For our third archive session we moved from the Merseyside Maritime Museum to the Special Collections at the Liverpool University Library. Dr. Maureen Watry, Head of Special Collections, very kindly identified a range of books and pamphlets relating to the history of food, in general, but also some great resources about food in Liverpool. She gave a fascinating overview of books available. We found, for example, that in the older recipe books medicinal and cooking recipes were often included together, suggesting that food was widely understood both as nourishment and as medicine.

We also saw one of the earliest curry recipes in the UK from 1747 in Hannah Glasse’s The art of cookery made plain and easy. Glasse also talked about keeping catsup (tomato sauce) for up to twenty years! Also included in this book were lists of when various foods were in season.

An extremely popular book, both in its time and with us, was Friedrich Christian Accum’s A treatise on adulterations of food, a book that had a skull and cross bones on its cover. The treatise was a compendium of all the horrible and dangerous things people did to the food they sold. One example was the routine use of red lead and copper to colour food.

Another item that we found really interesting was John Kirkland’s The bakers’ A B C: an encyclopaedic dictionary for bakers, confectioners and caterers. Most people will know the name from his bakery on Hardman Street, now the Fly in the Loaf (see here). Apparently, Liverpool had its own unit for measuring flour known as the ‘pack’. Kirkland wrote that while 140lb bags were the standard everywhere else, in Liverpool we used 240lb bags. Apparently the name comes from the wool trade, since a pack of wool was usually 240lbs.

Finally, given all the focus on relearning cookery skills that have been lost (see the excellent Can Cook for example), we were interested to find that this isn’t a recent issue, but actually one that has periodically re-occured in Liverpool when working habits changed, or there was a shift in what kinds of food were readily available.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, for example, there was a push to create more cookery schools, partly to train women to cook with unfamiliar ingredients such as corn and rice and later, processed goods such as tinned meat. We found an interesting and often funny range of recipes used at these local cookery schools, which we’ll sharing as part of our iphone app and other projects. These included ‘St George’s Hall Cake’ and ‘Woolton Pie’ (a meat-free version of shepherd’s pie).

Special thanks to the staff at the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections for making this session possible.

List of items we consulted: 

1. John Gerard, The Herball, or generall historic of plantes, 1633
2. T. Moufet, Health’s improvement; or, Rules comprising and discovering the nature, method, and manner of preparing all sorts of food used in this nation, 1655, SPEC KNOWSLEY 40
3. The Assize of bread; with sundry ordinances for bakers, brewers and butchers; and other assizes in weights and measures, 1698, SPEC H29.9
4. Hannah Glasse, The art of cookery made plain and easy, 1755 Printed and sold at Mrs. Ashburn’s china shop, London The fifth edition, SPEC Y76.2.3
5. An easy way to prolong life, 1775, SPEC FRASER 1471
6. Maria Eliza Rundell, A new system of domestic cookery; formed upon principles of economy: and adapted to the use of private families, 1811, SPEC Y81.2.20
7. Friedrich Christian Accum, A treatise on adulterations of food, 1820 SPEC CB1
8. Eliza Johnstone, ‘Early 19th century book of culinary and medical recipes’: MS 5.18
9. R. Procter, Practical Economy of Food, 1856, SPEC G35.17(11)
10. ‘Liverpool School of Cookery’, articles from 1875 in John Fraser’s scrapbook: Fraser 680
11. Mary MacNaughtan, Lessons in practical cookery for schools and technical classes, 1894, JUV.1402
12. William Hewitt, Liverpool Training School of Cookery and Technical College of Domestic Science: [report by the Director of Technical Instruction, W. Hewitt]; presented to the [City of Liverpool] Technical Instruction Committee at their meeting on March 23, 1903, DALE 11(11)
13. E E Mann, Liverpool School of Cookery recipe book, 1911 JUV.1401:1.1
14. Mary Florence Hodge, A little girl’s cookery book, 1911, JUV.1161
15. Flora Klickmann, The little Girl’s Cooking Book, 1923
16. John Kirkland, The bakers’ A B C: an encyclopaedic dictionary for bakers, confectioners and caterers, 1927, SPEC S/TX763.K51
17. The New Stanley Abattoir, 1931, SPEC SF/HD9424.G7.L78
18. G J S Broomhall, Corn trade memories, 1930, SPEC S/HD9041.5.B87
19. Scott, The History of F.E. Calder College of Domestic Science, 1875-1965, 1967, SPEC R/LF379.5.F.S42

Although our project is mainly focused on local food, both the Friends of Sudley Estate and the Friends of Everton Park were interested in finding out more about the international shipping heritage of the areas they work in. This interest also linked well with one of the things we really liked about the Mr Seel’s Garden plaque – the way it shows that the local and international dimensions of food production are always interconnected.

Our focus in this session was the Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry (see here for an overview).

We’d already begun to look at these a little in our last session and were looking forward to having more time to look at them in more depth.

We focused on the Bills of Entry for 6 different years: 1820, 1837, 1865, 1889, 1914 and 1939. Some of our findings included:

• Surprisingly not much tea was imported into Liverpool in 1820, instead it was mostly coffee.
• We also saw the way food preservation technologies changed over time from dried, pickled and canned to chilled and frozen foods.
• This happened quite quickly, so while we didn’t see much evidence of chilling and freezing in 1865 there was much more in 1889 (though we did find fridge being imported in 1865).
• There was also a high volume of trade with Ireland – it was very much Liverpool’s larder.

