'Receipts, Mrs. Heek',

Bookseller Notes

A neatly written and fully indexed mid nineteenth-century recipe book. Mrs. Heek's go-to recipes include soup maigre, bath buns, Irish sauce, 'souflee' potatoes, Seville orange tart, puddings (Irish, Genoese, Alderman - a variation of Bakewell tart using apricots), 'German Pie' (beef and pork sausages, liver, large oysters with their juice, and cayenne pepper), home remedies, and a method for preserving eggs. Loose sheets feature recipes for parsnip wine (with a horseradish variant for those who favour something spicier), various icings, and raspberry vinegar. The very different addresses in the front of the book - 30 Pudding Lane and 22 Upper Brook Street - presumably represent Heek's places of lodging and work respectively. It seems likely that she was the cook for William Battie Wrightson M.P., (1789-1879) of Cusworth Hall in Doncaster, who had 22 Upper Brook Street as his London residence from 1841 until his death. A later addition in a different hand (a recipe for knitted woollen slippers), contains a clue to a later owner in the West Midlands.