Jane LillyBower Ashton Library, UWE Bristol, UK
My first idea was to see if I could reproduce shopping lists for well-known people from the past, mainly by looking at cookery books and recipes reconstructed from their household accounts. But I got distracted! I searched the net to find lists of supplies used by vegetarians, Mormons, backpackers and so on, then added a list my Dad made in his wartime POW diaries while he was in Germany for some 3 years. The other one with a personal link is the Board of Guardians' list published in the Bristol Mercury in 1836, because their address is given as Bower Ashton, where I work for UWE Libraries. The cheese they list as 'half coward cheese' is in fact Single Gloucester, which was a good cheese for keeping, like Cheddar.
Food is a big interest for me; the way in which diet changes with fashionable ingredients and new products over the centuries is fascinating. Local history and domestic history work on a scale I feel very comfortable with. I write, collect and publish books on Clevedon, current research is under way for a book about the development of the town between 1790 and 1840, previous to which the population had stuck at 350 for centuries!
Jane Lilly, Clevedon, Somerset
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