This blog was written by Fiona Ellis, a local freelance writer. Fiona was commissioned by Northumberland Archives and November Club, a local award-winning performance arts charity, to write a script for a short film featuring the character of Hannah Glasse, an 18th century cook with Northumberland connections. The film was inspired by the content of one of Hannah Glasse’s letters found amongst the Allgood MSS (ref: ZAL) held by Northumberland Archives. The film will be launched on our website in April 2021. Fiona’s blog tells of Hannah’s eventful life.
If you were asked to name the most successful cookery writer of all time, the chances are you might mention Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson. Perhaps the more historically minded would say Escoffier or Brillat Savarin or even Apicius. But you would all be wrong. The answer lies much closer to home.
Among the treasures in the Northumberland Archives are a few precious letters and documents gifted by the Allgood family. They contain much of the story of the real ‘most successful cookery writer of all time’. That they are not better known is an illustration of how easy it is for extraordinary figures to disappear – especially if they are women.
The story begins with Isaac Allgood (1683-1725), a Northumbrian landowner with an estate near Hexham. He improved on an already comfortable fortune by marrying the daughter of a London wine merchant. We know little about her but she must have been a very tolerant wife for, not long after her marriage, she took into her household Isaac’s infant daughter by his long-term mistress Hannah Reynolds. This child, also called Hannah, was to become our lost Northumbrian heroine.
Young Hannah was born in London in 1708 but brought up and educated near Hexham at the Allgood family estate. She appears to have been raised as a full member of the family and had close relationships with her half-brother Lancelot Allgood and various Allgood aunts and uncles. She certainly saw herself as an Allgood to the extent that she repudiated her natural mother, dismissed in an Archive document as a ‘wicked wretch’.
At sixteen Hannah was back in London in the care of her grandmother. Apparently, the grandmother was quite strict and Hannah rather spirited. However, despite firm supervision, Hannah managed to meet and then secretly marry John Glasse, a subaltern not then in service, a widower and older than Hannah by some margin. Furious Allgood letter writers paint him as an aged fortune hunter. But Hannah is clearly bedazzled by him, protesting in her letters that although he has but little fortune he has talents that will secure him a good living in time. John too wrote to the family contesting their views about him. His letters demonstrate his own high opinion of himself.
Although it took some years for the family to forgive Hannah for her secret and, in their eyes, rash marriage, eventually the correspondence shows a rapprochement. They did, however, retain a wariness about John.
Hannah’s continued attachment to her Northumbrian family is clear from her letters from Essex and then London where she and John lived. She often sent gifts or procured goods at their request. She writes of nuts and quilts and all manner of items to be sent by cart. The family in turn provided a small annuity though they were careful to dedicate it to her use and not to allow John Glasse to have a claim on it.
Thus far there is nothing special or heroic about this headstrong young woman with her unsatisfactory husband and, soon enough, a large brood of children. What distinguishes Hannah is what she did to make up for John’s frequently inventive but always disastrous business ventures.
Hannah applied energy and imagination to a series of undertakings with admittedly mixed success. The foremost of these, and the enterprise for which she should be remembered, was her cookbook: ‘The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind ever yet Printed’. The first edition was published in 1747 under the sobriquet ‘A Lady’ and was an immediate success.
Let us for the moment gloss over the sadder parts of Hannah’s entrepreneurial history, the highly successful (until it was not) habit-making shop patronised by the Prince of Wales et al., the attempt at promoting Daffy’s Elixir as a panacea, the spells of bankruptcy and incarceration in debtors’ prison. Her business acumen definitely had holes in it. However, in creating her cookbook she showed true flair.
The Allgood letters help us reconstruct the story. Hannah writes to her Northumberland relatives announcing her intentions of making a book, asking for recipes, and soliciting subscriptions. A first publication like hers needed subscribers – a sort of crowd funding of its time – to succeed. Her family supported her as did others often from quite distinguished households.
In the foreword to her book she explains how she spotted a gap in the cookbook market for something quite basic – a proto-Delia’s How to Cook perhaps. Her keen eye saw the floundering new middle classes unable to instruct their servants, and those servants unable to understand fancy French cookbooks and methods. Hannah’s offer was simplicity. She factored in the limited education, equipment and indeed funds available to these households. She adapted fashionable French recipes explaining in detail how to prepare and anglicise them. She promoted seasonality and use of local produce; the wars and tensions that impeded imports from Europe were, even then, a feature of her letters.
She had considerable marketing ability – she sold her book in the premises of high-class suppliers of tableware establishing it as a necessity for the affluent household. It became the most used and referenced cookbook of its time not only in England but in the Americas and throughout the English-speaking world.
Alas, her story does not end well. Whether through her own financial failings or John’s posthumous debts, she was forced to sell the copyright of her book less than ten years after its first publication. She watched as future editions – thirty or more of them – made money for others. To add to her misery these later editions carried her name where their predecessors had been anonymous.
Hannah died in 1770 in Newcastle. A notice in the London Gazette merely notes the death of Sir Laurence Allgood’s sister.
Hannah’s fan club includes historic figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin as well as Clarissa Dickson Wright, who called her ‘the first domestic goddess’. But where is her memorial? Where indeed!
