Today, August 1st, is Yorkshire Day.

If you’re a Downton Abbey fan, you already have a stake in this one. The Crawleys’ fictional estate sits in Yorkshire, England’s largest historic county, and the same county that gets its own civic holiday every August 1.

I wrote up the real story behind it this week: a battle in 1759, a protest in 1975, and the food that would have been on a table like the Crawleys’ long before anyone thought to name a day after the county.

What’s in the full post

• Why Yorkshire Day lands on August 1 (it’s not a random date)

• How a protest against a 1974 boundary change turned into an official civic celebration by 1985

• Four foods worth knowing, and the real history behind each: Yorkshire pudding, parkin, Wensleydale cheese, and curd tart

• Where Downton Abbey’s real filming locations actually are, and how that compares to the Crawleys’ fictional Yorkshire address

Read the full history →

This Week’s Recipe: Yorkshire Curd Tart

Curd tart is Yorkshire’s answer to cheesecake: curd cheese, currants, lemon zest, and a good grating of nutmeg, baked into a shortcrust shell. It’s been a Yorkshire teatime staple since the 1600s, and it’s still the top order at Betty’s Tea Room in York.

The recipe in the full post is built for an American kitchen. Real curd cheese is nearly impossible to find here, so it’s adapted for well-drained cottage cheese instead. No specialty order required.

Get the recipe →

One More Thing

None of these dishes survived because they were fashionable. They survived because they worked: they used what the county had on hand, fed people well, and tasted good enough to keep making for three hundred years. That’s worth remembering the next time a recipe calls for something humble.

Put the kettle on. More from Yorkshire soon.

P.S.

If you make the curd tart, hit reply and tell me how it went. I read every one.

Our ancestors didn’t waste milk. They couldn’t afford to.

Sometime around the 1300s, someone’s milk curdled in their cottage kitchen, and instead of throwing it out, they ate it. No recipe book, no equipment, just a way to stretch what they had. That single decision fed people for 700 years, and it’s the reason we’re still calling it cottage cheese.

I made a batch last week thinking about that. We don’t have their problem anymore, milk doesn’t sour overnight in most kitchens, but we’ve got a different one: paying $6 for something that costs about a dollar to make the same way they did.

What They Were Solving For

Farmers with dairy cows had more milk than they could use fresh. Milk left out soured fast, so instead of losing it, they let it curdle on purpose, drained off the liquid, and ate what was left. That was the whole method. No science, just necessity.

By the 1700s and 1800s, the fix had moved up the social ladder. Edwardian households served it dressed with cream, herbs, or fruit at luncheon, the same cheese their grandparents made out of necessity, now sitting on good china.

The method never changed. Just who was eating it, and why.

What We’re Solving For Now

We’re not worried about milk spoiling. We’re worried about the grocery bill. A carton at the store runs $5 to $7. Making it yourself, with the same basic method as 700 years ago, costs about a dollar.

Twice a week, that’s $500 to $600 a year. Our ancestors weren’t thinking about a budget line item. But the logic holds up the same way: don’t pay for something you can make yourself with what’s already cheap and on hand.

The ingredient list hasn’t grown either. Milk, acid, salt. No gums, no stabilizers, nothing added to make it sit on a shelf for a month. That’s not a new health trend. That’s just what food looks like before it’s processed to survive a supply chain.

Their Method, Your Kitchen

It takes 30 minutes, a kitchen thermometer, and three ingredients: milk, an acid, and salt. Nothing exotic, nothing you can’t find in a regular grocery store.

I put the full recipe, with exact measurements and step-by-step instructions, up on the blog: https://bit.ly/3QTxu6R

What to Do With It

Warm, with berries and honey, for breakfast. Cold, with diced cucumber, tomato, and fresh dill, for lunch. Mixed with lemon zest and herbs on toast. Swapped in for ricotta in lasagna, tangier and lighter. Or just on toast with everything bagel seasoning.

The Edwardians served theirs with jam and cream. Different table, same instinct: it doesn’t need much next to it, just something acidic or something sweet.

The Thrift Hasn’t Gone Anywhere

Our ancestors made cottage cheese because wasting milk wasn’t an option. We can make it because paying six times the price for the same thing doesn’t make sense either. Different reasons, same method, same result: less waste, more food, for less money.

Make a batch. See what a 700-year-old fix does for your grocery bill.

If you make a batch, hit reply and let me know how it turned out. And if someone forwarded you this and you’d like more food history dug up and turned into something useful, subscribe below.

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Wimbledon runs from 29 June to 12 July 2026, and while the grass and the whites and the strawberries stay put, everything else on the plate has quietly moved with the century. Put a 1920s member’s luncheon next to the menu Wimbledon launched this year and you get a tidy little history of British taste, told in food.

I set the two tables side by side on the blog, course by course. One for Lord Grantham. One for this summer. Here is a taste of what you will find.

What is Wimbledon?

If you are new to it, here is the short version. Wimbledon, officially The Championships, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, played in the London suburb of the same name since 1877. It is the only Grand Slam still played on grass, it runs for two weeks each summer, and it is famous for its traditions: all-white dress for players, a Royal Box, and strawberries and cream for the crowd. The 2026 edition runs from 29 June to 12 July. For our purposes, it is also a hundred-year record of how Britain likes to eat, which is what this post is really about.

The strawberry never changed. Almost.

For a hundred years, the strawberry meant one thing at Wimbledon: berries, cream, sugar, served sweet. A bowl still costs just £2.85, still picked by hand each morning. But for the first time, the 2026 kitchen also serves the strawberry pickled, in a savoury ponzu, treated more like a vegetable than a pudding. Even the most sacred fruit at Wimbledon now has a savoury cousin.

The chicken tells the whole story

The Edwardians served roast chicken plainly done, the safe centre of a respectable table. The 2026 menu serves it with vadouvan, a gentle French curry spice. The Empire brought spice into British kitchens slowly and timidly. Today a curry-spiced chicken sits on the Wimbledon menu with no apology at all. The British table finally caught up to the British pantry.

The rest is on the blog

That is only two courses. The full post walks through the whole meal: from Dover sole to spicy prawns, from a roast joint to venison tartare, from soft sauced vegetables to crisp fried artichokes, and the lovely thrift of turning surplus strawberries into a house-made hot sauce. It closes with an easy way to set your own then-and-now table this fortnight, no debenture ticket required.

Read the full article here: A Century of Wimbledon Lunches: What the Crawleys Ate vs the 2026 Menu

Once you have read it, you will never look at a “new” menu the same way again. You will read it like a food historian.

If you enjoy food history with a plate in your lap, subscribe to follow along. I cover the tables of Downton Abbey and the Gilded Age, one recipe and one story at a time.

And if you know someone who watches Wimbledon for the strawberries as much as the tennis, pass this along.

The fireworks this year mark 250 years of the United States. The hot dogs on your grill do not go back nearly that far. In fact, most of what we think of as “classic” Fourth of July food is younger than the Gilded Age mansions in Newport.

I went looking for what Americans actually ate on the Fourth a century and a half ago, rich and poor, and set it beside the 2026 cookout. The full course-by-course comparison is up on the blog. Here is the taste that will make you want to read the rest.

The food that never changed

Strip away the burgers and the flag cake, and three things on your table would be perfectly familiar to a Gilded Age cook: ice cream, lemonade, and iced tea.

Ice cream was the crown of a Gilded Age summer, but it was work. Ice was cut from ponds in winter, packed in sawdust in an icehouse, and hand-cranked into cream on the Fourth. Lemonade ran the everyday celebration, sometimes the pink kind. And iced tea was catching on fast. The oldest printed sweet iced tea recipe shows up in an 1879 cookbook, and it took the country by storm at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Same three drinks and desserts, 150 years apart. Every era keeps the thing everyone came for and reinvents the rest.

The food that flipped completely

Here is the fact that surprised me most. Lobster was once poor people’s food. In colonial America it was so plentiful it washed up in piles and got fed to prisoners and servants. Then the railroad and the great restaurants of the Gilded Age turned it into a luxury. Delmonico’s in New York put lobster in butter, cream, and Madeira and called it Lobster Newburg, and suddenly the seafood once used as bait anchored the finest tables in the country.

