Place of Origin

England ➔ Cheshire ➔ Poyton
England ➔ Derbyshire ➔ King Sterndale
England ➔ Shropshire ➔ Adderley

Date of Composition

1700s-1850s

Description

The seventeenth-century Pickford family founded Pickfords Ltd, a moving company based in London, England, in 1646. (The company is still in operation today.) The books in this collection were compiled, at least partly, by two eighteenth-century members of the Pickford family, Martha Johnson Pickford (1711-1772), of Poynton, Cheshire, and her husband James Pickford (1709-1768), and the couple's descendants: their son Matthew Pickford (1741-1799) and his wife Hannah Taylor Pickford (1746-1819), of King Sterndale, Derbyshire; their grandson Thomas Pickford (1778-1846) and his wife Elizabeth Hawkins Pickford (1784-1866), also of King Sterndale; and their great-grandson Edward Matthew Pickford (1814-1869), a curate in Adderley parish, Shropshire, 1845-1848.

The collection comprises four bound books of culinary, medical, cosmetic, and household recipes, plus approximately 150 additional loose recipes, compiled by members of the Pickford and Hawkins families between the mid-1700s and the 1850s. The sources of some recipes are identified by names and places. One bound volume of 164 numbered pages contains recipes dated 1797 and 1807-1808, though most of the recipes are undated. A second bound volume, with a bookseller's label for John Seacome, Chester, contains 155 numbered pages of recipes dated circa 1820s-1840s. A third bound volume, annotated "E. M. Pickford, Adderly Rectory," contains 41 numbered pages, with recipes dated 1843 and 1851, but most undated. And a fourth bound volume, annotated "Mrs. Hawkins," contains approximately 20 pages of recipes of undetermined date. The loose recipes, a few dated 1809-1844 but most undated, are contained in an empty book cover of red leather. Some of these recipes are written on fragments of correspondence addressed to members of the Pickford and Hawkins families or other correspondents. Among these handwritten recipes there are also a few printed recipes, advertisements, and other ephemera, dating from the 1850s and undated.