The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie

Charlotte Clark was wife of Sir John Clark, the diplomat son of Queen Victoria’s physician. She collected and made notes on hundreds of recipes from 1841 until the day she died in 1897. The notes were kept for her own use, and provide a vivid picture of elite household dining for the nearly sixty years they cover. Whenever she came across an interesting or unusual dish she asked her hostess, or the cook, how it was made.

After her death her husband arranged for a selection from his wife's 16 large notebooks and miscellaneous papers to be compiled into a book, discarding any recipes that had been published elsewhere. Published in 1909, the original edition had the recipes arranged in alphabetical order but the current edition has seen them categorized into topics such as Soups and Broths (150 for soups alone), Sauces for Fish, Cheese and Cheese Dishes, for example, making it a treasure trove for cooks looking for variations on a theme. There are twenty ways of cooking salmon, 18 for rabbit, 19 for haddock and so on, some receipes calling for slow cooking, some very quick. There are also Italian influences reflecting the author’s time married to a diplomat and living in Turin. Tillypronie House is the name of their estate built in 1867 in Deeside, Scotland. The cornerstone of which was laid by Queen Victoria who used to visit the estate with her servant and confidant, John Brown.

The first (and only edition until this reprint) was long used by those lucky enough to own a copy and is still prized by collectors. It was not until Elizabeth David mentioned Lady Clark in her books and printed some of her recipes that her name reached a wider public.

In her introduction to this edition, Geraldene Holt writes that while most cooks collect recipes, Clark's achievement was "astonishing", her thousands of pages of notes on dishes she had liked "not only written over every available margin, but often crossed like a shepherd's plaid". Holt observes of the book that the abiding impression Clark's book made on her was its modernity: "simple cooking with unblemished, distinctive flavours – her worst criticism of a dish is that it tastes dull". This was accompanied by Clark's "eclecticism", from her childhood spent travelling and her adult life as a diplomat's wife". The result was a set of recipes which "still appeal to present-day tastes."