The burger and the hot dog went the other direction. The all-American cookout plate we treat as timeless is younger than the Newport cottages. Both were brought over and popularized by German immigrants, then became the very taste of Independence Day.

The Vanderbilts would have recognized good beef and been baffled by the bun.

The number that says it all

The American Farm Bureau puts a 2026 Fourth of July cookout for 10 people at $73.82, about $7.38 a head. A single Newport dinner party could burn through a working family’s yearly wage. The celebration got a great deal cheaper, and far more of us got invited.

What to make this Fourth

You do not need a Newport cottage to taste the contrast. Set poached salmon with new potatoes and peas on one side of the table, the true old New England Fourth, and burgers and a lobster roll on the other. Finish with hand-churned ice cream and a pitcher of iced tea, and you have served 250 years of the Fourth in one sitting.

On the blog, I have laid out the whole then-and-now, course by course, plus recipes for the poached salmon, the lobster roll, and the original 1894 Delmonico’s Lobster Newburg straight from the chef who invented it.

Read the full article on DowntonAbbeyCooks.com

One more thought

Two hundred and fifty years of the Fourth tell the same story as 250 years of the country. America kept its ice cream and its lemonade and changed almost everything else on the plate. The mansion dinner gave way to the potluck. That is not a loss of tradition. It is how a tradition stays alive and how it finally made room for everyone.

Keep the ice cream, fire up the grill, and enjoy the birthday.

— Pamela

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What to do with garlic scapes before the season ends

If you grow hardneck garlic, you know what’s happening right now.

The scapes are up. Those curling green stems that appear a few weeks before the bulbs are ready to harvest. They need to come off -- leaving them on means smaller bulbs -- and most gardeners compost them without a second thought.

Mrs. Patmore would have found that baffling.

A quick note on garlic in Edwardian England

Garlic had a complicated reputation in upper-class Edwardian households. It was considered too French, too pungent, too associated with working-class and continental cooking to appear on a formal dinner table. You would not have found it on the menu at a house like Downton Abbey -- at least not upstairs.

Below stairs was entirely different. The kitchen garden fed the whole household, and a cook like Mrs. Patmore was a practical person. She would have used what the garden offered, and she would not have wasted it. Garlic scapes, mild and seasonal and brief, would have gone straight into the cooking.

The techniques she would have reached for -- compound butter, blended herb sauces, cream soups built on kitchen garden produce -- are all well documented in Edwardian cookbooks. They are also, as it turns out, very good ways to use garlic scapes.

Four recipes worth making this week

I’ve put together a full garlic scape guide on the site this week. Four recipes, all rooted in the Edwardian kitchen garden tradition, each one suited to the ingredient’s mild, fresh character.

Grilled garlic scapes with lemon and Parmesan

Ten minutes. The char is the point: high heat caramelizes the natural sugars and adds a smoky edge you don’t get from roasting or sautéing. Lemon and finely grated Parmesan finish it. This one’s already been on the site for a while, and it remains the simplest introduction to the ingredient.

Garlic scape compound butter

Also ten minutes, but the payoff lasts all summer. The butter keeps in the freezer for two months. Make a batch now and slice off rounds in August to finish a grilled chop or melt over new potatoes. Compound butter was a staple of Edwardian cooking on both floors of the house -- practical, versatile, and prepared in advance.

Kitchen garden green sauce

Five minutes, no cooking. Scapes blended with flat-leaf parsley, white wine vinegar, and olive oil. Vinegar-based rather than oil-heavy, which makes it sharper and a better match for rich proteins. Think British salsa verde. Keeps three days in the fridge.

Cream of garlic scape soup

Ready in thirty minutes. This is the one that surprises people -- they expect it to be aggressively garlicky and it isn’t. Scapes are considerably milder than cloves, and once they’re cooked down with potato and finished with cream, the result is pale green, gently flavoured, and genuinely good. The base freezes well, which means you can make it now and have it in October.

The window is short

Garlic scapes are only available for two to three weeks in late June and early July. If you grow your own, the clock is already running. If you don’t, check your farmers’ market this week -- they go fast and vendors sell out.

The full guide with all four recipes, the Edwardian history, storage notes, and FAQs is on Downton Abbey Cooks now. Read the full garlic scape guide here.

Until next time,

Pamela

Downton Abbey Cooks -- Edwardian food history and recipes for the modern kitchen.

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Amazon Prime Day 2026 is underway. It runs through Friday, June 26, four full days in total and earlier than usual. It landed in June for the first time since 2021, which puts it right in the middle of garden party season. The Crawleys hosted theirs on the lawn. Yours might be on a patio. Either way, the kitchen does the work, and this is the week to re-arm it for less.

I have spent a lifetime in the kitchen, much of it recreating dishes from the Downton kitchens. So I will save you the scrolling. I know which tools earn their keep and which ones end up in a drawer you never open.

One rule before you shop

Prime Day is good at one thing: making you buy what you were not planning to buy. So shop it backwards. Decide what you actually need first, then check the price. If it is not cheaper than usual, close the tab. Mrs. Patmore did not waste a thing, and neither should your cart.

If you only buy three things

Make them the ones you use every day.

A sharp chef’s knife, so the onion stops being a chore. A cast iron skillet, which gets better with age, the way a copper pot did under a scullery maid’s cloth. A digital thermometer, so the roast comes out right the first time. None of them are exciting. All of them quietly make you a better cook, which is the only thing a tool is really for.

My full list is on the site

I have sorted the rest by what you need, so you can skip straight to it. Knives and prep. Cookware. Small appliances. Bakeware. Tea and serving pieces for summer entertaining. The unglamorous essentials no one photographs and everyone needs. Plus a short FAQ on whether Prime Day is even worth it, and how to tell a real deal from a pretend one.

Read the full Prime Day kitchen list here.

There are still a few days left. The sale ends Friday, June 26. A sponge for tea, a tart for the table, a cold drink on the lawn. That is the after-worth shopping for.

See you on the lawn,

Pamela

Father’s Day is complicated when your father is gone.

You still want to mark the day. You just need a different way in.

This year I am honouring my dad, Steve Denecky, KC. He passed away the day after Father’s Day last year. He was a lawyer, a farmer and cattleman, a Lion, a Scout leader, and a devoted husband to my mother for 64 years. But he was happiest on a boat with a rod in hand.

He loved to fish. And he loved to eat what he caught.

Where These Recipes Come From

Every year, my dad, my brothers, and I drove to the West Coast to fish the deep ocean waters near Alaska. We came home with huge coolers full of salmon, halibut, lingcod, red snapper, and crabs. Beautiful fish. Enough for the year in a freezer for our family, friends and dad’s clients.

Over the years, I developed new ways to serve, from simply stuffing on the BBQ to creating elegant meals for special guests.

That is where these recipes come from. Not a cookbook. Not a cooking class. Annual fishing trips with my dad, a full freezer, and a kitchen that smelled like the coast for weeks.

If your father took you fishing, or if he simply loved a great piece of fish, these recipes are for him, too.

Why Fish Belongs on a Tribute Table

Fish was not an afterthought at Edwardian dinners. It was a centrepiece.

In the era that inspired Downton Abbey, every formal dinner included a fish course. Poached salmon with mousseline sauce. Salmon rissoles in puff pastry. Halibut prepared with care and served with intention.

The Edwardians understood what many modern cooks have forgotten: a beautifully prepared piece of fish is quiet, elegant, and deeply satisfying. No fuss. No show. Just good technique and good flavour.

That sounds like the kind of man a lot of our fathers were.

The Recipes

I have seven fish recipes on the site that are worth making this weekend. Here is a quick taste of what is there.

For the ceremonial dinner: Poached Salmon with Mousseline Sauce is the most Edwardian of the lot. Served hot or cold, it works for a crowd.

For something unexpected: Chamomile Tea Salmon marinates the fish in tea, honey, lemon, and lavender. It is delicate, aromatic, and genuinely beautiful on a plate.

For the weeknight cook: Creamy Garlic Salmon is ready in 25 minutes. The fish is the star. Everything else just helps it along.

For halibut lovers: The Hazelnut Crusted Halibut with Boozy Blackberry Sauce is the showstopper. The colours alone are worth it.

