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MARY HAWKER - HER BOOK - 1691

Mary Hawker started writing her 'cookery' notebook in the reign of WIlliam & Mary, shortly
after her marriage to John Christopher Hawker in 1691. John Hawker was a yeoman farmer,
Who had inherited a house and land to the noth of London (then a very much smaller town), on
the edge of a very much larger Epping Forest. Mary was born in the time of CharlesI I, and
about the same time as Swift, Vanbrugh, Congreve and Addison, not very long after the great
plague and the fire of London. She grew up while Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries, Purcell
his music and Wren a-building, and lived through the reigns of Queen Anne, George I and into
the reign of George II. Through a period of great changes, the first glimpses of industrialisaton,
empire building, and religious re-appraisal, while famous men such as Parnell, Handel, Lord
Bolingbroke, Back, Pope, Hogarth, the Duke of Marlborough, John Wood, Bengamin Fraklyn,
Fielding, Samuel Johnson and so many more, were about their business.

In the home, cooking was solely over open fires, wood, peat or charcoal, set in large open
fireplaces; on turnspits, in cauldrons and skillets. Larger homes and farm houses sometimes had
one-chamber brick domed bread ovens, pre-heated by burning bundles of faggots in the oven, and
the baking done in the residual heat, on metal sheets or trays after the hot embers had been raked
out. No form of iron stove was seen until the end of the 18th century. The kitchen fire and
fireplace formed the focus of most ordinary household activities, and the fire was rarely allowed
to go out, a portion being kept going overnight under a couvert-feu (curfew). Coal was only used
in fireplaces in very limited areas of the country, where it was easily available from the surface,
it was not in general use until the middle of the 19th century when the railways were beginning
to make wider distribution a possibility.

In the kitchen, and the home generally, heavy oak furniture was common, a little beech and
walnut was occasionally seen, but mahogany was not importe until the 1720's, and then in
very small quantities, and was very much a luxury wood for many years.

For those days, Mary was an educated woman, the ability to read and write at all fluently was
still very rare among the general population. Mary had learnt a version of shorthand, similar in
some respects to Pepy's Shelton's Tachygraphy, into which she lapsed readily, as can be seen on
pages 17 and 18.

Alex.
Wondered if you might be interested to see the whole book, before I send it all away to a distant relative.
30 + pages, handwritten, copy.
Holly
'phone 239
1st 3 lines pure fiction