Josh Ireland

Recipes for disaster

A moving insight into family life is provided by Ann Fanshawe’s remedies for melancholy, memory loss and other ailments

issue 16 December 2017

Halfway through Lady Fanshawe’s Receipt Book Lucy Moore takes a moment to regret the vast tracts of the past that are lost to us. How lucky we would be if more examples of our ancestors’ daily interactions with others, what she calls ‘the scraps of daily life we take for granted’, had been preserved.

Instead, of course, we must make do with the flotsam that has survived, and to try to coax quotidian objects into offering up glimpses into lives that might otherwise have remained obscure. Court records, depositions and wills have all been interrogated by historians, as have more unlikely items, such as the collections of culinary and medical preparations compiled by women from ‘receipts’ given to them by their friends and relations.

Moore has used the receipt book owned by a Stuart loyalist, Ann Fanshawe, along with her memoirs, to produce a lively, affecting account of one family’s fortunes in a world turned upside down.

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