For the dad who just wanted fish and chips: This one is for him. Battered, fried golden, served with malt vinegar. No pretense required.

See all seven recipes on the site and find the one that fits your table.

How to Make It a Tribute

A few simple things can turn dinner into something more.

Pull out a photo. Tell the story of where the fish came from. Let the kids ask questions. If he had a favourite way he liked his fish prepared, get as close to that as you can.

The Edwardians understood that food is ceremony. A meal prepared with care says something that words often cannot.

Your father knew that too, even if he never said so.

What did your father love to eat? Tell me in the comments. I would love to hear.

And if you are cooking for Father’s Day this weekend, I hope the meal is good, and the stories are better.

Pamela

Downton Abbey Cooks — Great food has a history.
Browse the full Father’s Day recipe collection on the site.

Every spring it happens.

The chives bolt. Those soft purple pom-poms appear, look pretty for a few days, and then get composted along with everything else we don’t quite get around to using.

I’ve been guilty of it too.

This week on Downton Abbey Cooks, I finally wrote the post I’ve been meaning to write for years. It’s about chive blossoms: what they taste like, why the timing matters, and how the Edwardians would have used them.

The short answer on flavour: the blossom is milder than the stem. Oniony, slightly garlicky, gentle enough to use raw. Where a chopped chive can feel sharp in a delicate dish, the florets just quietly do their job.

The Edwardian angle: the kitchen garden at a house like Downton would have supplied the dining room with chives as a staple. The blossoms were there every spring. A good cook didn’t let them go to waste. Neither should you.

The full post, recipes, and harvesting notes are here:

Chive Blossoms: The Pretty Purple Flower You Should Be Cooking With Right Now

If you grow chives and you’ve been letting the blossoms go, this is the year to stop.

Until next week, Pamela

Downton Abbey Cooks | Great food has a history

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Memorial Day did not start with a grill.

It started in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865. Weeks after the Civil War ended, thousands of freed Black Americans gathered at a former horse-racing track where Confederate forces had buried Union soldiers in mass graves. They reburied the dead with dignity. They built a fence. They held a ceremony.

Then they had a picnic.

That combination -- solemnity in the morning, food and company in the afternoon -- has defined this holiday for 160 years. We’ve just forgotten where it came from.

The Holiday the Veterans Didn’t Recognize

Decoration Day became a national holiday in 1889. By then, the United States was deep in the Gilded Age -- a period of rapid industrial growth, vast wealth, and, at the table, a very particular food culture.

The Civil War veterans who had lobbied for the holiday wanted it kept solemn. What they got, by the 1890s, was baseball games, bicycle races, and picnic grounds full of families who had packed a hamper and headed for the park the moment the morning ceremony ended.

Newspapers of the era document the drift. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer complained in 1899 that the holiday had become an occasion for “picnics, outings, and other amusements.” President Grover Cleveland reportedly spent one Decoration Day fishing. In 1911, the first Indianapolis 500 was held on May 30 before a crowd of 85,000.

The Grand Army of the Republic was not amused.

But the picnic was not a betrayal. It was what happens when a solemn holiday lands at the start of warm weather in a country that was growing wealthier and more mobile. People stepped outside. They brought food. They sat down together.

What Was Actually in the Hamper

This is the part that surprises people.

The Gilded Age picnic was built around one practical constraint: no refrigeration, no kitchen, and often a long carriage ride to the grounds. The food had to travel well and taste good at room temperature.

Cold roast chicken was the anchor. It appeared on virtually every middle-class picnic menu of the era. A spring picnic list from Queen of the Household (c. 1900) included cold roast chicken, cold baked ham, egg salad, hard-boiled eggs, buttered rolls, chow chow, pickles, orange marmalade, quince jelly, sugared strawberries, white cake, and almond cake.

That was a typical spread. Not Delmonico’s, but not humble either.

The full Gilded Age picnic basket ran to:

Proteins: Cold fried chicken, ham, tongue, meat sandwiches Eggs: Hard-boiled, deviled, stuffed Salads: Egg salad, chicken salad, cabbage slaw Bread and condiments: Buttered rolls, pickles, olives, jellies, mustard Sweets: Coconut cake, almond cake, sponge cake, tarts Drinks: Lemonade, ginger beer, cider, raspberry vinegar

Mayonnaise had just arrived in American kitchens and showed up in every salad. Sandwiches were filled with ground or chopped meats mixed with butter -- not the simple sliced-meat constructions of earlier decades.

And then there was raspberry vinegar.

The Drink You’ve Never Heard Of

Raspberry vinegar was not a condiment. It was the default non-alcoholic summer drink of the 1880s and 1890s -- listed alongside lemonade and ginger beer on Decoration Day picnic menus, and included by Mrs. Mary J. Lincoln in the Boston Cook Book (1884) as an essential summer preparation.

The method: steep fresh raspberries in white wine vinegar for two days, strain, cook down with sugar, dilute with cold water and pour over ice.

Think of it as the kombucha of 1885. Tart, deeply flavoured, and genuinely refreshing.

The recipe goes back to American household manuscripts of the 1840s. The trick is passing the same vinegar through two batches of fresh fruit before cooking -- a double-steep that concentrates the flavour in a way a single steep never quite achieves.

It takes two days and three ingredients. The result keeps for three months in the fridge, or up to a year if you water-bath can it properly.

Get the recipe here: Victorian American Raspberry Vinegar

The Same Holiday, 160 Years Later

The Gilded Age Decoration Day picnic is the direct ancestor of your Memorial Day weekend. Cold chicken became grilled burgers. Raspberry vinegar became iced tea. The potato salad stayed.

The structure has never changed: solemn in the morning, food and company in the afternoon.

The 10,000 people who gathered in Charleston in 1865 understood something that still holds. They buried the dead with dignity. Then they sat down together and ate.

That’s not a betrayal of the occasion. That’s how communities hold grief alongside ordinary life.

It always has been.

Happy Memorial Day.

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This long weekend, most Canadians are firing up the grill and cracking open a two-four. Americans south of the border are gearing up for Memorial Day the following week. But if you want to understand what Victoria Day is really about, start with a fact that surprises most people: Queen Victoria was not a dainty eater.

She ate fast, she ate a lot, and the food she loved shaped a century of British entertaining — including everything that landed on the Downton Abbey table.

A Quick Primer for Our American Readers

Victoria Day falls on the Monday before May 25 each year. It marks the birthday of Queen Victoria, born May 24, 1819, and has been a Canadian public holiday since 1845 — one of the oldest on the continent.

Scotland observes it too, in its own quiet way. Edinburgh and Dundee still list Victoria Day as an official local holiday in 2026 — in Scottish Gaelic, Latha Victoria — though it has been fading for decades and many residents no longer know it exists. Victoria’s deep love of Scotland, Balmoral, Highland culture, and the Scottish table almost certainly explains why those two cities kept the holiday long after the rest of the UK let it go.

Canada never let it go at all. Here, it signals fireworks, garden planting, and the first real long weekend of summer. We also call it the May Two-Four, which is Canadian slang for a 24-case of beer. That tells you how solemnly we take the solemnity.

What Victoria Actually Ate

The popular image of Queen Victoria is a small, stern woman in perpetual mourning. At the table, the reality was quite different.

She ate fast. Royal protocol required that once the Queen set down her fork, everyone stopped eating. Since she moved quickly through her courses, guests at the royal table routinely went hungry. This was not an uncommon complaint among the aristocracy.

What she chose to eat is equally revealing. Victoria was not a food snob. She preferred plain English roasting — beef, game birds, mutton — over the elaborate French cuisine fashionable at other European courts. She loved potatoes in almost any form. She drank a mix of claret and Scotch whisky at dinner, a habit she picked up at Balmoral. She enjoyed Brown Windsor Soup, a hearty English beef broth, and turtle soup, which was considered the great delicacy of the era.

Her attachment to Scotland went beyond the summer retreat. She embraced Highland life with genuine enthusiasm, learning Gaelic, wearing tartan, and eating Scottish food whenever the opportunity arose. Game from the Balmoral estate — venison, grouse, pheasant — appeared regularly at her table. She preferred Scottish shortbread to the elaborate French pastries available at other royal courts. It was a deliberately unfussy choice from a woman with access to the finest cuisine in Europe.

