author

Lydia Maria Gurney

A New England collector of traditional recipes, remembered for preserving the kind of dishes and kitchen know-how that were often passed down by word of mouth. Her best-known book offers a warm glimpse of everyday home cooking from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

1 Audiobook

Things Mother Used to Make A Collection of Old Time Recipes, Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before

Things Mother Used to Make A Collection of Old Time Recipes, Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before

by Lydia Maria Gurney

About the author

Little is firmly documented about Lydia Maria Gurney herself, but surviving sources agree that she was a New England woman who gathered, tested, and shared old household recipes. In the introduction to Things Mother Used to Make, the book explains that many of these recipes had been handed down over generations and that she had tried most of them in her own kitchen.

Her best-known work, Things Mother Used to Make, was published in 1913 by Macmillan after material had appeared in Suburban Life. Rather than presenting fashionable cuisine, the book preserves practical, older-style cooking and domestic traditions, making it valuable both as a cookbook and as a record of everyday American home life.

Because so little personal biographical information seems to survive, Gurney is best approached through her work: a careful, affectionate preservation of recipes that might otherwise have disappeared. For modern readers, her writing still carries the appeal of lived experience, thrift, and the memory of family kitchens.