Charlotte MacKenzie is currently researching Cornish legends and historical individuals, including healthcare and folk customs in Georgian Cornwall. She popped into the Morrab Library in the autumn to use our Archive for some of her research. Along the way, she encountered Mrs Borlase’s recipe for ‘Minced Pyes’  and Charlotte has kindly written a blog for us about them.

One of the hidden treasures of the Morrab Library is a manuscript recipe book compiled by the Borlase family at Castle Horneck. Which includes a recipe for ‘minced Pyes’.

To make minced Pyes

Take Eggs & boyle them very hard when cold then mince them very Small, to one pound of Eggs two pounds of beef Suett one pound of Currants & ye Same Seasoning as you doe to your other minced pyes.

Charlotte’s photograph of Mrs Borlase’s recipe for ‘Minced Pyes’ which can be found in the Archive collection at Morrab Library

The quantities for the mincemeat filling suggest the household at Castle Horneck got through quite a lot of minced pies.

The book as a whole is of interest partly because it contains recipes and advice on family healthcare and first aid. Caring for family health, ailments, and illnesses was considered part of household management, which might also include attention to the well-being of horses or livestock. The Borlase family book was not unique. Recipe books like that of the Borlase family were mostly kept by women, whose responsibilities for family and household management included healthcare. And all kinds of recipes were sometimes shared between women in their family and social circles.

The book is organised as collections of recipes. For coughs, colds, fevers, headaches, itches, and digestive disorders; and first aid for scalds and cuts. The recipes were intended to relieve acute symptoms and promote healing, and did not include general pain relief. Information about whether and when recipes were prepared and applied is lacking. Some entries have an annotation that the recipe came from a named individual, including some prescriptions by medical practitioners, or were copied for possible future use from published books or magazines.

The book includes one recipe for a topical application for the head to cure ‘madness’; and many concoctions for ailments at every life stage and in different parts of the body – from sore nipples (presumably of nursing mothers) to steadying giddiness in the head; as well as a small number of prescriptions from medical practitioners. Plus other household requisites such as how to make ink and hair dye, and recipes for horses.

Although the Borlase family could afford to consult medical practitioners – and sometimes did – Cornish recipe books confirm that households were partly self-reliant in managing health and illness.

It is an approach which can be seen in the writings of William Borlase, whose brother Walter’s family had lived at Castle Horneck. In the 1760s, the health of William’s wife Anne improved, and he wrote to a friend, the Cornish born physician William Oliver in Bath, that ‘Our only physick for the last year has been no other than the air on the beach below the house, where we daily make our almost only visits, and pick pebbles’. After being widowed, Borlase later wrote that his own prescription for health in old age was to ‘read, write, and ride’.

Library member and PhD student, Kensa Broadhurst, has delved into the world of early Cornish Fiction, and uncovered some delights you may wish to explore yourself….

Over the past year I have been working my way steadily through the Cornish fiction collection in the Jenner room. I should perhaps clarify this a little. I am currently in the final stages of a PhD researching the use of the Cornish language between 1777-1904. As part of this research, I was interested to see if any of the novels written in or about Cornwall pre-1904 either mention the language or use Cornish words. This meant I was interested in reading any of the novels in the collection with a publication date before around 1910. There are some novels in the collection with no publication date in them. To be on the safe side, I did borrow these. Often it was easy to tell if the novel must have been written later in the twentieth century through the context.

These criteria meant I could avoid the shelves full of the works of Daphne du Maurier and Winston Graham, but it has still taken me the best part of year to work my way through the relevant books from the collection alongside my other studies. This may give you some idea as to the size of the Cornish fiction collection housed in the library (I’m a quick reader!). Although there are novels by authors who had been inspired by a visit they had made to Cornwall, many of the books are by Cornish authors and are specifically based in West Penwith.

Unsurprisingly for novels set in West Penwith either in the nineteenth century or earlier, several themes emerge: Methodism, mining, smuggling and wrecking feature heavily, alongside many tales of unrequited love and quite a few mining accidents. For people interested in the social history of Cornwall in the nineteenth century, these novels are a real treasure trove. There are also several novels which detail the adventures of young girls who are shipwrecked on the Cornish coast, rescued, and grow up unaware of their true identity, only for everything to be resolved perfectly at the end with a hugely coincidental reveal! A couple of examples of these include Mona the Fisher Girl by H.S. Streatfeild and Beatrice of St Mawse [no named author].

There are novels by well-known novelists such as Deep Down by R.M. Ballantyne, the Scottish author best remembered for The Coral Island. He came to Cornwall to research tin mining for this novel. There are also many novels by the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould from Devon. He was  well-known as a writer of hymns and served as President of the Royal Institution of Cornwall. Examples of his novels include Guavas the Tinner and The Crock of Gold. Famous Cornish novelists such as Katharine Lee, the Hocking siblings, and William Sandys also feature prominently.

So would I recommend a delve into nineteenth century Cornish fiction as a change from your usual reading fare? There are some gems to be discovered. If you like an adventure story filled with derring-do try Queen of the Guarded Mounts by John Oxenham which is set on St Michael’s Mount and Mont-Saint-Michel during the French Revolution.  If you want a bit of romance in the Cornish landscape, there’s Kynance Cove by William Bentinck Forfar. For some insight into life in Cornwall at this period see E.A. Bonham’s A Corner of Old Cornwall or Mrs Havelock Ellis’s My Cornish Neighbours. Or perhaps just show some neglected books some love – in many cases I was evidently the only person who had borrowed these novels for decades!