Increasing awareness of environmental issues has recently led to a growing desire for locally-grown food. This current interest has similarities with an organisation set up in the late 1920s by Florence White, called The English Folk Cookery Association. One of its aims was to ‘use as much fresh home and locally produced food as possible instead of sophisticated foods’. As well as promoting English food and cookery, the Association set up a cookery school in Fareham. Papers received by Hampshire Record Office in 2009 (44A09/A1-A11) give fascinating details about the school and the work of Florence White. But who was Florence, why did she found the English Folk Cookery Association and what were her links with Fareham?
Florence was born in Peckham, London on 20 June 1863. Her father was a lace buyer for a City firm, and she had a happy early life. This happiness ended when she was six, with the death of her mother. A few months later she lost the sight in one eye after an accident. Florence was to suffer from poor eyesight and ill health for the rest of her life. Her father remarried and her stepmother convinced her she would never marry as she only had one eye. Her stepmother later forbade her to enter the family home, and Florence had no settled home for the rest of her life. She was very resourceful, however, and once grown up took a wide variety of jobs around the country, in at least 28 occupations including journalist, schoolteacher, waitress, social worker and cook-housekeeper. Ill health, principally a weak heart, prevented her from keeping jobs for long. She often had to resign, rest for a while, then look for another job.
Florence had always shown an interest in English cookery. As a child, she had occasionally visited her aunts, Louisa and Harriet White, who from the 1850s to the 1880s were the proprietors of the Red Lion Inn, Fareham. Here she witnessed traditional English dishes being made. Her aunts were supplied by nearby country houses with poultry, eggs, fish, game, vegetables and fruit. As she states in her autobiography, by watching her aunts, Florence learnt to ‘prepare and cook in the best English way the best English country food’. Throughout her life, Florence believed in self-improvement and education. She enjoyed local history, but as well as investigating events and people from the past, she was keen to find out what they ate and cooked.
This interest finally came to fruition when she was in her sixties and semi-retired. She was working as a freelance journalist, specialising in cookery, and her work involved researching in the British Museum Reading Room and the Patent Office Library. She wrote for a number of newspapers, trying to make more people interested in English cookery. Frustrated by what she saw as the promotion of French food and cookery and a lack of interest in English cookery, she started to travel around England ‘to restore England’s good cookery to its former high standard and proud position’.
Realising she could not do all this alone, she wrote to The Times suggesting that all who were interested should form an English Folk Cookery Association. The EFCA was not a commercial enterprise but a learned society formed with the intention of restoring and maintaining England’s former high standard of cookery. It also aimed to collect recipes of traditional English dishes. Florence advertised in The Times for such recipes, and received hundreds. This resulted in the publication of Good Things In England, a cookery book containing over 800 recipes reflecting the cooking traditions from all over the country.
Examples include Derbyshire Oatcakes, Scarborough Muffins, and directions as to ‘how they raise a piecrust in Warwickshire’. It also includes a ‘stew of pigeons’, a recipe used at the Red Lion Hotel, Fareham in the mid-19th century.
In 1936, Florence decided to return to Fareham and start an English Folk Cookery Association School of Cookery. She had been shocked a few years earlier to find that many women did not know how to cook even a potato. In her autobiography she states ‘many unhappy marriages are due to bad cookery’. The documents we have received are mostly printed brochures and advertisements for this cookery school.
The brochures describe the spacious house she rented, 160 West Street, Fareham. It could accommodate four resident visitors as well as non-residents. It was intended for all social classes. Individual lessons were given by cooks, and students ‘taught to cook complete meals, not merely single dishes. They can learn to recognise good food before it is cooked, to buy and prepare it for table, to arrange different meals by the day or week according to the income at command and according to the requirements of different households’. Florence was keen to return to what she called ‘good epicurean English cookery’, such as her grandparents had experienced. Even in 1936, she was bemoaning the use of canned food, white flour and butter substitutes. She championed locally-produced food, and in another brochure, lists all the local suppliers in the Fareham area who provided all her needs.
Some of the food cooked by the students could be bought at cost price, and was displayed in the ‘shop’ window at 160 West Street. A poster (see below) shows what was on offer, including Fareham Puff Pastry ‘the best in the world’ and ‘delicious sweets’ including Nesslerode pudding and Grassy Corner pudding (the latter consisting of jelly, pistachio nuts, cream and isinglass). Also available were the 1930s equivalent of ‘ready meals’, hot dishes which could be ‘fetched by car just before lunch or dinner and heated up for a few minutes at home in the oven’.
Florence had hoped that the organisation would still flourish after her death, but sadly this was not to be. Already ill in 1936, she only lived four more years, dying on 12 March 1940. She is buried in an unmarked grave in Fareham Cemetery.
No references to the EFCA have been found after this date, the Second World War undoubtedly contributing to the difficulties of continuing such an organisation at that time. Her legacy and influence however remain. Good Things in England has been republished a number of times since the 1930s and has influenced other food writers such as Elizabeth David. With the cataloguing of the EFCA brochures and booklets, let us hope that her work and aims will not be forgotten.
Sarah Farley, Archivist
(This article was originally published in the Spring 2010 Hampshire Archives Trust Newsletter)
Hampshire Archives and Local Studies 