The picture you get is someone who genuinely liked food, but chose honest and satisfying over theatrical.

What Changed at Downton

Queen Victoria died in January 1901. Her son, Edward VII, was a different character entirely.

Edward loved French cuisine, elaborate multi-course meals, and the pleasures of the table on a grand scale. Under his reign, the aristocratic dinner grew longer, richer, and more overtly Continental. Consommé replaced Brown Windsor Soup at fashionable tables. Fish courses, game courses, and ices became the expected standard.

This is the table Mrs. Patmore inherited at Downton Abbey. When we watch her rushing between the kitchen and the service stairs, she is managing menus shaped by Edward VII’s tastes, built on foundations laid by Victoria. The Victorian simplicity never entirely disappeared — afternoon tea remained a constant, plain roasted meats still anchored the dinner menu — but the Edwardian era added considerable French ambition to what had been a fundamentally English tradition.

What to Make This Weekend

Skip the Victoria Sponge for once — you have that recipe already, and so do I. This weekend, try Eton Mess instead.

It is exactly what the name implies: a generous, happy mess of crushed meringue, whipped cream, and fresh strawberries. It was served at the annual cricket match between Eton College and Harrow School, a fixture of the Edwardian social calendar and the kind of event the Crawley family would have attended without a second thought.

No baking required. Comes together in minutes. Uses strawberries just coming into season.

You can find my Eton Mess recipe here on the website.

One More Thought

Many of us have quietly wondered whether Canada might someday establish a holiday in honour of Queen Elizabeth II. She reigned for 70 years and visited Canada more than any other Commonwealth nation. It seems only fitting. Perhaps the calendar will catch up eventually.

Until then, enjoy the long weekend. Whatever you are eating, eat it outdoors if you can.

— Pamela

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Dear Readers,

Before you visit your mom today, I want to tell you the real history of Mother’s Day. It’s a story about food history, peace, and why what you serve matters more than what you spend.

How Mother’s Day Really Started

Mother’s Day wasn’t born from greeting cards. It was born in 1850s Appalachia.

Ann Reeves Jarvis lost 7 to 10 of her children to preventable diseases. Instead of giving up, she became an activist.

In 1858, she organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to fight epidemics. Measles. Typhoid. Diphtheria. Her clubs educated families on sanitation, inspected milk, and provided medicine. They saved lives.

Then came the Civil War.

Ann insisted the women’s groups she organized help soldiers on both sides—Confederate and Union. After the war, she worked to reunite divided communities.

In 1868, she organized Mother’s Friendship Day to bring Civil War families together. Town officials begged her to cancel. Veterans arrived armed. She refused.

Ann stood before the crowd with teenage girls in blue and gray. Other women linked hands in blue and gray. They sang “Dixie” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” together.

Witnesses reported veterans “weeping and shaking hands,” saying, “God bless you, neighbour; let us be friends again.”

That’s the foundation of Mother’s Day: not sentiment, but peace.

The Fight Against Commercialism

Fast forward to 1914. Anna M. Jarvis, Ann’s daughter, got Mother’s Day declared a national holiday. She was intentional about the name: “Mother’s Day,” singular. One day to honour “the best mother who ever lived, yours.”

Then came the bitter irony.

While Anna fought to protect her creation, florists and retailers turned Mother’s Day into a profit machine. She spent her life fighting back. She lost. She died in 1948, blind, poor, and childless. The florists she battled paid for her funeral.

The lesson: the people who create meaning often don’t profit from it. But the legacy matters more.

What to Actually Serve

Give your mother what she actually wants: your time, good food, and thought instead of spending.

Serve her Afternoon Tea.

It’s elegant, doable, and meaningful. You need:

• A pot of good tea

• Scones (homemade or bakery)

• Tiny sandwiches with crusts cut off

• Small desserts

• Cream and jam

You can do this at home in an afternoon.

Your mother gets your time, good food made with thought, and no stress about you hosting at a restaurant. You get to deliver something meaningful instead of something expensive.

A memory that lasts longer than flowers.

Read the Full Story

Read the complete Mother’s Day food history on Downton Abbey Cooks

It includes the complete stories of Ann Reeves Jarvis and Anna M. Jarvis, easy Afternoon Tea recipes, Mother’s Day recipe ideas, and a complete Afternoon Tea guide.

Keep reading Downton Abbey Cooks for real food history and real recipes. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or X.

Happy Mother’s Day.

—Pamela

P.S. This is the kind of food history story we tell every week. The real history. The real recipes. The real meaning behind the food we eat.

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Look at this image.

A pint of dark beer on one side. A fine china teacup on the other. Two very different things. Two very different meals.

Now look at how many tea rooms are advertising their Mother’s Day High Tea packages this week.

There is the problem.

This particular mix-up gets under my skin every time I see it, particularly around Mother’s Day. Not because the distinction is obscure -- it is not -- but because getting it wrong has real consequences for the person sitting across from you at the table on Sunday. And that person is your mother.

A quick note before we begin: this is not a manifesto. Some dads genuinely love Afternoon Tea and will eat a scone with real enthusiasm. Some moms would rather have a pie and a pint. Swap the plans if that fits your family better. The history holds either way.

What Afternoon Tea Actually Is

Afternoon Tea was invented around 1840 by Anna, the 7th Duchess of Bedford. The gap between lunch and the fashionably late Victorian dinner was too long. She started requesting a tray of tea, bread and butter, and small cakes to be sent to her rooms around 4 p.m. She invited friends. It spread. By the 1880s, it was a full social institution among the upper and middle classes.

It is served between 3 and 5 p.m. The food is deliberate and delicate: finger sandwiches with crusts removed, warm scones with clotted cream and jam, small pastries and cakes arranged on a three-tier stand. Fine china. Low occasional tables. A drawing room or parlour.

If you have watched Downton Abbey, you have seen it. The upstairs version, in the drawing room, before dinner. That is Afternoon Tea.

This is what your mother is picturing when she hints about wanting something special for Mother’s Day.

What High Tea Actually Is

High Tea has nothing to do with elegance. The name refers to the height of the table, not the quality of the occasion.

It was a working-class meal eaten at the kitchen or dining table -- a high table, as opposed to the low occasional tables used for Afternoon Tea -- at the end of a working day, around 5 to 7 p.m. The food was substantial and filling: cold meats, pork pies, sausage rolls, bread, cheese, pickles, a strong pot of tea, or a pint if you are lucky.

The Downton Abbey equivalent is the servants’ hall. After a long shift. Before anyone has had a chance to sit down properly.

High Tea is a perfectly good meal. There is nothing wrong with it. It is just not what your mother has in mind when she mentions afternoon tea.

(It is, however, exactly what your father would enjoy at a good local pub in June. But that is a separate post.)

Why the Name Tells You Everything

When a tea room calls their offering High Tea instead of Afternoon Tea, that name is a signal. It tells you the people running it have not bothered to fully understand the meal they are serving. And if they are fuzzy on the name, they may be fuzzy on the details too.

Those details matter more than most people realize.

Clotted Cream Is Non-Negotiable

Clotted cream is not a topping. It is not interchangeable with whipped cream from a tub. It is not a pat of butter. Clotted cream is thick, golden, and rich -- completely different in texture and flavour from anything you can substitute.

Substituting it is the clearest possible sign that a kitchen is going through the motions rather than doing the thing properly.

The test: before you book anywhere, ask one question.

What comes with the scones?

• Clotted cream: they know what they are doing.

• Whipped cream: proceed with caution.

• A pat of butter: find somewhere else.

The Tea Matters Too

A proper Afternoon Tea uses loose-leaf tea, served in a pot, at the table. Individual bags in individual cups is a hotel breakfast. A venue charging Afternoon Tea prices for bagged tea has misunderstood the entire point.

The Sandwiches Should Be Fresh

Finger sandwiches dry out quickly. Curling corners means they were made too far in advance. This is a small thing that tells you a lot about how seriously the kitchen is taking everything else.

What to Look For Before You Book

A venue that truly understands Afternoon Tea will call it Afternoon Tea. That is the first filter. Beyond the name, four questions are worth asking:

Clotted cream or whipped cream with the scones? This is not a minor quibble. It is the most important question on this list.

