Good morning feminists,

How are you doing, is everything good? I hope so. Today is about food, and specifically about borrowed/stolen recipes.

It’s only right to kick off with the grandmother of stolen recipes; Isabella Beeton, of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management fame. She did the food column for a magazine her husband ran in the 1860s, where she encouraged readers to write in with their recipes and then just printed the ones she liked the sound of. She also did the monster job of compiling them all into a 1,000+ page book, which it sounds like she did not enjoy particularly:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it.

You can see the entire text of the book here; please let me know if you cook anything from it and if you would like to be featured in a future Fem Friday with the results of your experimentation:

http://www.mrsbeeton.com/

I also greatly enjoyed this article about how so many "family secret" recipes are actually cribbed from the sides of e.g. stock cube packets:

When my husband and I first got together, he talked wistfully of his grandmother’s cake. She was 90+ and living on the other side of the country, so on my urging, he would ask her to send him the recipe. She never got around to it. Over the years, I tried dozens of recipes—using fresh Meyer Lemons that we grew ourselves! He would try them and say, “Well, it’s delicious, but not what I remember from my childhood.” Finally, we happened to visit the East Coast in the final year of Grandma’s long life. We went to visit her at her home. Joe brought up the cake. She whacked her knee and exclaimed in her thick Jersey-and-cigarettes voice: “Oh Joey! That WAS a great cake! I got it off the box of Betty Crockah. Lemon Poke Cake. I’ll find it for you.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-family-recipes-copied

Finally, it would be remiss of me to talk about borrowed recipes without showing you my own favourite borrowed recipe, from a cook book that a friend’s father’s workplace produced. (thanks for the photo, friend!) Please note that this is an English workplace and not an English dish so there is clearly a great deal of borrowing going on here too. It’s the meal I default to whenever I am tired and don’t know what to cook, and it’s also the best thing I make.  I hope you enjoy it too:

A xx.