Her Story in Recipes

I’ve inherited a handful of things from my great grandmother. Rather than physical objects, they are quirks and character traits which, though I never got to meet her, seem to fix us in a common time. There’s a favourite flower (freesia), a favourite colour (blue) and a name (both Kate, but never Katherine). There’s also a love of reading and writing – she authored books on the animals around her Derbyshire home, while I now put pen to paper almost every day. Recently, however, something more tangible has come into my care.

I would call it a cookery book but that doesn’t really cut it. Matters of Housewifery is a portrait of life in the 1920s and ’30s, captured through a series of recipes and advice on caring for children and looking after a home. It is laden with stories. A recipe for bran bread is rooted in a game of cricket; a formula for crème brûlée in the sighting of a ghost; a lesson on dusting a desk in the story of a war horse called Jerry. There’s even a passage on unrealistic beauty standards, which segues into advice for turning domestic tasks into physical work: “Rubbing and scrubbing,” apparently “is bodily drill and mental relaxation combined”. When the book first landed with me I spent a day �

words kate hamilton photos charlotte may