Trafford Publishing: Maggie's Inheritance

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Maggie's Inheritance

by Maggie Nuyten

318 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #99-0003; ISBN 1-55212-235-2; US$31.00, C$35.50, EUR25.50, £18.00

The first recipe was entered into this manuscript in the 17th. Century. It was then passed from mother to daughter or aunt to niece. Those who had possession of the book added favourite recipes and trusted remedies. Anyone interested in the history of English cooking, ingredients, medicine, language or handwriting will find this book delightful.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book

Ever since her father passed the book (manuscript) on to her, Maggie was fascinated by it. Not until she had retired could she find time to do the research. It was written by her ancestors on the female side of the family starting in the mid 17th. Century, this was confirmed by the watermarks in the paper.

Many people encouraged her to publish the book. She felt before doing this, she should try and trace the background of the people that had contributed by recording their favourite or family recipes. This resulted in a book consisting of 176 pages of copies of recipes, a glossary and clarification of the old English terminology, measurements, weights and historical information.

The end result is a book, opening a window into more than three centuries of English cooking and home remedies. Anybody interested in cooking, medicine, the envolvement of the English language and handwriting will find this book fascinating.

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Reviews of MAGGIE'S INHERITANCE
Maggie's Inheritance: Okanagan woman culls 300-lus years of cooking knowledge
by Diana Bennett
The Okanagan Sunday, January 28, 2001
     If ever in need of a cure for deafness, try this: "Take tobacco and ginger powder'd very fine and flower of brimstone of each a like quanty snuff it up ye nose -- It purgeth ye head and healyeth deafnefs."
     The prescription has a worn leather binding, tattered pages and recipes for baked goods and remedies for what ails you penned more than 300 years ago. The 20th century version includes the pages of the original cookbook, plus deciphered and transcribed recipes and glossary, self-publisehd by Maggie Nuyten of Kelowna.
     The brittle volume, over time, was passed from mother to daughter, aunt to niece, to nephew, until it came to rest with Nuyten, the oldest daughter of her generation.
     Nuyten's father held onto the book for Maggie. His Aunt Cissie had passed it on to him for safe-keeping.
     For years, the original manuscript languished in a brown paper bag. After the death of her father in 1965, Nuyten brought the book to Canada.
     She had known of the cookbook for years and had always meant to "do something" with it. With two daughters of her own she'd planned all along to preserve the book, continue the tradition and pass on the legacy.
     The pages are rife with information, from the baking of simple tea cakes to a cure for scurvy and how to stop a mortification -- the gangrenous, not the humiliating sort.
     Accompanying the recipes and handwritten pages was the mystery of who had penned the words.
     Ten years ago, Nuyten set out to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Her quest took her back to England where she spent a week engrossed in ancient books in a dark, wood panelled reading room at the British Museum. There, she began to piece together a family history. She hasn't found all the answers, but she feels she has made a good start.
     With help from a book restorer and a hand-writing analyst, she was able to decipher not only the meaning of the written words, but also something of the history accompanying them.
     She traced the book back through her father to her Aunt Cissie to a more distant Aunt Jane, born in 1802 in Whitechapel.
     "I've come across a bit of a block," Nuyten said. "Before Jane, I'm not sure which side of the family the book came from."
     What she has found out about the book's still mysterious first author is not what she expected.
     "The writing changes through the years," Nuyten said.
     "I thought the first part was written by three different people but, really, she starts writing as a young girl, suffers some sort of trauma, and grows old."
     That wasn't the only surprise for Nuyten. The interest that others took in her book was also unexpected.
     "Historians studying language, grapho-analysts, even pharmacists, so many have expressed an interest," said Nuyten.
     "It was people at the Museum of British Columbia who first suggested I publish it."
     She took their advice and her resulting book, Maggie's Inheritance, contains the results of the past 10 years of research.
     Within days of posting the book on Trafford's website, she received numerous phone calls for interviews.
     Maggie's Inheritance evokes images of flour-powdered hands and cauldrons on fires. And, not a few forgotten terms.
     (A "drachm," by the way is a precise measurement equalling the eighth part of an ounce... three fcruples or sixty grains.")
     Too polite in Victorian times to discuss diarrhea or flatulence, cures for a "loofnefs" or a "windy complaint" are among the book's medicinal recipes.
     Then again, one may opt to suffer the indignity of gas rather than the taste of the cure, a dose of "broom ashes infused in Rhenish wine."
     The contents of the cookbook have been preserved in Maggie's Inheritance for Nuyten's daughters and any other descendants of Maggie.
     And the original? It will not be seeing the inside of a paper bag any time soon. "Oh, it's safely packed away in the bank," Nuyten said.

