Elsie's Receipt Book--The Heart of the Home

Good cooks have always collected recipes, or receipts as they were sometimes called. My mother-in-law's mother, Elizabeth Mary Stephens (Drapes) Churton, aka Elsie, was no exception. We recently uncovered a little journal, begun on 16 June 1918, eight months after she married, and about the time her husband was to return home from World War I, minus an arm and in need of much nurturing.

Elsie was born 12 July 1885 in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland. She met her future husband Harry Leslie Churton when he was working at the Asylum there as an electrician.

Cooking being at the heart of what we consider home and family life, this little book gives us insight into Elsie's world. Maybe because Elsie was born and raised in Ireland she didn't know some of the recipes that the English ladies already had ingrained in them, but for whatever reason we find some classic English foods, along with little hints. The page below has a very simple recipe for that most cherished dish, Yorkshire Pudding.

Beneath that is a key to which sauces must be served with which meats. Critical that the sauce changes depending on cooking method, so a roast chicken demands bread sauce, while boiled chicken wants a parsley or egg sauce. I remember my mother-in-law still holding to these hard and fast rules and wish I had known at the time that she had it all written down! Entertaining the in-laws might have been a little less stressful had I been able to anticipate the proper sauces!

Initially I thought it would be fun to work through each recipe in order, as an homage to ancestors, cooking and love, but mayonnaise sauce and many of the other treats don't really fit into our current dietary regime. What else, what else might Elsie have a receipe for?

We learn that Elsie was an orderly sort, for she created an index at the back of her little book. Oh, I like this lady!

Now this would all be quite wondrous enough, but upon further examination I found that Elsie and I have a few other things in common. First, she was a singer! While techniques may have changed a bit, I love that she recorded these warm-up exercises.

As if that weren't enough to put me into a swoon, I then discovered we have a pastime in common--knitting! Here are directions for making socks for her new husband. Now there's something I could try. You can see that she has squeezed in a receipt at the bottom, sideways, just as my mother-in-law Rosemary used to do on aerogrammes when she wrote to us and had one last message!

Finally, in anticipation of having children, Elsie also had some instructions for knitting baby garments.

Did mother-in-law Rosemary and Auntie Tealy (Sheelagh) end up wearing these woolly pants? Probably!

If we are lucky our genealogical research turns up documents, and many of those are dry--full of facts, and lacking in warmth, but helping us link together the generations with proof. Most are transactions between men concerning war, purchases, migration, and death and probate, in sum, the harsher side of life. This pleasing little journal, on the other hand, gives us a peek into the softer side of our family history and we will cherish it always.

Thomas and Elizabeth Frances "Lizzie" (Preston) Drapes

My husband, Myles, is English. Kind of. It's complicated. First of all, he was born in Kenya. His English parents were working for the British government in Kenya which was a British colony in 1960. So he is a British citizen. But there's another reason I say sort of. He's got lots of Irish blood in him!

This photo was given to me by Myles' Aunt Sheelagh, aka Aunty Tealy. Sheelagh is the daughter of the young woman on the left, Elsie Drapes. Elsie was Myles' grandmother. The elderly gentleman is Sheelagh's grandfather, Dr. Thomas Drapes. I hadn't done much research on this family, but I did know that Dr. Thomas was born 17 January 1847 in Lakeview, County Cavan, Ireland. His father, also Dr. Thomas, died when young Thomas was only 5 months old "On the 17th instant [July], at Lakeview, in this county, Thomas Drapes, Esq., M.D., in the 32nd year of his age, of malignant typhus fever, contracted in his attendance of the Fever Hospital in his district." [http:// www.irelandoldnews.com/Cavan/1847/AUG.html : accessed 4 March 2007].

Aunty Tealy was visiting us from England recently and after asking me all about my genealogy work, told me that at 84 years old, she is suddenly aware of how very little she knows about her own ancestors. So we did some googling and found a beautiful obituary for her grandfather Thomas. He was a very distinguished psychologist and the Resident Medical Superintendent at the District Asylum in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, for years. He published many articles in which it is evident that he was intelligent and thoughtful.

