Quartermaine Hall

Artisan: Cose di un altro mondo (Mariangela Gagliardi)
Date: 2022
Dimensions: 23 x 15 x 5 mm. / ⅞ x ⅝ x ¼ inches (height x width x depth)
Inventory number: 2022.033
Intended Room: Housekeeper’s Parlour
Category: Books

At an early stage, I decided that Elizabeth (the lady of the house), had been born in India, where her father was a colonial administrator. Obviously I then leapt at the chance to add this cookbook to the Quartermaine Hall collection: I’d never even heard of the book until I saw the miniature version in Mariangela Gagliardi’s shop. Elizabeth retains fond memories of her childhood growing up in India and has decided to try to introduce some of these flavours to her own children and family. Cook thinks it’s a scandal, of course, and can’t get her head around the spices, but this book should help.

Once again I’m cheating slightly with date, as this wasn’t published until 1902, but I hope you’ll allow me a bit of artistic licence. Can anyone throw any light on who ‘Ketab’ really was? It’s clearly a pseudonym but I haven’t been able to find out anything about the author. All I’ve found is a description of the book from 1911, which states: ‘One hundred and ten genuine Indian recipes, collected by the compiler during long residence in India’, suggesting that ‘Ketab’ was British.