Nearly Jane Austen’s Recipe Book
[BIGG-WITHER.]
Recipe and accounts book. 1730s, and 1845–53.
4to, manuscript on paper, pp. 23 (recipes in an eighteenth-century hand), pp. [324] (‘Farm Accounts of Lovelace Bigg Wither – Tangier Park’ 1845–1853), and from the other end pp. [14] of game accounts 1846–1852 in the same hand; rear endpapers with a two-page ‘account of plate’ dated April 1735, followed by a list of ‘My Grandmothers Plate’ in another early hand; two recipes in different eighteenth-century hands laid in loose; in very good condition; bound in contemporary (i.e. early eighteenth-century) stiff vellum, speckled edges.
An eighteenth-century manuscript recipe book, with a short catalogue of silver plate, re-purposed over a hundred years later as a substantial account book for Tangier Park, Hampshire, by Rev. Lovelace Bigg-Wither (1805–1874), son and heir of the man who was famously, and briefly engaged to Jane Austen, Harris Bigg-Wither, and nephew of her close friends, Catherine and Alethea Bigg.
Despite the failure of Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal to Jane Austen in 1802, she continued to visit the family at Manydown – visits are recorded in 1806, 1808 (when she played Mrs. Candour in a family staging of The School for Scandal), and 1810. Also known to Jane was the neighbouring property of Tangier Park (formerly ‘Fabians’), then owned by the Sclater family but long desired by the Bigg-Withers, who had originally owned some of the land. In February 1813 Jane jokingly suggested to Cassandra that she should ‘kill poor Mrs [Elizabeth] Sclater if you like it while you are at Manydown’; and in 1816 she remarked ‘We hear that Mrs S. [Penelope Sclater] does not quit Tangier – why and wherefore?’. Eventually Tangier, with its park, ‘wilderness’, and farm of 175 acres, was let to Harris Bigg-Wither in 1831, and in 1835 Lovelace bought the property (along with Sheerdown and Ramsdell) for £5300. It remained in the family hands until Lovelace’s death in 1871, when the combined Manydown and Tangier estate was sold.
The current volume is one of several parts, in two eras. The brief but interesting recipe book at the front dates from the first half of the eighteenth century and lists methods for preparing, inter alia, pork leg, Westphalia bacon, strong broth, scotch collops, fricassees of rabbits and of tripe, stewed oysters and carp, collared eels, and, rather more surprisingly, neats’ tongues, potted swan, bisque, roast pike, and buttered lobster. The list of silver plate at the end, dated 1735, includes some salvers and spoons marked for ‘Ant. Bradhurst and ‘M: Crouch’, and ‘11 Spoons’ for ‘Ma: Bigg’ (Matthew? Mary?), alongside a punch bowl and ladles, tea kettles, a coffee pot, a tobacco box, ‘a large wrought silver sugar dish’, etc.
Most voluminous, and the meat of the volume, are the farm accounts for Tangier Park, a splendid record of the life of the rural gentry in the mid nineteenth-century, detailing farm expenditure and produce for every month from September 1845 to April 1853. The expenses include wages, drainage, seed, livestock, threshing, etc., but also more personal and familial expenses: ‘250 faggots given away to poor people’; £4 to a ‘Collection for the starving Irish’ (in 1847, the worst year of the Great Famine); the costs of transporting ‘7 children to school’ in London (the Bigg Withers had fourteen children); in 1848 £3 3s for an ‘Electrical machine’; in 1851 ‘a dormouse for Emma’; and in 1852 the cost of two balls at Basingstoke town hall, a fee to ‘Revd Walter Wither [for] Churching my wife 11th child!’, £2 12s to Aldermarston-court cricket club, and a whopping £64 for the premium, mess and uniform for his son George’s ‘third voyage to Bombay’ – one of the five Bigg-Wither siblings to spend time in India. Most significant are the purchases, noted in 1846, of Browning Hill (110 acres, £3600), and Ham Farm (38 acres, £490), near Baughurst, which thereafter appear regularly in the accounts.
Often the account book serves as a sort of diary, the longest such entry being in 1847, when Lovelace records a ‘journey of 14 days with my daughter Frances (aged nearly 16) my sons George and Guy – aged nearly 15 and 11 – and my sister’, travelling to ‘London, York, Edinburgh … Glasgow … Glencoe … Gretna … Keswick … Lancaster … Birmingham … about 1200 miles by railroads, steamboats & carriages, 11 days of actual travel, in one day 285 miles!’. In 1852 there is a trip ‘To London & back – I got dear Guy appointed by Admiral Dundas to his own ship the Britannia at Malta … NB the admiral knew my family at Chilton’ (Lovelace later sees him off at Portsmouth – Guy was to die in a typhoon off Japan in 1860); and another to Newport election ‘where my brother William Massey was elected MP on the liberal side’ and to Oxford, ‘to vote for Mr Gladstone’. Elsewhere we find mention of ‘a splendid aurora borealis’, and the first cuckoo, butterfly, swallow, and nightingale of the year are frequently recorded.
The produce/income side is largely cereal crops, pigs, and timber, some of which reserved for repairs at Manydown, but an interesting entry in 1847 mentions £120 in ‘letters of credit on Union Bank of Australia’ from his brother Charles Bigg Wither, who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1843, where he became a prominent sheep farmer and a member of the legislative council. The shorter set of Game Accounts covers largely hares and feathered game shot, received and disposed of – those who were sent birds include ‘Mrs B. Lefroy’ i.e. Jane Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy (1793–1872, a widow since 1829), Lovelace’s mother and brothers, Lord and Lady Bolton, and Sir Richard Rycroft, the tenant at Manydown.