Tuppenny Rice and Treacle: Cottage Housekeeping 1900-1920

By Doris E Coates

Feeding a family on a limited budget is always a challenge. Yet even with a budget as low as ten shillings (50p) a week in the early part of the twentieth century, it is remarkable how interesting and varied the menu could be.

This delightful book draws on recipes compiled by Doris’s mother in Derbyshire and mother-in-law in Cumberla

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Harpsden Press
• Release date: Jan 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999823658

Doris E Coates

Doris E. Coates was born in Eyam in 1908. Remarkably, from a very basic education at the village school, she achieved entry to Goldsmith's College, University of London, and achieved a First Class qualification. After a lifetime of teaching in Derbyshire and Norfolk, Doris turned to writing. Her first book, Tuppenny Rice and Treacle, also recalled her Derbyshire roots. Later books explored the history of Stoke Ferry and its neighbouring villages in west Norfolk. Doris died in 1998.

Book preview

Tuppenny Rice and Treacle

Cottage Housekeeping 1900–1920

Doris E Coates

Edited with additional material by Richard Coates

Second Edition published by The Harpsden Press 2017

Copyright © 2017

First Edition published by David and Charles, 1975

The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that with which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-1-9998236-0-3 - paperback

978-1-9998236-5-8 - ebook

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,

Half a pound of treacle;

That’s the way the money goes;

Pop! Goes the weasel.

W.R. Mandale, nineteenth-century song

Contents

FOREWORD

This book was written by my mother, Doris Evelyn Coates, after she retired from her life-long career in teaching, over forty years ago. She writes of an era that is now a century past, using notebooks and recipes from my two grandmothers, Margaret Jane Dawson (known as ‘Maggie’) and Jane Elizabeth Rachel Coates (known as ‘Jenny’).

I well remember as a child and teenager visiting my nanas. Nana Dawson still lived in the cottage in Eyam where my mother was born in 1908. Laurel Cottage was home to at least four generations of Dawsons from my great-grandfather in the 1870s up to my cousin Michael who died in 2013. Going to Eyam every Christmas was a treat – it ‘always’ snowed, the church bells rang, the choir came round singing carols, Santa delivered a Christmas hamper to the ‘old folk’ and Christmas dinner (lunch did not exist as a concept in Derbyshire) was prepared on the coal fire and range.

Nana Coates was much more peripatetic. Born in Grant City, Missouri, she had come to England as a child to be brought up by her grandparents following the early death of her mother. My late grandfather died while they were living in Leeds and Nana stayed on in the family home – a large semi-detached house near the Headingley cricket ground. The treats of visiting Leeds were to ride on the trams into the city and then ride the escalators in Lewis’s department store, and being taken to see Len Hutton bat for Yorkshire.

The contrast, then, between the rural working class of Nana Dawson’s Eyam and the big-city middle-class of Nana Coates’s Leeds was significant. However, their pride in their homes and families, and their thrifty living within their means were very similar.

The recipes in this book are as my grandmothers and others of their generation wrote them down. I cannot vouch for how they might turn out, using modern ingredients and cooking facilities, although I have attempted a few of them. So please view this as a slice of history, rather than a recipe book as such, but let me know of any successes (or failures) with these recipes.

I have made very few alterations to the original text, leaving weights and measures in their Imperial form, and using pre-decimalisation pricing where it appears. Twenty-first century technology allows for both print and digital versions, which would have been a revelation to my mother, let alone my grandmothers. However, I hope that twenty-first century readers will find fascination in this glimpse of England a century ago.

Richard Coates

October 2017

PREFACE

These recipes and household hints from 1900 to 1920 have been collected for their historic interest and the light they throw on everyday life in the early years of this century. I have long been interested in this period because, although it is on the fringes of memory for older people today¹, it represents a way of life before technology and social reforms revolutionised our opportunities, before mass media and freedom of communication helped to turn yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities.

For many people at the turn of the century the problem of poverty was starker than that faced by even the neediest families in our welfare state. It seemed appropriate to illustrate this by including authentic details of one family’s household accounts which will be found in Chapter One. Yet it was not all gloom. Housewives managed, through unstinting work and infinite ingenuity, to create a decent quality of life. Working-class mothers were the unsung heroines of those days. With little money and no security, they performed miracles of homemaking, bringing up their families without envy or self-pity, and cheerfully making the best of their small resources.

Although I do not claim to be a culinary expert, I find that knowledge of food and household management of a past generation clearly illustrates one aspect of its culture. I have omitted recipes still familiar nowadays, except in cases where the original version has special interest, and I have concentrated on regional uses and economies. Some of these are amusing curiosities but many more are applicable in our own times, and may help with the perennial problem of making ends meet. There are puddings in profusion and economical meals for the slenderest purse. The bounty of the countryside, the basis for beers and wines, and for the various items which filled the Edwardian store cupboard, is once again being drawn on by thrifty modern housewives.

I hope that this book gives a picture, albeit a hazy one, of the quality of life in those less comfortable times. If so, it will fulfil my aim of paying some small tribute to the women who made it possible.

Doris Coates

June 1974

Doris, aged 17

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1 This was written in the early 1970s and first published in 1975

CHAPTER ONE - Balancing the Books

Annual income, twenty pounds,

Annual expenditure, nineteen, nineteen six,

Result – happiness.

Annual income, twenty pounds,

Annual expenditure, twenty pounds, ought and six,

Result – misery.

Mr Micawber in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Today, when we are so preoccupied with the rising cost of living and the demand for wages to keep pace with prices, it is of interest to look back seventy years to times when the problems of working-class families were of much greater magnitude. Starting with a standard of living drastically below the modern conception of the poverty level, the economic pattern was only too familiar. Between 1900 and 1914 average wages rose by about 6 per cent while retail food prices had risen by 16 or 17 per cent. Then came World War I and prices soared. The cost of living increased by 120 per cent, but average wages were appreciably less than doubled, and in some cases the increase was under 50 per cent.

I was able to appreciate these conditions more clearly when some old family papers came into my possession. These included the household notebooks, recipes and accounts of two women: Margaret Jane Dawson, my mother, who was born in 1875, and married in 1905 to a boot operative in a Derbyshire village; and Jane Elizabeth Coates, my mother-in-law, born in 1890.

Jane came from a Cumberland farming family and was born in the USA soon after her parents’ emigration. Her mother died when she was only three years old and she was sent home to be brought up by her very strict maternal grandmother at Whitehaven. It was through her interest in the Baptist church that she met Herbert Coates, who was already a member of the London & North Western Railway Police Force. As a condition of his employment, he had to be prepared to move at a few days’ notice if required by the railway company.

Margaret Dawson’s Household Accounts

The couple married in 1912, and during the next seventeen years moved house fourteen times, with short periods in Crewe, Stafford, Birmingham, Dublin, Holyhead and Leeds. Sometimes the move meant promotion for Herbert, but wages were still low. With