Manuscript Location

New York Public Library, Schwarzman Building - Manuscripts & Archives Division

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1849 - 1855

Description

It is not known for certain how this unique and absorbing manuscript came to be, but one can make a reasonable conjecture. It would seem that, in the early 1850s, several culinary projects were undertaken by English novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), his daughter Mary Ellen Peacock Nichols Meredith (1821-1861) and her second husband, English novelist George Meredith, whom she married in 1849. One of these projects was a proposed revision of Dr. William Kitchiner’s highly influential cookbook The Cook’s Oracle, first published in 1817, greatly expanded in an edition of 1822, and subsequently reprinted in various editions in both Britain and America into the 1850s. In preparation for this project Mary Ellen Meredith composed a series of reflections on cookery and gathered several dozen recipes. Along the way, her father and her husband read this material and discussed this project and other culinary matters with her, prompting them to write down their own thoughts on food and cooking. At some point someone—likely a book dealer—came into possession of the writings of all three individuals, as well as those of a fourth (unidentified) person (who may have been involved in the revision project), and cut and pasted this material according to theme, producing this manuscript. The proposed revision of the Kitchiner cookbook was never completed. The Meredith marriage disintegrated, and in 1858 Mrs. Meredith “ran off” with pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, shortly before giving birth to a child he is assumed to have fathered.

The manuscript is in two parts. The first part, which runs through page 74, mostly comprises observations on contemporary English cookery and musings on historical cooking (particularly that of the ancients) but also includes some advice of the kind typical of cookbook authors, such as "how to order a dinner." Most of the observations on the contemporary English culinary scene are critical, as the first sentence of the manuscript suggests: "We have made but little progress in the science and practice of cookery during the last thirty years," intones Mrs. Meredith, herself barely thirty years old when she delivered herself of this weighty pronouncement. The three principal authors are staunch culinary Tories, favoring traditional British cooking, which they frame as simple and honest, over the fancy French cooking then popular among the upper classes. Both Mrs. and Mr. Meredith repeatedly praise Dr. Kitchiner over the current fashionable favorite, the expatriate French chef Alexis Soyer. Both also disparage updated editions of Maria Rundell's New System of Domestic Cookery, first published in 1806, Mrs. Meredith condemning several of the newly added French-inflected recipes as "barbarous." Thomas Love Peacock, perhaps thinking of Hogarth's famous 1748 patriotic painting "O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais)," fumes, "We have added to the number of our dishes and have forgotten how to melt butter. We have let the beer of the people disappear and have grown ashamed of roast beef."

The second part of the manuscript consists of recipes. Most of these recipes are for that most English of dishes, pudding, and many of the pudding recipes are copied verbatim from the revered Dr. Kitchiner. Oddly, though, ample room is also found for multiple iterations of two echt French dishes, souffles ("much easier to make and bake than is generally supposed") and compotes.

The library is in possession of a second manuscript related to the Peacock-Meredith proposed revision of Dr. Kitchiner’s cookbook. Titled “The Science of Cookery,” this manuscript consists of revised recipes from The Cook’s Oracle, mostly in the hand of Thomas Love Peacock but with interpolations in the hand of his daughter. This manuscript is part of the “Thomas Love Peacock manuscript material,” held in the library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection. For an in-depth consideration of both manuscripts and their background, see Anne Mendelson's "The Peacock-Meredith Cookbook Project: Long-sundered Manuscripts and Unanswered Questions," in Biblion: The Bulletin of The New York Public Library, volume 2, number 1, Fall 1993, pages 77-99.