Lamb-tail pie and other farmhouse fare
Traditional Oxfordshire country cooking
This post is inspired by a battered, well-thumbed copy of Farmhouse Fare, which Brenda Hayden discovered in an old set of draws in her Great Rollright farmhouse over twenty years ago. It was in a downstairs room, which was previously used as a kitchen. It had a derelict aga, but no sink.
First published in 1935, the cookery book collates hundreds of recipes that readers submitted to The Farmers Weekly. It draws on 19th-century traditions by featuring: ‘dishes commonly used from generation to generation in our own country kitchens, and set down by the women who have inherited or adapted them’. It is aimed at a readership of home cooks who by the first half of the 20th century would have started using coal, gas or electric cookers and were transferring over their mothers’ and grandmothers’ cooking knowledge, which would have been based around ‘wood-heated ovens’ and ‘fires banked around stewpots with hot turves or ashes’, to their new ovens. Running into numerous editions, the book was a great success with housewives across the country.
As Brenda highlights to me when we meet, the recipes are extraordinary to the contemporary reader because of the sheer quantities of ingredients that they use. A wholemeal bread recipe requires not only 5lbs of flour – enough to make at least 6 loaves – but also 2 mashed potatoes! Farmhouse cooking catered for large numbers around the table with significant appetites from hard physical labour outdoors.
There are chapters dedicated to cheesemaking, pig curing and by-products, preserves, sweetmeats, wines and meads and puddings (lots of home-grown fruit, filling roly-polies and sponges).
The meat recipes use every part of the animal. Recipes range from sheep’s head broth to stuff chine (back of the neck/backbone), balmoral tripe and mock goose that uses bullock’s heart. There is also a lamb-tail pie submitted by Miss V Grey from Oxfordshire (see recipe below).
This set me wondering about what type of food would have been served in cottages and farmhouses when shepherd Richard Widdows lived in Great Rollright from the mid 1830s to 1910.
Cottage and farmhouse fare
In Great Rollright, where the farms were mixed with arable and livestock, farmers would have had access to a good range of home-produced foods: dairy produce, vegetables, grain and meat. Wood or coal for fuelling the fire or oven would have been bought in bulk, as well as basic ingredients, such as sugar and flour. The farmer’s wife, with the help of servants, would have served large nourishing hot meals for their family and any men ‘living in’. Like their ascendants who submitted recipes for Farmhouse Fare, they would have made the most of seasonal produce and every part of an animal. To see them through the winter months, they would have canned summer and autumn fruits and vegetables – everything from plums and raspberries to carrots and beans.
Farm labourers ate very differently from farmers when they lived ‘out’ in farm cottages. Their diets were largely restricted to bread and lard, cheese, porridge, potatoes, bacon and any vegetables they could grow themselves. It was the cost of fuel as much as the expense and availability of ingredients that made bread the staple. During the second half of the century their diets started to improve, and they were able to afford at least one hot meal a week with meat. In Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson, drawing on her Oxfordshire childhood in the 1890s, describes housewives cooking stews, boiled potatoes and suet puddings, all in a single iron pot over an open fire.
It is no surprise that some found the temptation to steal or poach from the farmers too difficult to resist. In January 1876, carter Joseph Harris was charged with 7 days of hard labour for stealing three eggs from Great Rollright farmer Richard Berry. In March 1878, three men from Bloxham were charged with stealing 12 rabbits from land leased by Berry. One of the accused was imprisoned for a month.
The annual harvest supper was one of the few opportunities that farm labourers had for feasting. In October 1891, the Oxfordshire Weekly News describes the spread that Richard Berry laid on for his employees and their wives in Church End Barn, waited on by his servants, in which roast beef and plum pudding were on the menu.
Household Hints and Recipes
The recipes published in the Chipping Norton-based Oxfordshire Weekly News, in the 1870s and 80s, offer a rare insight into the type of food that newspaper readers might have been preparing and eating locally. Readers would have been farmers and better off artisans and their wives (shepherd Richard Widdows was illiterate). Recipes were most often included in the ‘Household Hints’ column, along with tips for feeding infants, treating insect bites, curing hams, soaking bent whalebones and alleviating perspiring feet. Guidance on cookery was famously featured in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Regarded as an essential chore involved in running a household, cooking lacked today’s leisure and lifestyle connotations. The recipes in the Oxfordshire Weekly News were not authored and were most likely lifted from other publications.
Among the Household Hints are recipes for preserving French beans and mashing potatoes; also cooking apple bread pudding, chicken pie, cottage plum pudding, plain plum pudding, rich plum pudding (without flour), Christmas cake, tapioca cream and batter for frying vegetables. Rather surprisingly there is also a recipe for ‘fondue’ in a March 1885 edition, which turns out to be a heavy unseasoned soufflé, baked with 3 eggs, breadcrumbs and half a pound of cheese in a mould in the oven.
These recipes share much in common with those published in Farmhouse Fare. There is very rarely any more than four or five listed ingredients, reflecting the food stuffs available to their readers. They are also short on method. When a recipe is provided for a pie, for instance, no instructions are given for making shortcrust pastry. The cook is assumed to be proficient in the rudiments of cookery, such as pastry making. There is also an emphasis on seasonal cooking. For instance, a recipe for apple bread pudding appears in the 3 October 1877 issue, along with other healthy hints for using apples.
Though there is much we can learn from these recipes, in terms of their enterprising use of local produce with little wastage, they are also a reminder of how much the availability of food changed during the course of the 20th century with the development of large supermarkets and global supply chains. To the contemporary cook, the dishes seem not only highly restricted in terms of ingredients and flavours, but also incredibly stodgy: they were prepared for a population who were working physically in the fields all day. They are also heavy on meat, and cuts of meat that we would no longer consider. How many people would now be tempted by a taste of lamb-tail pie?
LAMB-TAIL PIE (recipe from Farmhouse Fare)
On some farms it is the customs to cut off lambs’ tails when the lambs are very young: the tails then are small and not of much use. When left to get to a fair size, they make a delicious pie. When the tails are severed instruct the shepherd to keep them warm by covering with a sack.
Cut off the longest part of the wool with scissors. Prepare the scald by putting 1 part cold to 3 parts of boiling water, and immerse the tails for a few minutes: then the wool will come off easily. Stew the tails in water with a carrot and onion, or in veal stock; they will want to stew for some time if they are fairly big – some farmers’ wives roll each tail in chopped parsley before putting into the pie-dish. Hard-boiled eggs may – or may not – be added. Cover with short crust, and bake. Brush with beaten egg when partly baked.
From Miss V. Grey, Oxfordshire.
With thanks to Brenda Hayden who inspired this post and lent me her copy of Farmhouse Fare.
Sources
Farmhouse Fare: Recipes from Country Housewives Collected by The Farmers Weekly, Hulton Press (5th edition, 1954; reprinted 1956).
Digitised copies of the Oxfordshire Weekly News, originally published 1869–1928 in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. Available from the British Newspaper Archives.
Maggie Black, Victorian Cookery: Recipes & History, English Heritage, 1985 and 2004.
Eunice M Schofield, ‘Food and Cooking of the Working Class about 1900’, The Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, vol 123 (1971): https://www.hslc.org.uk/journal/vol-123-1971/attachment/123-8-schofield/