Maid of Honour
Britain’s First Celebrity Baker
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ppc.27862Keywords:
pleasure gardens, 18th century, London, Marybone Gardens, culinary celebrities, female bakers, social history, marketing, catering, entrepreneurship, gentility, almond cheesecake, Miss Trusler, iconic dishes, female anonymityAbstract
Britain has a long history of enjoying food in the open-air, and one of the ways eighteenth century Londoners could enjoy both, was in the numerous pleasure gardens of the time. The largest, Ranelagh and Vauxhall Gardens, covered many acres in or near the city and boasted numerous well-lit walks and discrete alcoves. However, for a brief forty years in the middle of the century, Marybone Gardens, a small attraction in the rural fields to the north-west of the city, managed to compete with them on an almost equal level. This was due to the vision of one family to, unlike the other venues, serve tasteful and elegant food and drinks in peaceful and refined surroundings. This enterprise would create Britain’s first celebrity baker, the subject of this paper, whose career and creations can be traced, almost exclusively, through the newspaper advertisements of the day.
