggs

Chocolate cake

Chocolate mould (like blancmange)

Chutney

Coconut cake

Coconut sponge

commemoration cake

embrocation

German cakes

sandwich cake

Scotch breakfast scones

Shortbread

Snap gingerbread

Soda cakes

sponge cake

Sweet sandwich

Swiss Roll

Tillington Pudding

Toffee

Treacle sponge

trifle

Ginger sponge

Gingerbread pudding

Ground rice cakes

Jordan cake

Lemon Paste Buns

marmalade

marrow marmalade

Milk Mould

Orange mould

parkin

Plains seed cake

Queen Buns

Rice cake

Sago & Apple Mould

This is the complete list of the recipes - let me know if you would like copies