Loose-leaf tea served in a pot? Or individual bags. The answer tells you where their standards are.

What time is service? Between 3 and 5 p.m. is Afternoon Tea. Noon service is lunch with scones. Both are fine, but they are not the same.

Set menu or buffet? A proper Afternoon Tea is a composed, set service. A buffet is a different experience entirely.

Heritage hotels, historic properties, and dedicated tea rooms with a track record are the safer bet. Restaurants adding Afternoon Tea as a weekend menu option are a gamble.

The Best Option: Make Your Own

If you cannot find a venue that meets the standard -- or would rather skip the search -- make your own at home. You control every detail. No substitutions. No compromises on the cream.

The menu is simpler than it looks:

Bottom tier -- Finger sandwiches: Cucumber and cream cheese on white, smoked salmon with dill butter on brown, egg salad with cress on wholegrain. Crusts off. Cut into quarters. Make more than you think you need. They go faster than you expect.

Middle tier -- Scones: Plain or currant, served warm. With proper clotted cream and good jam. Devon puts the cream on first; Cornwall puts jam on first. Let your mother choose. It is her day.

Top tier -- Small sweets: Macarons, jam tarts, shortbread, petit fours, a slice of Victoria sponge. Generally, nothing that requires a fork.

The tea: Loose-leaf. English Breakfast, Darjeeling, or Earl Grey. Pot on the table. Let people pour for each other. That gesture is part of the whole point.

Serve between 3 and 5 p.m. Tell your guests clearly, or someone will eat a full lunch beforehand and then wonder why the scones are not landing.

The Short Version

Afternoon Tea: delicate, elegant, 3 to 5 p.m., fine china, finger sandwiches, scones with proper clotted cream. Invented by a duchess. What your mother wants.

High Tea: hearty, working-class, 5 to 7 p.m., high table, pies, bread and cheese. Named after the furniture. Perfectly suited to a pub on Father’s Day.

If a venue calls it High Tea and means it as a selling point for Mother’s Day, they do not know what they are selling.

You deserve better. So does your mother.

Book somewhere that gets it right. Or make it at home. My Online Guide to Afternoon Tea. Either way, do get the clotted cream.

If you want to go further with Afternoon Tea, I wrote the book on it. Literally. Relaxing Over Afternoon Tea covers the full history, menus, recipes, and etiquette -- everything you need to host your own or simply enjoy it a little more wherever you go. It also makes a rather good Mother’s Day gift, if someone in your life is still looking for ideas.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Pamela

If this was useful, pass it on, and do call out the tea shop when they get it wrong so they will get it right the next time.

Anyone planning a Mother’s Day outing this weekend could use the clotted cream test. Forward this along or share the link.

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If you watch The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes’s HBO series set in 1880s New York, you already know the world I am about to describe. The elaborate entertaining. The hampers. The servants. The social performance of a meal. The Kentucky Derby of that era was exactly that world, transplanted to Louisville in May.

If you are a Downton Abbey reader who has not yet watched The Gilded Age, it is the American prequel to the world you already love, set thirty years earlier and one ocean away. Same attention to period detail. Same Fellowes instinct for what a household reveals about the people running it. Worth your time.

Both shows understand something that gets lost in modern Derby coverage: in the Gilded Age, the food was the point. The race was the occasion.

I have written about the Derby before, the history, the mint julep, and the social spectacle. This year, I went looking at something more specific: what was actually in the hampers.

Wealthy Gilded Age guests did not eat from concession stands. They packed elaborate hampers the day before and unpacked them in private boxes at Churchill Downs. Cold fried chicken. Beaten biscuits with country ham. Cucumber finger sandwiches. Devilled eggs. Champagne cup in a silver jug. The food was planned, prepared, and carried in. It had to travel well, hold up in the May heat, and look as if it had not travelled at all.

That table was better than what most people serve at Derby parties today. Most of it can be made ahead.

I wrote up the full piece here: What the Kentucky Derby Table Looked Like Before Concession Stands

It covers what was in those hampers, what happened to the Derby table over the next century (short answer: it got worse), and how to put together a Gilded Age-inspired spread for Saturday.

The recipes I have ready for you:

Beaten biscuits with country ham — dense, crisp, nearly extinct, and one of the great small bites of Southern food. Thirty minutes of work the day before. Worth it.

Benedictine spread — cucumber cream cheese finger sandwiches, invented by Louisville caterer Jennie Benedict in the 1890s. Outside Kentucky, almost nobody knows this exists. Inside Kentucky, it is on every Derby table.

Champagne cup — the period drink for guests who are not drinking the bourbon-based mint juleps. Champagne, soda water, brandy, fruit, and cucumber. Mrs. Beeton had the recipe in 1861. Easy to batch.

Claret cup — the wine punch version. Red Bordeaux, soda water, citrus, cucumber, and a pinch of nutmeg. Passed from a shared cup with a napkin looped through the handle, which is either charming or unhygienic depending on your perspective.

Everything can be made ahead. The biscuits keep for a week. The spreads and cups come together in under an hour.

If you are hosting on Saturday, the full article has the timing and the list. If you are just reading, the history of what went into those Gilded Age hampers is worth knowing, regardless of whether you make any of it.

The race is not the only thing to bet on. Take a look at the image of the hamper above and see how many items you can name. Drop your guesses in the comments. Most people get three or four. The answers are in the article.

Either way, enjoy the race.

Pamela

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Every April, I do the same thing. I pick a Titanic recipe I haven’t made in a while and I cook it on the evening of April 14th. Sometimes it’s the Punch Romaine. Sometimes it’s the Consommé Olga. Last year I made the Filet Mignons Lili, which took most of the afternoon and was worth every minute. For the 100th anniversary in 2012, I cooked every dish from every class of service — first class, second class, steerage, all of it. What a marathon.

But this year I’m doing something different. I’m cooking steerage.

We tell this story the wrong way

When people talk about the Titanic’s food — and they do, every April, because the menus are genuinely astonishing — the conversation always starts at the top. The ten-course first-class dinner. The champagne-saffron vinaigrette. The lobster. And I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I’ve spent fifteen years cooking these dishes, and I love doing it.

But this week, while writing a new post for the blog, I found myself stuck on a sentence I’d written almost in passing: “The food quality in third class was still likely better than what these passengers would have eaten at home.”

I’d typed that line years ago. But I’d never really sat with it.

700 people, eating the best meal of their lives

More than 700 people travelled in third class on the Titanic. The vast majority were emigrants — leaving Ireland, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. They were heading to America for a life they’d never lived. Many had never eaten in a dining room. Some had never used an indoor toilet.

On most ships of the era, steerage passengers were expected to bring their own food for the voyage. The Titanic fed them. Three meals a day. Included in the ticket. Served by stewards at proper tables in a real dining room — plain white walls, long communal tables seating 22, but a real dining room nonetheless.

On April 14, 1912 — the last full day — third-class passengers ate:

Breakfast: Oatmeal porridge and milk, smoked herring, jacket potatoes, ham and eggs, fresh bread and butter, marmalade, tea, coffee.

Dinner (midday): Rice soup, fresh bread, cabin biscuits, roast beef with brown gravy, sweet corn, boiled potatoes, plum pudding with sweet sauce.

Supper (evening): Gruel, cabin biscuits, cheese.

That midday dinner — roast beef, plum pudding, fresh bread — was, for many of these passengers, the finest meal they had ever been served. For people leaving famine-scarred Ireland, for families from villages in Sweden where meat was a rare luxury, this was extraordinary.

By supper, the day had quieted. Gruel, biscuits, and cheese. A simple meal to end the day before bed.

By 11:40 PM, the iceberg had struck. The best food most of them had ever eaten was already hours behind them.

Jack Dawson wasn’t wrong

James Cameron’s film Titanic (watch on Amazon Prime) — which turns 30 next year — understood this instinctively. Most of us can picture steerage because of that movie, because of Jack Dawson: a kid who won his third-class ticket in a poker game and boarded with nothing but a sketchbook and a best friend.

Jack wasn’t based on a single real person, but he represents hundreds of them. Young emigrants with no money, no connections, heading toward a future they’d built entirely in their imagination. Cameron made Jack the hero — not Cal — because the real emotional core of the Titanic story lives below decks.

