The recipes of Ada de la Harpe
Ada Henrietta Ferdinands was born in 1883, the sixth of the fourteen children of Frederick William Ferdinands and Henrietta Jansz, a Sri Lankan Dutch Burgher. Dutch Burghers are the descendants of employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who chose to remain in Sri Lanka when the British took over government of the country.She was my grandmother, Ada de La Harpe.
My memories of Ada are few; she died when I was six. The most vivid is of helping her make Sri Lankan Christmas cake, a cake that is not only scrumptious, but one of two dishes in Sri Lankan cuisine that most completely bring together all the food influences successive waves of settlers and colonists brought to the Sri Lankan table. Ada’s cookbook is both a very practical guide to making good food and a social record of the Dutch Burghers.
I find Ada's recipe book particularly fascinating as an example of women's domestic cookery books. It's not a hodge podge of recipes that jump around from style of dish to style of dish as you go from page to page, reflecting when the woman recieved a recipe from a friend or came across it in a book or magazine. At some time in her life, my mum is not quite sure when, Ada gathered together all her recipe cards and notes, put them in order from soups through to preserves, and wrote them down in order one after another, leaving no space in her Monitor Exercise Book to add in new recipes under a particular style of dish. She wasn't as obsessive as me and didn't also do them in alphabetical order within their style of dish, but she did then go and write out a formal index. Once done, she never added another recipe to the collection, though she lived for many years after completing the book.
Her recipes are also interesting for what they tell us about the role women like her played in their kitchen. The pages are full of recipes from the Western European cuisine, notably English, Dutch and Portuguese, in keeping with being a Dutch Burgher. This is because these were the dishes that she would remain responsible for overseeing in the kitchen. The bulk of what I ate as a child, the curries and vegetable mallungs and sambols, were produced by our cook, and Ada had no particular reason to record them for her descendants, and no particular interest in reproducing them, except for a few 'specialties' that she would remain responsible for. The cook, usually a man or woman who had come from a village out of Colombo, was only expected to know how to cook 'istu' (stew), 'cutliss' (cutlets), and 'bifstek' from the Western European canon.
Ada wrote the book to pass on to her children, one of whom was my mother. My mother, after years of use, again particularly at Christmas time, passed it on to me. I can't pass the book itself on to you, but I can share it with you.
I have included images of the pages from Ada's cookery book from which I have transcribed her recipes. The later revisions are my mother's and were done when we emigrated to Australia and she had to take over cooking in the absence of a cook. They often reflect differences in Australia in the availability (hence substitutions) or quality (for example, the bigger eggs in Australia) of ingredients specified in Ada's originals.
As a final familiy note, my mother became pregnant within the first year of the family emigrating, and my father took up the cooking duties. He remained the cook of Sri Lankan food in the household from then on, with mum, in an interesting continuity of the role of a Burgher housewife, focussing on the latest recipes from Women's Weekly and other Australian women's magazines - lots of English meat and vegie dishes, cakes, desserts and things with macaroni.
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