What is the earliest British cookbook for children to use themselves at home? It’s a difficult question to answer for many reasons: a cookbook may not take a form we recognise and the intended audience may be ambiguous. But here are three early examples of the genre – each very different to the others in approach and style.
Picture credit: illustration from Three Little Cooks by Lucy Crump p. 37
The Young Cook’s Assistant, edited by ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’ (8th edition, 1848 – the earliest edition I have been able to find comes from 1830)
Whether this is or is not a cookbook for children is up for dispute. The Young Cook’s Assistant is dedicated to new wives who were learning to manage young inexperienced servants (who would almost certainly have been children). A great deal of material is indeed aimed at the ‘mistress’ but the servants are addressed directly too - for example in an introductory section setting out what they should ‘endeavour’ to do. The book covers (quite comprehensively) the cooking that would be needed for a middle-class household: there are hearty soups and broths (meat, fish and vegetable - but definitely not vegetarian); meat and fish dishes, vegetable sides , sauces and pickles, sweet and savoury puddings and pies, small dishes (such as Welsh Rabbit (sic) and eggs with toast), custards and creams, jellies, cakes and wines. There is also a section on the making of cleaning products. The cook is presumed to be starting with the most basic of raw ingredients ('Skin your hare very carefully'). The recipes are written in paragraphs rather than lists but are remarkably easy to follow, with clear details about quantities and methods. The langauge is generally straightforword, even simplified - ‘Skate: ‘If good, is very white and thin’ – so that the book is accessible as possible to the young servant with perhaps limited education.
Three Courses for Threepence by I.L Richmond (2nd edition,1887 – first edition 1885)
By the 1880s, schools of cookery had been established across the country and textbooks were being produced for the use of teachers and pupils. Authors began to repurpose and repackage such material for home use. This book, for example, has been written primarily for girls to use at home but the preface states it could also be used in schools. It is organised not into sections about the different types of food, but into lessons that are based around three course meals (for example, pease soup, curried rabbit and tapioca pudding) that the family could eat. There are lists of 'materials' and 'directions' for each dish, together with cooking tips and a learning point on which to focus ("How to clarify dripping and fat") and information about nutrition. There are no illustrations and nothing that looks very child-friendly to modern eyes – although a slightly light-hearted tone indicates the intended audience: ‘To-day you will learn how to cook eggs. And let me tell you this, that not one ordinary cook out of a hundred understands this simple little operation’.
Three Little Cooks by Lucy Crump (1905)
A different interpretation of what a child’s cook book could be emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a narrative book in which the cooking instruction or food information was woven into the narrative, usually with very little subtlety. A popular American title was Six Little Cooks or Aunt Jane’s Cooking Class (1877) by Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland and this British book surely draws on that model. In Crump’s work, the apprentice cooks are a girl, a boy and a doll. The inclusion of the boy Thomas is made palatable to the reader by the fact that he is taking a scientific approach to proceedings: ‘Then you beat cakes to get air in, do you? That is interesting’. The story itself is very thin and of fairly minimal interest but the accounts of cooking are sufficiently detailed that a child could realistically replicate the experience. The thirty recipes that are included at the end do include some substantial fare suitable for meals (roast mutton, sprouts, boiled fish) but there seems to be more emphasis on lighter dishes (soups and scrambled eggs) and cakes, scones and pastries. Here we see a cookbook that is moving away from enabling children to supply the daily needs of the household and towards teaching cooking for fun.
References
A Clergyman’s Daughter. (1848). The Young Cook’s Assistant: A Selection of Economical Receipts and Directions Adapted to the Use of Families in the Middle Rank of Life. 8th edn. London: John Johnston.
Crump, L. (1905) Three Little Cooks. London: Edward Arnold.
Richmond, I.L. (1887). Three Courses for Threepence. 2nd edn, London: SPCK.
Stansbury Kirkland, E. (1877). Six Little Cooks or Aunt Jane’s Cooking Class. Chicago: Jansen McClurg and Co.
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