Remember the scene where Rose sneaks down to steerage and finds the communal tables, the music, people dancing in a space that doubles as a social hall? That’s drawn from reality. White Star Line’s own promotional materials boasted about the third-class social hall, complete with a piano. The company understood that happy emigrants talked when they got to America, and word of mouth sold more tickets than any brochure.

The warmth Cameron captured wasn’t artistic licence. It was a business strategy.

The Downton connection

If you’re reading this newsletter, you already understand the upstairs/downstairs dynamic that runs through everything I write about. The Titanic was Downton Abbey made literal. First class was upstairs: ten courses, Escoffier-influenced cuisine, 62 kitchen staff. Third class was downstairs: hearty food, honestly prepared, served at long communal tables.

And just as at Downton, the people downstairs often had more life in them.

The show opens with the sinking of the Titanic, which shattered the certainty of the Edwardian class system. The heirs died. The money was at risk. The assumption that position protected the people at the top was proven catastrophically wrong. Third-class passengers had the lowest survival rate — not because the food was bad, but because the lifeboats were not meant for them.

When we only talk about the first-class menu, we unconsciously replicate that same bias. We remember the wealthy because their menus were more photogenic. But more than 700 people ate in that plain white dining room on April 14th. Most of them didn’t survive the night.

What I’m cooking Tuesday

This year, on the anniversary, I’m making the third-class midday dinner. Rice soup. Roast beef with brown gravy. Sweet corn and boiled potatoes. Plum pudding with sweet sauce. The meal those passengers sat down to in the middle of their last day, when the Atlantic was still calm, and America was still getting closer.

Not the supper — the gruel and cabin biscuits that came later, the last food they were served before everything changed. The midday dinner. The one that mattered. The one that, for many of them, was the best meal they’d ever had.

If you want to do the same, I’ve posted the full steerage menu with recipes and the complete history on the blog this week. I’ve also got a roundup of five dishes across all three classes if you want more options.

And if you want the simplest possible tribute: bake the cabin biscuits. Fifteen minutes. Flour, water, salt, shortening. The recipe the Titanic’s third-class passengers would have recognized instantly. Then raise a glass at 11:40 PM — the moment the ship struck the iceberg — and remember the people who were sitting at those communal tables just hours earlier. They’d had roast beef and plum pudding for dinner. By supper it was gruel and biscuits. By midnight, the ship was sinking, and the lifeboats were not coming for them.

Great food has a history. Theirs deserves to be remembered.

— Pamela

P.S. Tomorrow on the blog: why we keep returning to the Titanic — from 1912 to the OceanGate disaster. The anniversary is on Tuesday. The obsession never ends. I have some thoughts about why.

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Easter weekend at Downton was never just one meal. Three days. Three moods in the kitchen. Each has its own food rules.

Good Friday falls this Friday. While you prepare for your own celebrations, consider what the weekend at Downton would have looked like below stairs and above.

Good Friday: Fish, Not Meat

No meat. Not optional. The Crawleys observed it without question.

Upstairs

Dinner centred on fish. Poached salmon with mousseline sauce was the elegant choice. Eggs en cocotte alongside. Spring vegetables. No elaborate pudding.

Downstairs and the Village

The servants ate fish pie or kedgeree. The village ate fish and chips. By the 1920s, there were 35,000 chip shops across Britain. Good Friday was their busiest day. Carson would never have permitted it upstairs. But in cottages across the country, newspaper-wrapped fish and chips were the Good Friday meal.

Hot Cross Buns

Baked before dawn. Hot cross buns: spiced, fruit-studded, served warm with butter. (My Hot Cross Muffins take 40 minutes if yeast feels like too much.)

Holy Saturday: Controlled Chaos

The busiest day in the kitchen. The lamb is trimmed and seasoned. The simnel cake is topped with eleven marzipan balls. (Judas does not get one.) Easter biscuits are cooling on wire racks. The kitchen garden was raided for every spring vegetable it could offer.

Easter Sunday: The Feast

Church at St. Michael and All Angels. Then home for the meal everyone had been building toward.

The Lamb

Roast spring lamb with mint sauce. Always. The Paschal lamb. Christ as the Lamb of God. Not a menu choice. A statement of faith. Alongside: Duchess potatoes, spring vegetables, a Charlotte Russe. Simnel cake and Easter biscuits at tea.

Carrot Cake: Older Than You Think

The cream cheese version is 1960s American. But carrot cakes go back to medieval England. A published recipe appeared in November 1912. A spiced carrot loaf would have sat comfortably on the Downton tea table. My individual spiced carrot cakes bridge the Edwardian original and the modern classic.

The Easter Egg Hunt

A German tradition brought to England by Queen Victoria’s mother. By the 1900s, egg hunts had spread across upper-class households. Sybbie, George, and Marigold would have hunted eggs on the Downton grounds. Decorated hen’s eggs at first. Chocolate eggs from Cadbury since the 1920s.

For Your Good Friday Table

My Edwardian Baked Cod with Parsley Sauce. Thirty-five minutes. Deeply English comfort food. Or pick up fish and chips. Possibly the most historically authentic Good Friday meal there is.

Your Weekend Plan

Friday: Hot cross buns in the morning. Baked cod or fish and chips for dinner.

Saturday: Easter biscuits. Prep the lamb. Finish the simnel cake.

Sunday: Roast lamb. Duchess potatoes. Carrot cakes and simnel cake for tea. Egg hunt in the garden.

Check out my full article: Good Friday to Easter Sunday at Downton Abbey

Happy Easter, everyone.

Pamela

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If you’re reading this from North America, you might be thinking — wait, isn’t Mother’s Day in May? It is here. But today, March 15th, families across the UK and Ireland are sitting down to Sunday lunch, handing over flowers, and tucking into one of my favourite cakes of the year.

In the UK and Ireland, the celebration is called Mothering Sunday, and it falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent. Dozens of countries around the world officially celebrate Mother’s Day, but the dates — and the traditions — vary widely. And the story behind Mothering Sunday is one I think you’ll love, because it has everything: church, servants, a rare day off, wildflowers picked from hedgerows, and a very old cake.

It Wasn’t About Mothers at All

Mothering Sunday didn’t start as a celebration for mothers. It began in the 16th century, and the word “mothering” referred to the “mother church” — the main church or cathedral of the region, or the church in which you had been baptized. On the fourth Sunday of Lent, people would return to their mother church for a special service. If you made the journey, you were said to have gone “a-mothering.”

The day coincides with Laetare Sunday — also called Mid-Lent Sunday or Refreshment Sunday — a day of respite from fasting halfway through Lent. The strict rules were relaxed: the organ could be played in church, rose-coloured vestments replaced the sombre purple, and families were permitted to enjoy rich foods that were otherwise forbidden during the forty-day fast. The Gospel reading for the day is the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand — a fitting theme for a day that became all about food and family reunion.

A record from 1644 captures the spirit beautifully: families in Worcester would gather at the home of the eldest family member for a feast, and they called it “the Mothering-day.”

A Rare Day Off for Servants

Now here’s where Downton Abbey enters the picture.

For domestic servants — our beloved downstairs staff — Mothering Sunday was one of the very few days off they received all year. It was often the only time when whole families could gather, since on other days they were kept apart by the demands of service.

Children and young people, given the day off, would pick wildflowers along the way — daffodils, primroses, violets from the hedgerows — to place in the church or give to their mothers. In towns and cities where there were no hedgerows to raid, churches would supply the children with violets.

It’s such a lovely image. Imagine Daisy slipping out of the kitchen at Downton with a basket Mrs. Patmore had packed, walking the lanes back to her family, gathering flowers as she went. The reunion itself was the real gift.

How Mothering Sunday Became Mother’s Day

By the 1920s, the custom of keeping Mothering Sunday had largely lapsed across most of Europe. It took Constance Adelaide Smith, an Anglican woman from Nottingham, to revive it. Smith had been inspired by the American Mother’s Day movement — established as a US national holiday in 1914 thanks to the campaigning of Anna Jarvis, who held the first official observance to honour her own mother at a church in West Virginia.

