Kitchen Essays

'An enchanting period piece and, in its own quirky intelligent way, a culinary gem' (Nigella Lawson)

During 1921-2 (the now) Lady Jekyll wrote unsigned essays for The Times with titles such as 'Tray Food' and 'Sunday Supper', 'For the Two Fat' and 'For the Too Thin', all of which are contained in Kitchen Essays. Recipes are interspersed with her delightful comments, for example an excellent and very simple recipe for Caraway Tea Bread in 'Tea-Time and Some Cakes' is prefaced: "The true spiritual home of the teapot is surely in a softly-lighted room between a deep armchair and a sofa, two cups only, awaiting their fragrant infusion, whilst the clock points nearer to six than five, and a wood fire flickers sympathetically on the hearth."

The author of Kitchen Essays (1922) was sister-in-law to the great Gertrude Jekyll, whose biographer wrote that if she 'was an artist-gardener, then Agnes was an artist-housekeeper.' Agnes was a famous hostess (the guests at her first dinner party included Browning, Ruskin and Burne-Jones) and her home, Munstead House, 'was the apogee of opulent comfort and order without grandeur, smelling of pot-pourri, furniture polish and wood smoke'.

Also available as a Persephone Classic.

Endpaper

The endpapers show a 1922 design by the painter George Sheringham called 'Clusters of stylised fruits, flowers and shell motifs', a domestic design with a hint both of the pastoral and the abstract.

Picture Caption

The Tea Table by Harold Harvey