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A family's treasure
by Judie Steeves
Showcase (Kelowna, BC)
     Kelowna's Maggie Nuyten has been unravelling a mystery. In the 1980s she was known locally for her Food for Thought column in the Capital News, written under the name of Maggie Hopkinson, which looked at food and the behaviour of people. She also had a cooking show on Cable 11 at about the same time.
     With a degree in institutional administration from London University and experience in running institutions, she moved to Kelowna in 1969, a single parent with five children.
     She worked as a part-time Food Service Supervisor at Kelowna General Hospital while studying for her psychology degree, then operated a private weight control clinic in Kelowna in the early 1980s.
     It might seem that Nuyten has a fixation about food.
     Yet, she admits quite candidly, when she was a teen, she couldn't even cook.
     But her mystery is also food related.
     She's not quite finished, but she's published her findings so far - in a 318-page book called Maggie's Inheritance. It would be easy to say that this is a recipe book. It does contain recipes, but they're a bit unusual and include such titles as cow heel jelly, lumber pye, souse pickle and hart's horn jelly.
     But then, some of them date to the year 1670 when ingredients that are common today, such as powdered gelatin, had to be made from the grated horn of a hart, or stag.
     Maggie's Inheritance is a history book that's about her heritage; a book with some crumbling and confused pages; odd ingredients and curious combinations to cure what ails you.
     It's also about pharmaceuticals, medicinal recipes for repairing or restoring what needs fixing. Modern pharmacists say the hundreds-of-years old remedies are not so very different from what we take in more polished form, today.
     Initially, however, it was intended to serve as a genealogy for her family, and a less confused, clearer way to pass down the family history to her children and their children, complete with ancient family remedies and recipes passed down to her.
     However, over the 10 years she's been pursuing the various threads of the mystery, it grew, until it became not just a copy of a multi-generational recipe book - complete with home remedies for both housekeeping and human maladies - but also her typewritten translation of those recipes.
     She became curious about the modern meaning of some of the ingredients listed in different recipes, such as blackcaps: which are blackberries; or collops: a thin slice of meat; comforts or comfits: a confection made from a piece of fruit, root or seed coated and preserved with sugar; flummery: food made of oatmeal and water; any of several sweet desserts; humbles of deer: the liver, heart etc. were made into pies and given to the servants; jugg'd: cooked in; and souse: anything parboiled and kept in salt.
     So, the book begins with exact copies of the hand written pages of the recipe book handed down from generation to generation in her family, starting in the 1670s, followed by her typewritten translation, retaining queer spellings and unusual terms.
     Then there's an index to the recipes and remedies and a series of notes about the various writers who contributed to the recipe book, as far as she's been able to figure out; and some comments about the evolution of food and recipes over the ages.
     Nuyten concludes with a glossary of terms and a bibliography.
     In the first two days after her book appeared on her publisher's Web page, she received 21 e-mails in response, and in the first couple of weeks she did four radio interviews which aired all over the continent, and dealt with 11 other requests for interviews, including one from Britain's London Daily Mail.
     Nuyten admits she'd never have tackled the project if she'd realized at the start what a challenging one it was going to be, but as it happened, the work just went on over a period of years, and she was gradually drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery.
     "It's been a hobby; totally engrossing," she says now with a grin.
     Such a book is far more expensive and time-consuming to write than simply writing a book from scratch, she notes.
     She ended up doing research at places like the British Museum, and continues to try and find pieces of her own genealogical puzzle in figgerent parts of Britain.
     She employed a graphologist to help her gain some insight into the various ancestors who contributed to the recipe book and another professional to help her by restoring the original book enough so it could be copies and deciphered.
     "The Victorian-era paper was in perfect shape, but other parts were not," she comments.
     The next step is to continue the family recipe book with contributions from the current generation.
     Already, certain recipes have been chosen to go in it, such as her husband Martin's bread; potato salad; a favourite duck recipe; her son's smoked salmon; and a crepe recipe.
     It'll be a work that continues to progress, and she's quite certain most families have a book like this as part of their heritage, too.

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300-year-old culinary recipes released to public for first time
McKenzie River Reflections Newspaper (McKenzie Bridge, Oregon)
Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2000
     After over 300 years of being maintained and closely-guarded by the females in her family, author Maggie Nuyten (nee Rudge) has decided to release an amazing tome of recipes in Maggie's Inheritance.
     After inheriting the 175-page book, Maggie began to research her family origins and background, delving successfully into the genealogical panoply her ancestors left her. This research allowed Maggie to attach names and personalities to many of the contributors to the recipe book.
     Started in England, the first recipe was entered into this manuscript in the 17th Century. It was then passed from mother to daughter or aunt to niece. Those who had possession of the book added favorite recipes and trusted medicinal remedies. In Maggie's hands, Maggie's Inheritance is now a comprehensive yet quietly touching expose into one family's history of cooking. Maggie's Inheritance includes scans from the original book, a corresponding page in easy-to-read type, and a glossary of old English words.
     Maggie was born in London, England, studied at London University and eventually emigrated to British Columbia, Canada. During a successful career relating to health, especially food and drug abuse, she obtained a Psychology degree from Simon Fraser University in 1981. Maggie has worked at Kelowna General Hospital as a Food Service Supervisor, owned and managed a private Weight Control Clinic and was a qualified Registered Clinical Counselor with a private practise.

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Letters for Maggie Nuyten
Dear Maggie:
     I know it's long in coming, but I do want you to know how much I appreciated your joining me on "Lunch Talk." I have good books, I love history, I love food; Maggie's Inheritance covered it all!!
     You were a delightful guest, and I'm glad you took the time out of what I expect was a hectic day to help make our program so interesting.
     Again, thank you.
          Regards,
           Claudia Staines
           Bayshore Broadcasting Corporation.

About the Author

Maggie Nuyten was born in London, England but lived in Hove, Sussex until she left the family home to study Institutional Management at London University. After working at Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham she emigrated to Vancouver, Canada with her husband and two children. In 1969, as a single parent with five children Maggie moved to Kelowna British Columbia and worked as the Co-ordinator of the developing Drug Addiction Centre for six years. While working as a part-time Food Service Supervisor at Kelowna General Hospital she studied and obtained a Psychology degree from Simon Fraser University in 1981.

Later, as a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Maggie had a private practice specializing in addictions and abuse of food and people. The many years as a single parent of a wonderful family with very different personalities and interests but living in British Columbia away from the traditions left behind in England, created a need to produce something that could be passed on to her grandchildren. The combination of interest in people, food, drugs and family have fueled Maggie's motivation to research and restore this old manuscript. The goal has been to preserve this fascinating inheritance but also to make copies available to the descendents of the brothers and sisters of "Jane".

Sample Excerpts

Catalogue Information