The servants’ quarters at the Jacobean mansion of Audley End near Saffron Walden offer a fascinating glimpse of life ‘below stairs’. And if you happen to be there on a summer weekend you may meet the head cook, ‘Mrs Crocombe’, demonstrating Victorian cookery techniques and explaining what was involved in preparing banquets for the family and their guests in the decades before gadgets.
The real Mrs Avid Crocombe, who ruled the Audley End kitchen in the 1880s, left behind a notebook with some of her recipes, and these and others of a similar vintage have been made widely available. Her 21st-century equivalent – historical interpreter Kathy Hipperson – has her own YouTube channel, ‘The Victorian Way’. You can find the written recipes on fliers in the Audley End kitchen; on the property’s web pages; and in a book (How to Cook the Victorian Way by Annie Grey & Andrew Hann, pub. English Heritage 2020).
I aimed to try out some of these recipes to find out if the ingredients are as accessible and the taste as good as they suggest. And its having been a Monday (which Aidan and I keep as ‘meat-free Monday’) when I started, I chose a veg curry. This one dates from a bit after Mrs Crocombe’s time. It is taken from the book Cookery and Domestic Management by one Katharine Mellish, which was published in London in the year Victoria died: 1901.
Annotations in italics are mine. It doesn’t say how many the curry is expected to feed but I have assumed four.
Ingredients
- 1 large apple
- 2 onions
- Half a cucumber or a similar-sized piece of vegetable marrow – I found the idea of cooked cucumber difficult to imagine, so tried to find a marrow. There weren’t any in my local Tesco, so I went back to the cucumber and found it worked surprisingly well.
- ‘Vegetables’ – they suggest beans or cauliflower, and I used cauliflower
- 1 tablespoon coconut
- ½ teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon curry powder
- 1 teaspoon curry paste – replaced with more powder
- 1 teaspoon salt – left out, healthy eating being more important than verisimilitude
- 2 oz butter
- ½ pint milk
- ½ lb rice
- ‘flour’ – quantity unspecified, but you can see from the recipe that it is small
Recipe
Take the onions, apple, and cucumber (or marrow); peel them and slice the onion and apple thinly. Cut the cucumber into pieces one and a half inches long by one inch broad. Melt the butter in a stewpan (i.e. large saucepan or skillet with a lid). Dust the vegetables with flour. Put the apple and onions into the butter, put on the lid and fry without browning for 20 minutes (difficult!). Then add the cucumber and fry for another 15 minutes. Add the spices and milk. Mix in any plainly boiled vegetables (that’s the cauliflower or whatever) ‘sufficient to make a large breakfast-cupful together’. (Now, how big would a Victorian breakfast cup have been?) If cauliflower is used it must be cut into small pieces ‘the size that is used in pickles’. Broad beans must be skinned. Cut beans and salsify (a common Victorian vegetable, not a verb!) into dice shapes. Add them to the curry and simmer for half an hour.
Prepare some plainly boiled rice; put a border of it down each side of the dish, but not at the ends, with the curry in the centre. (I’m not used to recipes that tell me how to arrange the food on the plates, but it did look good.) Sprinkle a little grated coconut over the top and serve.
Verdict
And yes, it tasted very good. The only drawback I found was the length of time it took to prepare: over an hour, despite my shaving a few minutes off the times for frying and simmering.
You won’t, unfortunately, find ‘Mrs Crocombe’ in Audley End until next season: she’s currently taking a well-earned sabbatical. When she returns, I hope to interview her for East Anglia Bylines.
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