Opps …. never get lazy with your history ….. and other revelations

It’s that golden rule of all research which put simply is …. check your facts.

And now the BBC has it’s own "BBC Verify" which searches and challenges a vast range of assertions masquerading as facts.

But we all get lazy and I am no exception.

So, in a story on the origins of apple crumble I wrote “a recipe for it was in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management dated 1896”, and despite not finding a reference in my own copy which had been published thirty-years earlier I went with the comment from an online article.*

I should have dug deeper but accepted the statement, and yesterday someone left the comment “I am looking for early crumble recipes and stumbled across your comment. 

Are you sure Mrs Beeton has a recipe for a crumble in 1865. I can see references to Mrs Beeton crumbles but whenever I research them they all seem to link to a blog post that made that claim erroneously. 

Would be great to be proven wrong but haven't found anything in Beeton this far!! Any hints much appreciated!”

All of which is a tad embarrassing and led me to consider taking down the original story but instead I will amend the copy including the comment and then go looking for later copies of Mrs Beeton.

But it does highlight that temptation to accept what is asserted as the truth.

Now truth and indeed facts are not set in stone, and as we all know new scholarship and chance finds can reverse a fact lead to a fresh interpretation and a new truth.

It is 43 years since the discovery of the Hitler Diaries which have now been proved as forgeries but for a brief period in the early 1980s some scholars, and some newspapers thought they were genuine, expended heaps of money acquiring them only to be disappointed at the discovery that they were made up.

My simple slip up may seem a world away and trivial in comparison to those diaries or the regular stories that the moon landings were fake, that there is a mystery to planes and ships disappearing in an area off Bermuda or countless other conspiracy theories, but of course it’s the same.

And that brings me back to Mrs. Beeton and the recipe for Sweet Macaroni Pudding.

It appears on pages 654 and 655 in the 1863 edition of The Book of Household Management and is further vindication of my oft told account of how as young kids in the 1950s we often ate spaghetti cooked with milk and sugar. 

The overwhelming response to that story is a mix of bewilderment, revulsion and incredulity and I have to say in some cases disbelief.  

And despite my frequent revisits to the story, I know some thought it was either a false memory or just made up.**

But then my friend, fellow writer and blogger Lois Elsden*** sent me Food in War Time - Vegetarian Recipes for 100 Inexpensive Dishes: And Helpful Suggestions for Providing Two Course Dinners for Six People for One Shilling, George W. Hall.

It was published during the Great War and there is boiled Macaroni “with a little sugar and milk [which] makes a very acceptable pudding”.***

It was that moment when I could proudly write “We are not an aberration and nor were alone” to which I can now push back the date when sweet pasta pudding was acceptable.

I don’t suppose its historical lineage well endear it to my sons and friends but there you are wait long enough and your own facts will come along.

Leaving me just to conclude with the observation of others on the importance of facts.

In a conversation with Rudyard Kipling in 1889 Mark Twain said "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please”.  

And while I have yet to verify the following, I think they are worth throwing into the pot.  John Adams: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." 

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

Thomas Huxley: "Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact."

And that is that.

Pictures; The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, Jeni Wright, 1976, recipe for  Sweet Macaroni Pudding, courtesy of Google Books, 2011, cover of the reprint Food in War Time, 2026,  and pasta to make a pudding from, 2026

*Apple crumble ….. it’s place in history .... and a lesson in doing your homework https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/apple-crumble-its-place-in-history-and.html

** We are not an aberration …… when you are not alone .... spaghetti, milk and sugar, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2026/07/we-are-not-aberration-when-you-are-not_02011329298.html

***Lois Elsden, Writer, https://loiselsden.com/

**** Food in War Time - Vegetarian Recipes for 100 Inexpensive Dishes: And Helpful Suggestions for Providing Two Course Dinners for Six People for One Shilling, George W. Hall