The Coobook of Ada de la Harpe

I introduced you to my grandmother's cookbook in the last post on making breuder, so I thought I'd tell you more about her and the cookbook.

Ada lived through the latter part of the 1800’s and into the 1950’s. She was a housewife, and like other Burgher women of her time she oversaw the kitchen and the preparation of meals. At some time in her life, I’m not sure just when and my mother is also not certain, she set about documenting her recipes. 

Keeping a personal recipe book was not an uncommon practice among woman householders of the times.

What I think is unusual about Ada’s is that she seems to have sat down and written all of it at the one time, perhaps from notes or cards she once had and perhaps some from memory. Most personal cookbooks like hers are a grab bag of recipes written or pasted in as the collector finds or is given recipes they want to keep. Ada’s is organised as a formal cookbook, with separate sections that follow each other in a sequence with no blank pages between for adding new recipes in. The pages are numbered and there is an index at the back. Finally, the recipes are ordered in groups according to the style of the dish and these groups are ordered generally according to the form of an English meal - soup, fish, meat, chutneys and accompaniments, puddings, cakes (with a few deviations  - eggs, sauces, and salads coming between the soup and fish).

That is, she clearly wrote the book from start to finish with a clear plan in mind and knowing exactly what recipes she wanted to record. Certainly, once she finished recording what she had, she added no more. When my mother took over the book she used it in the more usual way: some of her recipes are hand written but many are cutout from magazines, and they aren't bracketed together according to style of dish.

The book also lacks recipes for vegetable curries, many sambols, hoppers, dosai, pittu or other features of the Sri Lankan Burgher table. When I asked my mum why this might be, she suggested that perhaps how to prepare vegetables was common knowledge or considered too simple and straightforward to write a recipe for. I think their are two other likely reasons. Often books like these were ones in which a woman would record dishes that were specialties of hers, ones that she may have adapted or created or was particularly known for within and outside of the family, ones again that were usually more complicated or difficult and needed more than common knowledge. Ada's Christmas Cake recipe is a good example of this. 

The other reason is that in Ada's house, as in the houses of most Sri Lankan Burghers, most of the cooking was not done by the woman head of the house but by a hired cook, usually a Singhalese or Tamil girl or woman, but sometimes also a boy or man. My father told me that cooks were generally selected, after recommendation, on the basis of being able to prepare basic Sri Lankan food - rice and curry - and istek, istu, and cutliss, that is beefsteak, stew and cutlets, the simplest of European dishes and ones that they could be trusted to make without supervision. The rest of the European dishes in the repertoire of the Burgher woman were her responsibility. Hence the recipes in Ada's book for liver and bacon, broiled beef and mutton, blancmange, chocolate cake and such.

I've updated some of Ada's recipes on my Sri Lankan food site. As a project for this year I will now work my way through all of her recipes, updating them as necessary. I'll post them on the blog as I do them. They provide a fascinating look into the domestic life of an ethnic group that is in decline.


I will blog at a later time about the domestic servants in the households of women like Ada - a fascinating area about which little has been formally written.