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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Honor Moore was an Irish food writer who started writing a daily recipe column for the Belfast Newsletter in 1946, “Cookery Hints” written under her nom de plume, Housekeeper was published until 1963. In her personal collection there are scrapbooks of cuttings of her columns. Moore’s 1952 scrapbook, comprises recipe columns from each month of that year as well as cuttings she saved from other newspapers and magazines. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton’s structured approach to reading historic cookbooks was applied to Moore’s columns for this study; using the categories of ingredients, the cook’s workplace, the meal, the book and worldview. The exploration of the columns revealed a detailed view of the ingredients available in Northern Ireland in 1952 in the aftermath of the war and subsequent austerity, as well as the equipment the readers had to work with in their kitchens. The category of the meal was less fruitful with Moore focussing more on sharing recipes and new ideas with her readers rather than on when and how to serve meals. It was the category of the book that revealed many of Moore’s influences and seen altogether in one scrapbook the range and depth of her many recipes became apparent, with each daily column usually comprising two or three recipes as well as some advice and hints. In post-war Northern Ireland it was the overarching theme of frugality that emerged as most significant from this exploration. Wheaton’s structured approach proved to be a suitable methodology with which to explore the daily recipe columns. The study concludes that the exploration of Moore’s columns provided an understanding of the milieu in which she was writing and allowed for an appreciation of the domestic lives of women in the post-war era in Northern Ireland.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/9rcm-p060

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