"In the Journal of Mental Science in October 1894 Thomas Drapes, Resident Medical Superintendent of the District Asylum, Enniscorthy, delivered a paper ‘On the Alleged Increase of Insanity in Ireland’. Ireland, he pointed out, ‘possesses the unique and unenviable distinction of a continuously increasing amount of insanity with a continuously decreasing population’ and he then went on to a thoroughgoing analysis of what statistics were available to him and to comparisons between the Irish and English scenes. ...In summary, Drapes claimed: ‘The net result, then, of this examination is to show that, while there is an undoubted increase in occurring insanity, as indicated by the records of first admissions, by far the larger part of the apparent increase in insanity generally is due to accumulation, and that the seeming preponderance of insanity in Ireland, as compared to England, is fictitious, and depends entirely on the greater amount of accumulation in Ireland, occasioned by the lower death-rate in that country, and (possibly) the lower rate of discharge of the unrecovered." [MENTAL ILLNESS IS IRELAND 1750-1922 , http://www.hrb.ie/storage/publications/hrbpublications/mentalhealth/Mental%20Illness%20in%20Ireland.pdf : accessed 10 May 2009].

Thomas and Lizzie moved to a lovely house, "Milleen", on a bluff overlooking the Irish Sea in Dalkey shortly before Thomas died in 1919. Dalkey was in County Dublin, just south of Dublin. Lizzie remained there for the rest of her life, living comfortably with plenty of servants to help her out. Aunty Tealy has fond memories of spending summers with her Granny there. She and Rosemary, Myles' mother, would travel with their mother via ferry from Holyhead in North Wales from their home in Chester, England. For the rest of her life, Rosemary would get a charge out of passing the Kish Light in Dublin Bay, a signal that they were close to Dun Laoghaire harbor and their beloved Granny. Tealy remembers that they used to be met by a horse and "cab" at the boat – there were no taxis at that time. The driver was named Cavanaugh and "had weepy eyes". He couldn't get up the hill and had to have someone help him, every time! They all traveled with trunks, and knowing my mother-in-law in later years, I would imagine those trunks were both numerous and very heavy! Tealy used to pity the poor horse, who constantly had his head in a sack, so she would steal biscuits to give him strength: pretty ones with pink and white marshmallow topping. Maybe she should have given something to Cavanaugh, too!

On the veranda at Milleen, Grandfather had left a very powerful telescope through which the girls would gaze across the harbor and see "right over to Hove and the whole of the Irish Sea." They liked to look at people on the boats coming in and imagine their itineraries. They kept themselves busy running up and down the huge staircase that led to Milleen, hiding in cupboards looking for sweets and giggling until Granny would exclaim that she could hear mice. They chased chickens in the "yard," and generally rattled around, bringing life to the huge home. Granny would send the girls out to the town common behind the house with a shopping list. They'd pick flowers on the way back and learned the fine art of floral arrangement from a patient Lizzie. Tealy even remembers doing an arrangement inside a matchbox once.

Lizzie died in 1944, just after she received a call about her son Bertie dying after lingering from a stroke for seven years. Sheelagh remembers, "She got the call, had her boiled egg and said, 'Now I can die.'" And she did. I would love to have met Lizzie. My mother-in-law, Rosemary, and Aunty Tealy were/are delightful ladies, and I just know that the love and nurturing they got from Lizzie gave them a sense of security and joy that is evident today.

Thomas and Lizzie had 8 children, 7 of whom were boys! Tealy's mother was the only girl. Three of the boys died young: Arthur Vernon 1881-1896; John Sloan (1884-1884); and Walter Ardaugh (1886-1886).

Pictured above are Thomas and Lizzie with their four remaining sons and Myles' grandmother, Elizabeth Mary Stephens "Elsie" (Drapes) Churton. Elsie was the youngest of the living children. I'm not sure right now which brother is which, but they are: Dr. Thomas Lambert "Bertie" (1878-1943) - this is their eldest, and one that died right before Lizzie; Alexander Plunket Preston "Alec" (1879-1901) who participated in the Alaskan gold rush and settled in Montana; George Russell (1880-1935) of whom we know very little except that he perhaps married a "dreadful woman"; and Francis Colley (1883-?) who worked on the stock exchange and also had an "awful woman" for a wife. Note to self: must clarify this!

When she was about 18, or ca 1903, Elsie met English engineer Harry Leslie Churton, when he was installing the electrical system at the Asylum. He is the only one of Myles' four grandparents who was English. This means that though my maiden name is FitzGerald, I actually have more English blood than my "English" husband.