Smith created the Mothering Sunday Movement and, in 1921, published a book calling for the festival’s renewal. But she argued it should honour more than biological mothers — the Mother Church, the Virgin Mary, and Mother Nature all deserved recognition too.

The wider revival came through American and Canadian soldiers serving in Britain during World War II, who brought the idea of “Mother’s Day” with them. The old religious traditions merged with the newer commercial ones, and by the 1950s Mothering Sunday was celebrated across the UK — though increasingly as a secular occasion with cards, chocolates, and gifts.

Traditionally, after church, families would sit down to a Sunday dinner of roast lamb or veal, and the mother would be made Queen of the feast. Some things never change.

In modern Britain, “Mother’s Day” has become the common name in shops and on greeting cards, but the Church of England still invites people on Mothering Sunday to visit the parish church or cathedral in which they were baptized.

The Traditional Mothering Cake: Simnel

No Mothering Sunday would be complete without Simnel cake. Mothering Sunday was sometimes even called “Simnel Sunday” after it.

The word “simnel” likely derives from the Latin simila, meaning fine flour — the whitest and best quality available. References to simnel appear as far back as the 13th century, though it began life as a yeast-leavened bread rather than a cake. It would have been nothing like the rich confection we know today — more likely a bread dough enriched with egg and dried fruit, made special simply by using the finest flour a household could afford.

Here’s the key to understanding why this cake matters: medieval observers could not consume dairy products during the rest of Lent, which ruled out most baked goods. Mothering Sunday marked a temporary break from the fast, allowing people to eat simnel cake, which contained butter and eggs. Think of it as the mirror image of Pancake Tuesday, when eggs and milk are used up before Lent begins. On Refreshment Sunday, you could finally indulge in them again.

By the Stuart era, the simnel had evolved from bread into something closer to a pudding — boiled and then baked. This unusual technique spawned a charming folk tale about a couple named Simon and Nelly who quarrelled over whether the cake should be boiled or baked. They compromised on using both methods, and “Simon and Nelly” was supposedly contracted into “Simnel.” It’s almost certainly fiction, but it’s a wonderful story. Different towns had their own recipes and shapes — Shrewsbury, Bury, and Devizes each claimed their version as the original.

The modern Simnel cake, as we recognize it — a light fruitcake with marzipan baked into the middle, another layer spread on top, then toasted under the grill until golden — only began to take that familiar form toward the end of the 19th century. The eleven marzipan balls representing the true disciples of Jesus (omitting Judas) are actually a relatively modern addition. In some variations, a twelfth ball in the centre represents Christ himself.

Follow the link to the Simnel Cake recipe.

Whether you’re celebrating Mothering Sunday today or saving your celebration for May, the spirit of the day remains the same — gathering with family, sharing good food, and honouring the women who shaped us.

Mrs. Patmore would approve.

Do you celebrate Mothering Sunday or Mother’s Day? Does your family have any traditions? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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Tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday—February 17th—which means kitchens across Britain will be filled with the smell of hot butter and the sound of sizzling batter.

But if you think Pancake Day is just about breakfast food, you’re missing centuries of tradition that would have been second nature to Mrs. Patmore and her kitchen staff at Downton Abbey.

Why Pancakes?

The answer is beautifully practical. Before Lent began—forty days of fasting leading to Easter—households needed to use up their eggs, butter, and milk. What better way than combining them into pancakes?

The tradition goes back to at least 1439, when pancakes first appeared in English cookery manuscripts. By 1619, pancake flipping was already a beloved (and competitive) activity:

“And every man and maide doe take their turne,
And tosse their Pancakes up for feare they burne.”

Some things never change.

Upstairs vs. Downstairs

Here’s something I love about Shrove Tuesday: it was one of those rare occasions when everyone—from the Earl to the scullery maid—ate the same food. The difference was all in the presentation.

In the Servants’ Hall, Daisy and the kitchen maids would have enjoyed simple pancakes with lemon and sugar at breakfast, rolled and eaten hot from the pan. There might even have been a flipping competition, with forfeits for anyone who dropped their pancake.

In the dining room, the Crawleys would never have eaten pancakes at breakfast—too informal. But they might have enjoyed crêpes Suzette flambéed in orange liqueur at dinner. Same pancake, different world.

And for Tom Branson, the day held special meaning. As a Catholic, he would have slipped away for confession—the very act of “shriving” that gives Shrove Tuesday its name—while the Anglican Crawleys attended the village church.

Mrs. Patmore’s Secrets

Want your pancakes to rival those from the Downton kitchen? Here’s what every Edwardian cook knew:

Rest your batter. Twenty minutes minimum. This lets the starches swell, producing a more tender pancake. Mrs. Patmore would have mixed hers first thing, letting it rest while she organized the day’s meals.

Let the pan recover. Between pancakes, give your pan a moment to heat back up. Impatient cooks get pale, soggy results.

Flip with confidence. A hesitant flip produces a folded mess. Commit to the motion. (Or use a spatula—Mrs. Patmore wouldn’t judge. Efficiency over showmanship.)

British vs. American: A Quick Note

For my North American readers: British pancakes are thin, crêpe-like, and served rolled with lemon and sugar. American pancakes are thick, fluffy, and stacked with maple syrup.

Both are delicious. Neither is wrong. But at Downton, only the British version would have appeared—and Carson would have raised an eyebrow at any pancake in the dining room regardless.

What Will You Make Tomorrow?

I’ve got recipes for every taste on the blog:

→ British Pancakes — thin and delicate like crêpes Suzette

→ Drop Scones (Scottish Pancakes) — the small, thick pancakes beloved at tea time

→ Lemon Ricotta Pancakes — Italian influence meets British tradition

→ Fluffy Low-Fat Pancakes — proof that Lent needn’t start early

→ Savoury Zucchini Pancakes — perfect for a light supper

And if you want the full history—including the 580-year-old Olney Pancake Race and what the pancake ingredients symbolize—read my complete Shrove Tuesday guide here.

Happy Pancake Day, everyone. Whether you’re team lemon-and-sugar or team maple syrup, I hope tomorrow brings you a hot pan, a smooth batter, and at least one successful flip.

What’s your Shrove Tuesday tradition? Hit reply and tell me—I read every response.

—Pamela

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Happy Friday the 13th!

I’m supposed to be terrified today, right? Except here’s the thing that always gets me as a food historian: Friday the 13th is barely older than my grandmother. The combined superstition dates only to 1907, when a novel called Friday the Thirteenth essentially invented it out of whole cloth.

Before that? Crickets. No historical references. No medieval mentions. Nothing.

The slasher films in the 1980s did the rest, turning what was essentially a marketing gimmick into a global phenomenon.

But you know what Edwardian cooks like Mrs. Patmore actually feared? Everything in their kitchen.

The Real Superstitions Below Stairs

While we’re clutching our pearls over a Friday falling on the 13th, the 1910s-1920s kitchen staff at places like Downton Abbey navigated an absolute minefield of beliefs:

Spill salt? You’ve just invited the devil in. Quick—throw a pinch over your left shoulder into his face. This wasn’t a cute saying. This was kitchen law.

Turn a loaf of bread upside down? Death in the family. Or at minimum, the devil is joining you for dinner. Choose your poison.

Bring eggs into the house after dark? Bad luck. Break both ends of the eggshell, or witches will use them as boats. (Yes, really.)

Cross knives on the table? A quarrel is coming. And if you give someone a knife as a gift without receiving a coin in return, you’ve just cut that friendship forever.

Spill milk? You’ve angered the household spirits. Better hope they’re forgiving.

These weren’t quaint beliefs people rolled their eyes at. They were practiced daily, reinforced constantly, and taken as seriously as we take... well, probably more seriously than we take Friday the 13th.

The Dinner Party Crisis

Here’s where the number 13 actually mattered in the Edwardian era: never seat 13 at dinner.

This superstition—rooted in the Last Supper—held that the first person to rise from a table of 13 would die within the year. And wealthy Victorians and Edwardians took it so seriously that they employed professional “14th guests” who could be summoned at the last minute if someone cancelled.

The Savoy Hotel in London kept (and still keeps!) a black cat sculpture named Kaspar to serve as the symbolic 14th guest when needed. King Edward VII himself adhered to this rule.

That’s a superstition with staying power. That’s genuine fear embedded in social practice.

