Published Cookbooks and Recipe Books
LADIES DELIGHT:
"Put eight ounces of chopped apples, eight ounces of chopped onions, and two ounces of chopped chillies into a jar; boil one pint of white-wine vinegar with a dessert-spoonful of salt; pour it to these ingredients; mix, and when cold, use the pickle to be eaten with cold meats, &c."
A very familiar recipe for 'Ladies Delight' can be found in the 1868 edition of The Cook's Guide and Housekeeper's & Butler's Assistant, a cookbook by one of the Victorian era's most prominent 'celebrity chefs', Charles Elme Francatelli (1805-1876). Francatelli was an Italian who studied the manners of Classical French cooking, and later arrived in Victorian London, where he became the head chef of a variety of upper-class establishments, the most notable being chief cook for Queen Victoria herself. He became a popular cook and writer for his series of cookbooks, but 'The Cook's Guide' (which included entrees, cakes, instructions for preserving or pickling, and medicinal recipes) in particular was noted in his foreword as being for the middle class, unlike his previous work. He wrote that previous cookbooks on the subject had recipes that were unappetizing or did not adequately account for costs. This recipe appears in his section on pickling, and indeed features a pickling mix that we would find strange today- apples, onions and chilies! 'Ladies Delight' is a recipe that seems to appear in the Women's Recipe Book with quite similar instructions, but with a few small changes- in the margins of the ingredients, the woman who wrote the recipe down noted that she was quite dissatisfied with chopping the fruits and vegetables, and rather, 'pounded better'. Presumably, the author had read The Cook's Guide, and found Francatelli's instructions adequate, but wanting!