The 'Pudding Lady': Supporting families with making meals on a budget

Her work with mothers

Florence Petty's work was seen as an experiment in social work in the 1910s. She was a lecturer who supported poor, working class mothers with budgeting for family meals each week. She also helped them to plan and cook these meals. Significantly, she worked directly with women in their own homes.  This was because she wanted to see what cooking facilities and equipment they had rather than assume what was in place. Indeed, the School for Mothers, which had undertaken classroom based lessons on cookery for mothers before, had been rather disconcerted at their lack of success in changing the practice in the home. It seems that the mothers who attended had come to see the lessons as a form of recreational activity, but had not translated what they had learned to any real shift in their own cooking practice. In a classroom situation, for example, the lecturer might assume that mothers had access to particular pots, pans, or a large oven when reality their home circumstances were very different. Florence Petty's aimed to work very differently.

Part of what Florence Petty did was to keep careful records of the circumstances of the families she visited. Although the visits were not intended to pry or make judgements about the families and their circumstances, they do seem to have done that in their documentation of these families' lives. One family she worked with had two parents out of work and six children (two with rickets). Water had to fetched from the yard, there was no oven - only a small fire, and there were two saucepans and a frying pan with hardly any crockery.  The parents' level of education is documented and a note is kept on the cleanliness of the household ('clean when husband is in work, but physical and moral courage rather in abeyance now' - pg. 34). She also notes on one of her visits that the children were rather dirty and 'the mother seemed helpless amongst them sometimes' (pg. 35). Families also showed her how they budgeted for the week, indicating how much money they had for food, after taking off the monies for rent, household and personal washing, and fuel for heating. Her notes provide a window into just how difficult many families' lives were at this time, but make for uncomfortable reading today as they do read as  judgemental and intrusive. 

After her initial assessment of the family's situation, Florence Petty visited a family a number of times giving cooking lessons in the home. She documented what recipe was taught each time and how the lesson was received. She also indicated any 'progress' a family was making. The cookery lesson was often entwined with practical help in other aspects of household life such as washing the children and brushing their hair. She seems to have listened to the families she worked with. For example, one mother wanted to make a ginger pudding so Florence provided the suet and helped her to make it. She also recognised the importance of Sunday dinner to the families with whom she worked. Many families would put up with bread and tea all week to have a good dinner on a Sunday, the memory of which would sustain them throughout the week. Thus, you get a sense from her notes that the socio-cultural significance of food was recognised alongside its nutritional and nourishing properties. 

A typical meal made from cheaper foodstuffs

Florence Petty encouraged families to make use of cheese, pulses and nuts as sources of protein rather than meat, against popular prejudice against such foodstuffs at the time. She made use of a book called 'Economical Dishes for Workers' which was used by social workers and cookery teachers in the period. 

Soups were a popular dish taught. For example potato soup, fish soup (made with the heads of cod or conger eel), or tomato soup. Lentil or bean stews were a staple too, as were dumplings. As something that would assuage the hunger of a family, dumplings are commonly seen in her soup and stew recipes. Here's an example of one of her recipes.

Vegetable stew and dumplings (cost 6d - to feed 6 persons)

Half a pound tomatoes

Half a pound chestnuts

Salt to taste

Lentils (soaked overnight). Pour away the water the next day, cover with fresh water and boil for one and a half hours. Add tomatoes (cut up) and chestnuts.

Add dumplings (made from three quarters of a pound of flour, quarter of a pound of suet, baking powder and salt).

Boil for three quarters of an hour.

There were omlette recipes and savoury custard recipes as well as suet pudding recipes such as date pudding. Date pudding proved to be an especially popular dish with the families with whom she worked; perhaps leading to Florence Petty's nickname as 'The Pudding Lady'.  The emphasis in her cookery teaching, understandably, was on food that was cheap, filling, and would not be dependent on high levels of skill (although making light, fluffy dumplings is not that easy!) or fancy equipment. 

Assessing the work of Florence Petty

It is hard to assess the success of her work. Noone undertook a quantitative analysis of its impact as we are used to today, to show a 'before and after' effect, open to statistical analysis. However, you do get a sense of the impact of her work in her notes. For example, Florence Petty cites one mother as telling others at the School for Mothers about the stew she had learned to make. They in turn said: 'That is what we want, miss; somebody to show us how to make nourishing meals for the children out of the little money we have.' (p. 36) This mother also noted what she had learned about rickets and how the children's diet may have been a factor. Many families described the dishes they were taught to make as delicious.

Florence Petty writes of one mother: 'The influence of the Welcome is certainly helping her in every way to get a new grip of the powers and faculties she was losing.' Yet also records that this mother needed 'pulling up' for giving her children too much tea: 'I talked strongly on this point to her' (p. 37). Evidently, the relationship Florence Petty had with the working class women she worked with was one where she was seen as the teacher; she was called 'miss' by the women, not 'Florence'. She was also not averse to reprimanding mothers for deviating from her advice about healthy living as we can see in her comment about the children's tea drinking.

Most significantly, the notes we have about the impact of her work on these mothers were written by Florence Petty herself.  Although she quotes the mothers she worked with, perhaps she has airbrushed the more difficult encounters she must surely have had in her work.  Hints of this can be seen in her records however. For example one mother described herself as feeling 'such a sneak' in asking for help (pg. 41) and in one instance a family had disappeared when she went to visit them again, leaving no trace. 

Do we need a 'Pudding Lady' today?

Florence Petty's ‘case papers’ on the families she worked with are detailed  but make for uncomfortable reading today in their detailed assessment of  cleanliness, sanitary conditions, level of education, and cooking facilities. At times, you feel like you are intruding into intimacies of families' lives: families: families who were clearly very poor and experiencing the mental and physical hardships associated with grinding, long-term poverty. 

This said, she did seem to sympathise with the families. And whatever we might think of her middle-class assessments of working class family life, she did seek to work with what families had available to them in their own homes. Mothers did seem to have learned some new, nourishing recipes which their families enjoyed. So she provided a very practical service that tackled real-life problems there and then. Yet while, undoubtedly, Florence Petty did some useful work, we suggest that more needed (and needs) to be done to tackle the reasons why some families  struggle to provide a regular, nutritious meal for their families. Interventions such as those of the 'Pudding Lady' - however well meant - did (and do) little to change the material conditions that families live in. It is often poverty, rather than lack of understanding on its own, that means children and their families go hungry. Addressing the issue of poverty, then, is key. It is an issue that speaks as much to us today as it did early in the twentieth century when Florence Petty was working.

References

Bibby, ME, Colles, EG, and Florence Petty, (1916) The Pudding Lady; a New Departure in Social Work (2nd edition) London: National Food Reform Association. (quoted text from this book).

In 1917 she published her own cookery book: The Pudding Lady's Recipe Book, with Practical Hints, which was notable in its emphasis on plain, wholesome cookery from basic (and cheap) ingredients.