Cooking up a storm for Mozart
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
WHEN Verity Walker decided to do some fund-rasing for her Black Isle music project, she turned to her family for help — her great-great-great-grandmother to be exact.
Walker was the event manager for the Black Isle Messiah, the community music project which brought together local singers and professional musicians to perform Handel’s "Messiah" under the direction of her former Fortrose Academy schoolmate, award-winning composer and conductor Alasdair Nicholson, director of Orkney’s St Magnus Festival.
This year the same team are planning to perform Mozart’s "Requiem" over the weekend of the 4th to 6th November, but with funding tight, Walker decided to look for new ways of raising money to bring the dozen professional musicians — and that is when she enlisted the help of her great-great-great-granny.
Walker’s ancestor, Jane Onslow, was born in 1791.
The daughter of the Dean of Worcester, Jane was a member of what Walker laughingly refers to as "the ecclesiastical mafia" and in 1810 at the age of 19 married another priest, Edward Winnington-Ingram. The couple later settled at his large stately home, Ribbesford House in Worcestershire where they had eight children, seven of whom survived to adulthood, while a grandson went on to become Bishop of London.
It was in the year of her marriage that Jane Winnington-Ingram started collecting recipes in a cookbook that remains in the family today.
With Jane a near contemporary of Mozart — she was born in the year of the Austrian composer’s death — Walker decided to publish her recipes in order to help fund this winter’s Mozart performance.
"It also met my ambition to write a book before I was 50 — which I have done with the help of my great-great-great-grandmother," she added.
It is not the first time that publication has been suggested for the 155 recipes and remedies in the 201-year-old cookbook.
In the mid-1990s the cookbook was filmed for the BBC’s "Antiques Roadshow", along with other family heirlooms, when experts put a valuation on it of £2000.
"(Presenter) Michael Aspel suggested publishing it at the time. Nice man," Walker added,
The published book reprints Jane’s recipes in her own handwriting, but the Georgian cookbook has been given a very 21st century bonus in its own website, www.the1810cookbook.com, where anyone who has bought the book can go to for help with those hard to decipher words or say how they got on with their own versions of recipes, some of which might not have been cooked in almost 200 years.
"We’re starting to get comments trickling through on the website which is great. It’s never going to be a thundering bestseller, but it is great fun getting all these comments back on the recipes," Walker added.
"Some of them are old family favourites, and some you might never want to eat — the gravy omelette is not something I would want to run out and try."
Written well over a century before Italian and Indian restaurants became a common fixture on British high streets, the book also contains early recipes for curry and pasta, as well as much more standard British fare,
"I think she was a bit of a pioneer," Walker commented.
"From her point of view, being married to a senior priest was probably as good as it got in terms of emancipation in the early 19th century. She had status within the community, she had power and she certainly had wealth because she is bringing in stuff like oranges and lemons into her recipes from all over the world which would have been difficult to transport and expensive at that time."
What she is less likely to have done is cooked the recipes herself.
"I doubt she would have experimented with them at all," Walker pointed out.
"With a woman in her position, it’s more likely her cook would have made all the recipes."
However, there are some recipes Walker certainly recommends modern readers do not try.
At the back of the book are a number of homemade medicinal cures of doubtful effect, one of them of remedy for cholera which involves consuming large amounts of turpentine and laudanum (opium).
"That would have been more likely to finish you off," she laughed.
However, there are certain recipes she definitely recommends,
"I’ve never enjoyed plum pudding, so for Christmas we have the almond pudding," she revealed. "It makes you feel like you have been screwed to the floor. We put a full almond in it and whoever finds it has good luck for the coming year."
? "The 1810 Cookbook" by Jane Winnington-Ingram, edited by Verity Walker, is available on-line from www.the1810cookbook.com, at Waterstones in Eastgate and various other stockists in the Black Isle and further afield, including the Post Office and Anderson Hotel in Fortrose, The Emporium in Cromarty, Comfort Foods in Rosemarkie, Tore Art Gallery and Storehouse of Foulis, by Dingwall.
