JVC Comic Relief Cookbook

Thank you to everyone who submitted a post to the JVC Comic Relief Bake Off. We were really pleased with the response and hope that you have enjoyed reading about people’s endeavours in the kitchen as much as we have. All of the bakes looked scrummy and very Victorian! You can read more about our challenge here. We have compiled all of posts, together with some old posts, here in what we would like to call the JVC Comic Relief

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Two Loaves of Bread for William Cobbett’s Birthday

Ruth Livesey As you can see here, any hope of winning the JVC bake off on the grounds of elegance and finesse were pretty much a goner from the moment I decided to bake a cottage loaf. I had been thinking of cooking something much more fin de siècle: I had fantasies of glistening absinthe-soaked madeleines or gold-flaked pets-de-nonne. But for a movement so interested in taste, there is surprisingly little actual eating taking place in the literature of the

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A Victorian Tea Party

I love cake. I love tea. I love Victorian history… So, when Helen Rogers, my LJMU colleague and editor of Journal of Victorian Culture, suggested a Victorian tea party for Comic Relief I was excited. Not only would I have an excuse to bake, but it would also be a great way to get students to think about the Victorians in an exciting and different way. This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t nervous. Would anybody bake? Would anybody attend? I

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The Young Housewife’s Daily Assistant, or rather the sameness of Victorian cake

Lucinda Matthews-Jones (LJMU) JVC Online readers will know that this isn’t the first time I’ve turned to the Victorians for baking inspiration. However, in the past, I’ve tended to focus on Mrs Beeton and her rather gaudy fare. For this challenge, I decided I would leave Mrs B to one side. Perhaps it was the Welsh dragon on the opening page of Cre-Fydd’s Family Fare: The Young Housewife’s Daily Assistant on all matters relating to cookery and housekeeping that tempted

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The delights of a tipsy hedgehog

Jessica Hindes Trawling through recipes for the JVC Bake Off, my eye was caught by a mysterious recipe in the Lady’s Own Cookery Book reading simply ‘Hedgehog’. As a long-time connoisseur of the hedgehog cake (my Mum baked one for my first birthday party in 1986), the prospect of a Victorian variant on this much-loved dessert was profoundly appealing. Unfortunately, the Lady’s Own recipe was not. Instructions for a kind of eggy, almondy paste, cooked on the stove-top until ‘stiff

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A very Victorian bake sale

Michelle Keeley (LJMU, 3rd year) This was first published on Michelle’s blog ”Typewriter and Teacakes‘ Yesterday afternoon, 68 Hope St played host to a Victorian bake sale in aid of Comic Relief. Organised by Victorianist and history lecturer, Dr Lucie Matthews-Jones, the idea was that you had to create a cake from scratch using a Victorian Recipe with no modern electrical equipment. People then paid £2 on the day to eat unlimited cake, drink unlimited tea and judge the best

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How I cooked a Victorian dish and lived to tell the tale

Tim Train You know those blogs written by perfect cooks who spend their time cooking the perfect meal perfectly, and usually begin things by posting picture after picture of their perfect cooking for their readers? I hate those blogs. They make everyone else feel so inadequate, and me too. If anything, in this post, in which I detail my questionable attempts to come to grips with unfashionable recipes, I trust I will make your readers feel perfectly adequate about themselves

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Mrs Beeton’s not so great lemon biscuits

Emma Vickers (LJMU) This post forms part of the JVC Bake off  in aid of Comic Relief. You can sponsor all our bakers efforts here. I decided to attempt Mrs Beeton’s Lemon biscuits on the basis that they looked relatively simple. No Viennese flour, no weird solid sugar and a ‘drop’ biscuit to boot. I pre-heated the oven to 150 used Google to change the old measurements into usable ones and followed the recipe. The amount of butter seemed fine but I

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Where’s the cheese Mrs Beeton? Apple cheesecakes

Maria Damkjaer None of the cheesecakes in Beeton’s Book of Household Management have any cheese in them whatsoever. As far as I can make out from Andrea Broomfield’s Food and Cooking in Victorian England, these recipes are a relic of pre-Reformation fasting practices.[i] In the 1816 edition of her A New System of Domestic Cookery, Maria Rundell includes recipes both with and without cheese curd, but by the time of Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the cheeseless cheesecakes have

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Transcribing Bentham’s baked apple pudding from the page

Tim Causer This post forms part of the JVC Bake off  in aid of Comic Relief. You can sponsor all our bakers efforts here. Thank you to Helen and Lucinda for allowing a pre-Victorian to take part in the Bake Off. Since the award-winning crowdsourced transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, began making available digital images of the manuscripts of the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), volunteer transcribers from around the world have discovered a number of interesting and hitherto unknown things in

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