Footnotes

'TAKE A LITTLE BASON FULL OF SWEET CRAME' – THE CELEBRATED RECIPE BOOK OF DIANA ASTRY, who is featured, on the strength of this volume, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, as 'diarist and compiler of recipe books'. Harriet Blodgett writes of our volume, the only recipe book by Diana Astry known: 'The recipe book itself acts as an index of Diana Astry's social life. Of 375 recipes in her hand (five further entries were made by others) only twenty-seven give no indication of the person who gave her the recipe. Most have initials, but some give names or titles. As well as family members such as Diana's mother or sisters, among the more frequently quoted individuals was the countess of Torrington, Anne, née Hadley, wife of Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington. A Lady Drake is also cited, and a recipe for pancakes is attributed to "Lady Churchell", perhaps Elizabeth, née Drake, widow of Sir Winston Churchill, and mother of John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough. Sometimes recipes are celebrated for their socially exalted provenance—four recipes for ratafia were attributed to the duke of Luxembourg, through the duke of Ormond. Many other attributions are probably to members of the households of the Astry family and their neighbours. The book is also a valuable record of culinary practices. Timings are not given in minutes but in units of cultural significance: "when potting lampreys they should be thrown into boyling water for 'as long as you can say an Avemary'" (Diana Astry's Recipe Book, introduction, 87). Food colourings included claret for red, and, in a pickle recipe, boiling the ingredients in a pot with melted brass farthings to obtain green. The recipes are mostly intended to make up parts of substantial meals, possibly providing a measure of the prosperity of the gentry of southern England in the first decade of the eighteenth century, or suggesting the scale of the entertaining expected among them' (ODNB). Her 12-page journal is held by the Bedfordshire Archives (Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service).

The recipe book was printed in full in 1957, edited by Bette Stitt, 'Diana Astry's recipe book, c.1700', Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, 37; and has since become a widely-used resource for the culinary and social history of the period. In her introduction, Stitt provides full details of the attribution to Diana Astry, which is made in face of the attribution borne by the volume itself on its flyleaf, namely: "an Old Receipt Book of Lady Rolt's – of Sacomb Park above an Hundred Years ago [rule] now 1790". The attribution to Diana is clinched by the handwriting of the journal which is, indeed, the same as in ours (op. cit., frontispiece). Stitt states that 'the handwriting of this remark has not been identified'. It is however very similar to that of a small almanack kept in 1777, included in the lot, which from internal evidence can be attributed to Mary Orlebar, one of a trio of sisters (the best-known of whom is Constantia, author of the 1786-1808 weather-book published in 1955). They were descended from the Rolt side of the family which, as Stitt suggests, is how the misattribution might have occurred (pp.84-5).

Diana Astry married Richard Orlebar in 1708, after which she abandoned her journal but continued to make entries into our recipe book. She is commemorated in the freeze of Diana the Huntress on the south side of Hinwick House, near Poddington in Bedfordshire, the magnificent house built by her husband, which is said to have been modelled on the original Buckingham Palace. But, 'as for many ordinary women of past centuries, she is remembered for her diary, impersonal though it may be, and for her collection of recipes' (ODNB).