Mrs Yorke–newly pregnant with her second child–was a transformed woman. Becoming a mother seems to have emboldened her, and she ran the house almost single-handedly, bolstered by her second in command, Ellen Penketh. As far as Louisa Yorke was concerned, the cook-housekeeper was keeping her end up admirably.
This being the case, there is one thing I find puzzling. Mrs Yorke held an account with Duttons the grocers at 1 High Street, Wrexham. Her account book lists every purchase made, and it makes interesting reading–for there among the macaroni and split peas, the honey and arrowroot, the Worcester Sauce and Bovril, are items that any self-respecting cook-housekeeper would surely be making herself: Genoa cake. Cherry cake. Seed cake. Macaroons. There are also regular purchases of Cooper’s marmalade, bramble jelly, strawberry and raspberry jam.
Might this be read as a clue that Ellen Penketh was perhaps overworked, or understaffed, or simply a bad planner? Clearly, she could cook. Perhaps, shopkeeper’s daughter that she was, she found herself unable to resist the bright packaging of the brand names and convenience foods of the era. Maybe it was Louisa’s doing, indulging an appetite for luxurious little treats she never knew she had until she came to be mistress of Erddig. Turkish Delights, for example, are ordered once a week. Either way, the family’s annual spend was escalating. In 1903, Ellen’s first year, Louisa totted it up in her accounts book as £694 (around £40,000 in today’s money). In 1904 it doubled, to £1,284. In 1905 it was £1,356, and in 1906, £1,544 (£88,500 today).
The reason is obvious. The Yorkes loved entertaining, and as Louisa grew in confidence, so did their numbers of guests. She kept a list of all house-party guests in Erddig’s visitors’ book:
1902–32
1903–68
1904–90
1905–86
1906–120
1907–113
These visitors might stay for one or two nights, but many stayed for two weeks or more, all requiring elaborate meals, clean linen, coal fires and extra laundry. It was like running a hotel. Servicing all this were fourteen hard-pressed indoor servants, costing in all around £22 a month. Compared to most big houses at the time, Erddig’s entertaining was relatively modest (and certainly more strait-laced; Louisa would never have facilitated bed-hopping in the manner of those upper-class hostesses). Elsewhere in Britain the Edwardian house party was reaching its apogee–the ‘Saturday-to-Monday’, where one arrived with several trunks of clothing and a lady’s maid; where gargantuan meals were consumed at least four times a day; where champagne was served ‘at moments when a glass of barley-water might have been acceptable’.8 The Yorkes’ gesture to the era was to throw a really big dinner party, in the pillared dining room hung with ancestors, about four times a year. The table laden with heavily decorated Victorian dishes was now a thing of the past. These days it was all about originality, sleight of hand, little amuse-bouches; the wow factor, if you like.
Louisa was initially an insecure hostess, recording slights and successes in her diary. But she soon got into her stride, clocking up ‘great’ successes and ‘fair’ successes, invariably involving music and games after dinner–and one lampshade going up in flames, extinguished by Wootton and the footman.
It was considered ‘modern’ to be in revolt against extravagance and outdated Victorian customs, a fashion that suited the straightforward Louisa and her teetotal husband. To have just eight dishes served at dinner–soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweet, hors d’oeuvre and perhaps an ice–was considered modern.9 Great importance was attached to the entrée, known as the ‘cook’s high-water mark’, because it gave scope to the cook’s talent in preparing and decorating ‘made dishes’ served in decorated shapes and moulds. At Erddig, Mrs Penketh’s high-water mark included her Vol-au-Vent of Chicken; her ‘Chicken Shape’ and Oyster Patties (turned out and plated up on the long kitchen table by paraffin lamplight). Dozens of these copper entrée moulds still sit today in the mahogany kitchen cabinets, waiting their turn: little prawns, lobsters, tomatoes; fish shaped as a child might draw them.
Louisa reached her own high-water mark in 1906 when she began recording her table plans, decorations and menus in the back of the visitors’ book. She was developing a confident artistic eye, revelling in the modern ‘rage’ for table decorations. On 30 October, when twelve came to dinner, the long, polished table was decorated with Erddig’s prize-winning chrysanthemums, Gloire de la Reine roses and long boughs of red Virginia creeper, an autumn feature of the house’s west face. Daringly there was no starched white tablecloth. The guests ate turtle soup, turbot in lobster sauce and ‘artistic vegetarian entrée’ (Mrs Penketh’s chance to show off), followed by saddle of mutton, pheasant, Charlotte russe, fruit salad, cheese capons, roast chestnuts, pears, grapes and apples. (Charlotte russe–a dessert of Bavarian cream set in a mould of sponge fingers–seems to have been one of Mrs Penketh’s specialities.)
Conversation, as the guests sipped their ‘sun-dried’ turtle soup, might have touched on the many welfare reforms under way following the Liberal Party’s landslide victory that year: free school meals for children, pensions for the elderly, labour exchanges for the unemployed…Brave ideas, certainly, but who was going to foot the bill?
One month later twelve more came to dinner, entering the dining room to admire the great Gainsborough portrait of Philip Yorke I, the new oil portrait of Mrs Yorke in her amethyst choker, the magical effect of the pier-glass mirrors throwing back the flickering candlelight, and the table piece–single white chrysanthemums and plumbago cardinals (‘the most lovely’, noted Louisa). They ate Palestine soup (made with Jerusalem artichoke), whitebait, sweetbread, boned turkey, partridge, jelly, chocolate mould and cheese capons, rounded off with home-grown apples and pears, Erddig’s prize-winners at the recent Chester show.
These menus are today on display in the dining room at Erddig. I quote them in full because it seems important to remember who created rather than wrote them; who stirred the lobster sauce, whipped the egg whites, decorated the vegetarian savouries so as to make the guests gasp with pleasure. Important, not least because the cook-housekeeper of these years has since been denied a part in the Erddig narrative. Ellen Penketh, kitchen maid Lizzie Copestake and scullery maid Annie Parry must have felt a keen share of the hostess’s triumph as the heaped and elaborately garnished serving dishes were borne upstairs by the young footmen.
On a day such as this the kitchen team would also have cooked a large breakfast, provided lunch for guests (cold cuts, savouries crafted from last night’s leftovers, rissoles, salads) along with the usual vegetarian dish for Mr Yorke (savoury rice, macaroni cheese, stuffed eggs), lunch for the servants’ hall (thirteen mouths including their own, plus up to twenty outdoor servants and any visiting lady’s maids and valets), lunch for the nursery upstairs, all puréed and crust-free according to Lucy Hitchman’s specifications for Master Simon and little Phil. And by the time poor Annie Parry had finished washing it all up in the dank scullery, standing on duckboards at a low sink, rubbing at the copper pans with turpentine and fine brick dust, it was time to start baking again for that afternoon’s tea.
It was hard, hard work. On top of this, at the end of the day the accounts had to be done by the cook-housekeeper. Ellen Penketh would wipe her hands on her apron and make her way heavily down the long green basement corridor to the housekeeper’s sitting room.