Why Food Trumps Calendars

The reason kitchen superstitions persisted while Friday the 13th had to be invented is simple: repetition breeds belief.

You might not notice what day it is. But you’re going to handle salt, bread, knives, and eggs multiple times a day if you work in a kitchen. Every single interaction becomes an opportunity to either follow the rules or tempt fate.

Mrs. Patmore might not care what date appeared on the calendar, but she absolutely cared about that salt cellar.

The Crawleys upstairs could dismiss it all as “peasant nonsense.” Below stairs, Daisy wasn’t taking chances.

What We Still Do

Here’s the kicker: we laugh at Victorian superstitions while simultaneously practicing them.

How many of you still throw salt over your shoulder? Avoid walking under ladders? Give a penny when someone gifts you a knife?

We’ve simply traded the daily kitchen fears for one acceptable, ironic, modern superstition: Friday the 13th. It’s vague enough to embrace without embarrassment, recent enough to feel sophisticated rather than primitive.

But Mrs. Patmore would absolutely recognize the gesture when you toss that spilled salt backward.

The Research Backs This Up

Modern studies have examined accident rates, hospital admissions, and stock market performance on Friday the 13th. The verdict? No statistically significant difference from any other Friday.

The only measurable effect is when the superstition itself changes behaviour—anxious people staying home, which sometimes leads to fewer accidents simply from reduced activity.

We’ve created a superstition through sheer cultural reinforcement and media saturation. It’s a fascinating case study in how modern folklore is manufactured.

So if you’re cooking today, maybe keep the salt shaker steady. Not because it’s Friday the 13th—that’s nonsense.

But because somewhere, Mrs. Patmore is watching.

And she has opinions about your kitchen practices.

What food superstitions did your grandmother follow? Hit reply and tell me—I’m collecting them for a future piece.

Until next time, Pamela

P.S. The Savoy Hotel really does still seat Kaspar the cat at tables of 13. In 2024. At one of London’s finest hotels. If that doesn’t tell you everything about the enduring power of food-adjacent superstitions, I don’t know what does.

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The world of Downton Abbey captures the romance of Valentine’s Day from 1912 to 1930 perfectly—but the celebrations looked very different depending on which side of the green baize door you lived on.

Upstairs: Romance by the Rules

For the upper classes, Valentine’s Day meant elaborate cards adorned with silk ribbons, embossed flowers, and delicate lace paper—actual works of art, not the drugstore cards we know today. Young ladies might receive cards signed with merely an initial, leading to delicious speculation in drawing rooms across England.

Courtship operated within strict boundaries. A carefully chaperoned Valentine’s tea might be arranged, with young men presenting flowers, each bloom bearing its own secret message in the Victorian language of flowers, which persisted through the 1920s.

A Valentine’s Dinner Upstairs:

• Oysters Rockefeller

• Rich French Onion Soup

• Beef Wellington or Roasted Duck with Cherry Sauce

• Charlotte Russe with crystallized rose petals

• Hand-moulded chocolate truffles with coffee

Below Stairs: Love on a Budget

For housemaids earning £12-20 annually and footmen making £25-40, elaborate gestures were impossible. The ornate card gracing Lady Mary’s breakfast tray might cost what a scullery maid earned in a week.

Instead, servants exchanged penny postcards or homemade valentines—pressed flowers from the estate gardens, ribbon scraps, and handkerchiefs embroidered during rare moments of leisure.

Senior servants like Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes had to be especially careful. Their positions demanded propriety. Any Valentine’s gesture would have been private and dignified—perhaps a carefully chosen book of poetry.

For Anna and Bates, Valentine’s Day was complicated. Anna’s time belonged to Lady Mary—she couldn’t simply disappear for a romantic moment. Their courtship happened in stolen moments in linen closets and brief hallway conversations, with Valentines tucked into pockets to be read later.

Mrs. Patmore might mark the occasion with special treats at the servants’ hall table, though never acknowledging them as Valentine’s indulgences—that would be too frivolous.

A Servants’ Hall Valentine’s Dinner:

• Traditional Cottage Pie with rich beef gravy

• Glazed Carrots and Parsnips

• Heart-Shaped Jam Tarts (if Daisy was clever)

• Treacle Tart with Custard

• Strong Builder’s Tea or cocoa

The servants’ celebration lacked upstairs elegance but made up for it in genuine warmth. The most meaningful gestures were often the smallest: a cup of tea brought unbidden, a kind word after a difficult day, taking on an extra task so a sweetheart could retire early.

Love Transcends Class

In an age before text messages and emoji hearts, Valentine’s Day from 1912 to 1930 represented love at its most authentic. Romance flourished both upstairs and downstairs, each in its own way, proving that heartfelt gestures matter more than elaborate displays.

Whether you celebrate with Beef Wellington or Cottage Pie this Valentine’s Day, remember: it’s the sincerity that counts. Visit my website for many more ideas.

Which menu are you trying this year—upstairs or downstairs?

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Yes, They Really Ate the Groundhog

Every February 2nd, millions of Americans watch a plump rodent predict the weather. It’s charming. It’s silly. And it completely obscures what Groundhog Day celebrations actually looked like for nearly a century.

Here’s the part they don’t mention on the morning news: the groundhog wasn’t just the forecaster. He was dinner.

I’ve spent the last few weeks digging into the surprisingly deep—and surprisingly delicious—history of Groundhog Day, and what I found connects directly to the British traditions we love exploring here.

It Started with Candlemas

Before there was Punxsutawney Phil, there was Candlemas.

February 2nd was celebrated throughout Britain and Europe for centuries as a Christian feast day loaded with weather lore. The medieval belief was simple: if the sun shone brightly on Candlemas, more winter was on the way. If clouds covered the sky, spring would arrive early.

German settlers carried this tradition across the Atlantic, swapping the European hedgehog for the American groundhog. By the early 1800s, Pennsylvania farmers were celebrating “Grundsaudaag” with weather predictions, community gatherings, and hearty winter feasts.

And that feast? It featured the guest of honour himself—roasted, stewed, or barbecued.

What Groundhog Dinner Actually Looked Like

Period accounts describe groundhog as tasting somewhere between pork and chicken—rich but mild, and always better after a long soak in brine before cooking.

At Groundhog Club gatherings in Pennsylvania Dutch country, the meal wasn’t just the meat. It was farmhouse cooking at its finest:

• Fried groundhog with dandelion greens dressed in hot bacon drippings and a mountain of mashed potatoes.

• Slow-simmered groundhog stew with the classic trio of carrots, potatoes, and onions.

• Barbecued groundhog at summer picnics, served alongside corn-on-the-cob and cold beer.

This wasn’t novelty eating. This was practical, seasonal cooking that treated the woodchuck like any other small game—which, of course, it was.

How Phil Got His Reprieve

So how did we get from roasting pan to red carpet?

The short answer: newspapers, radio, television, and one very famous 1993 film.

As Punxsutawney Phil became a national celebrity, eating him became... unthinkable. The practice quietly faded from official celebrations by the late 20th century.

Today’s Groundhog Day features pancake breakfasts, groundhog-shaped cookies, and the kind of festival fare you’d expect at any small-town American celebration. Phil himself is offered a ceremonial “elixir of life” rather than anything involving a roasting pan.

On the Blog: The Full History + A Menu You Can Actually Make

I’ve written the complete story over on Downton Abbey Cooks—including the Candlemas connection, how the tradition evolved through the 1880s, and a full historically-inspired menu you can make without sourcing any woodchuck.

Think: chicken thigh stew, dandelion greens with warm bacon dressing, and Pennsylvania Dutch potato filling—all the spirit of those original feasts, none of the ethical complications.

Read the Full Article: The Shocking Truth About Groundhog Day

What I’m Cooking Today

In honour of Grundsaudaag, I’m making a big pot of chicken thigh stew with root vegetables and serving it with braised winter greens. There’s something satisfying about marking February 2nd with a meal that actually acknowledges the day’s history—even if the main ingredient has been respectfully substituted.

If you make anything from the full recipe post, I’d love to see it. Just reply to this email or tag me on social.

Happy Groundhog Day—and may your shadow (or lack thereof) bring whatever weather you’re hoping for.

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