You can scroll down to see more comprehensive list of what we found just below.

Thanks again to the Merseyside Maritime Museum for hosting us and to Alex Buchanan from the University of Liverpool and Sarah Starkey for running the workshop!

Listing for Lampert and Holt Ltd. The shipping line owned by George Holt who also owned Sudley House.

Where our archive research will take place

Next up after our introductory oral history session was “Introduction to Historic Documents”, where we began our training in how to do research with historic maps and archives. The setting for the session was the Merseyside Maritime Museum. Perhaps an unusual choice for a project on local food, but in developing the project the team were particularly interested in understanding what ‘local food’ might mean in a port city.

Often, small market towns are the model in the back of people’s minds when they think about rebuilding local food systems. However, this kind of model is not what Liverpool has traditionally been based around. Indeed the money from Mr Seel’s Garden itself, would have come from Mr Thomas Seel’s slaving empire. So one of the really interesting questions raised in this project is how ‘local food’ relates to the dynamic networks of trade, which have always been essential to port cities and their hinterlands.

Volunteers getting intro to historic documents

Our aim at the Merseyside Maritime Museum was to develop a picture of food systems in Liverpool that might give us an interesting contrast to our oral history and map sessions, which focus on finding where food was grown in Liverpool. To start getting ready for this we had to first get an idea of what kinds of archive documents would help us answer the questions we had, and just as importantly – how to handle the documents when we found them. Along with how to use stands to support books and weights on hold down pages, we were initiated into perhaps the most persistent controversy in public archive work – whether or not to wear white gloves. We were quite bemused to find out that despite what we might have seen on TV, it is actually often better for the documents not to use them (See this post from the British Library for an explanation).

Detail of warehouse plan by Jesse Hartley

After recovering from the shock we settled in to get more of an idea of the kinds of records archives usually contain and browse through some examples the archive’s curator Sarah Starkey had prepared for us. In response to someone’s claim that ‘there must be a record’ of some of the Holt’s activities that we are particularly interested in Sarah told us that this was a phrase that strikes dread in the heart of archivists. Instead, archive work was presented to us as being more like being a detective, treasure hunter or even a spy. Since not everything that happened in the past gets recorded the key to successful archival research is to try to work out who might have needed the info you’re looking for and for what purposes. For example, there are most likely to be records when money is involved.

One of the key sets of materials we’ll be looking at are the Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry (see here for an overview). While we only had a quick look at them in this session, just seeing the increasing size of each of the volumes showed how much and how quickly Liverpool port business changed over the 1800s. We also saw changes in the origin of the ships, with ships in 1829 mostly coming from Ireland and ships around 1900 shipping frozen meat from Argentina.

More locally, we also looked at street directories from 1955 which included pages and pages of bakers and butchers. We wondered how big their sections would be in the Liverpool directories of 2012. It was really interesting to find that while records from particular shops are most likely to have been destroyed, street directories are often still available and provide valuable resources for tracing the rise and fall of particular industries.

Other items of interest included a stevedore’s log book that included incredibly detailed plans for loading ships, including lists of items to be shipped, how they should be packed and what kinds of things shouldn’t be packed next to each other.

Thanks to Alex Buchanan from the University of Liverpool, Alex Hale from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and Sarah Starkey, the archivist at the Merseyside Maritime Museum for organising the session. For more information on the MMM’s collection of Bills of Entry go here and here.

The Liverpool University Centre for Archives Studies (LUCAS) run a yearly public event showcasing archive items that relate to a particular theme. Called In the Archives, previous events have looked at Shopping in the Archives (held at Lewis’s Department store), On Holiday in the Archives and Crime in the Archives.

This year, to coincide with the Memories of Mr Seel’s Garden project, LUCAS hosted Eating in the Archives at Croxteth Hall, in part so attendees could also visit the Hall’s beautiful Victorian Walled Garden.

There was a great range of speakers who looked at local food from a variety of angles. Michelle Bastian from the University of Manchester and Transition Liverpool was up first and gave a short presentation on the background to the Mr Seel project and some of the things we’ve found so far.

We’ve been following the Scottish Council on Archives recent project called The Edible Archive with some interest and were very pleased to have Ben Bennett in Liverpool to tell us more about it. The project has been collecting heritage receipes from around Scotland, both from the range of Scottish Archives and from private individuals. They also hosted an event where there were cookery demonstrations, workshops and speakers and members of the public had the chance to try Locust Bread, Sheep’s Head Broth and the Butler’s Gingerbeer. If you want to find out more or download some of the recipe cards just go here.

While intereviewing people in Everton we found that there were lots of fond memories of the Co-op and we were amazed how many people could still recite their co-op number! Adam Shaw from the National Co-operative Archive did a bit of background research for us and gave us a lovely overview of the history of co-operative food shops in Liverpool, as well as showing us some vintage advertising and packaging.

Last but not least, Marion Hewitt from the North West Film Archive brought a selection of fascinating films, including one from the Co-operative society showing the process of making CSW Cream Crackers at the Crumpshall Biscuit Works. We also loved a film made during WWII that showed members of the land army cycling off to the countryside after work to help with the harvests. Some great graphics showing the interdependencies between the urban and the rural and a suprisingly high percentage of veg provided to Manchester from within a 50 mile radius.

Thanks to all the presenters for a wonderful afternoon and to everyone who came along. Thanks particularly to Croxteth Hall for hosting us.