Say hi to the grossest historical recipe I've ever made! A little while ago, I was talking to a friend about the "Vegetarian Cookery" section of my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton's Household Management. I told them that I was pleasantly surprised at some of these recipes. Then I saw…
Ruth Goodman is one of my favourite historians. I’ve watched several of her shows and have seen her as a guest on other history programs, and am always impressed by how she tries to live as period-authentic as she can during a project. I don’t have that much commitment to anything!
I’ve recently finished her book How to be a Victorian, which I was very excited about. If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know that my favourite part of history are the smaller, everyday moments of regular people – and that’s kind of Ruth’s whole thing. This quote from the book is a prime example of why I love her – when talking about dry rubbing instead of washing, she writes:
The early days of home computers and video games has always been a particular interest of mine. In fact, it's my stock answer for the "if you had a time machine" question - while I would love to visit all sorts of historical periods, I'd probably fare a bit better…
Between my recent Instagram post about Gibson girls and revisiting a favourite article detailing how the ideal woman's body has changed over the past hundred years, I've had the 1910s on the brain a little bit. I'd remembered an episode of Edwardian Farm where Ruth and her daughter were demonstrating…
One of the reasons I love reading Victorian/Regency novels is that I get a glimpse of the everyday rituals, strange to us now, that were so important to the people performing them. One of those rituals that always seemed at once charming and terrifying to me was the obligation of…
I've been reading a lot of historical fiction lately. I've been enjoying it, returning to it regularly, with the same urgency I often feel about certain history and biography books I read. I am indeed an adult who deals with her problems, but at the same time, I'm also…
Memorial plaques for three of the family members of Plum Johnson, author of the memoir They Left us Everything (check it out at amazon.ca or amazon.com), which I mentioned in a recent entry. I would hesitate to call this "history," but seeing these plaques (I had forgotten they were there, so…
"Well now, history is not just the tale of the victors," he said, "It's the tale of the privileged. The men in the mud of the battlefield didn't leave much of a story behind, and the stories they did tell were mostly ignored or forgotten." - A Desperate Fortune, Susanna Kearsley.…
Many buildings outside London had thatched roofs of reed or straw, and in January 1784 Woodforde noted: 'I rejoiced much this morning on shooting an old wood-pecker, which had teised [teased] me a long time in pulling out the reed from my house. He had been often shot at by…
Last year, I found a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management in a secondhand book store, and snapped it up eagerly. It isn't obvious when it was printed. A previous owner wrote her name and the year 1944, but certain things made me believe this was already a few years old when…
