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By Rachel Rich&#160;[caption id="attachment_3715" align="alignleft" width="247"] Two rabbits sitting next to the entrance of their burrow while a couple of rabbits are gamboling in the background. Etching by J. Tookeyafter J. C. Ibbetson.Credit: Wellcome Library, London.[/caption]In a previous post, I compared Georgiana Hill with Isabella Beeton, in order to reflect on different genres of Victorian recipe books. But Hill is interesting as more than a counterpart to the more famous Beeton. Georgiana Hill was a prolific cookery writer in the 1860s. Of what she did before this, and how she spent her remaining years after, little is known. Until recently, the most notable mention of her by a historian was in Joan Thirsk’s ‘Forward’ Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (edited by Mary Prior, 1985). Thirsk, perfectly understandably, assumed that Hill the cookery writer was the same person as Georgiana Hill who published on women’s history in the 1890s. We now know otherwise.  In 2012 Panmacmillan reprinted Everybody’s Pudding Book as A Year of Victorian Puddings. Now Hill is back in our minds and the ODNB will be adding an entry on her to their publication in the near future.Apart from what the census yields, the best clues about Hill’s life come from her cookbooks. The introduction to Puddings suggests that Hill had sense of humour since she offered a funny take on the usual trope of scolding women for their lack of culinary know-how, with a clearly exaggerated tale of a visit to an elderly woman who served apple pudding six months a year and gooseberry pudding the other six, because these were the only two recipes her servant could tolerably execute. Hill wrote that ‘This slight incident decided me to undertake a work for the assistance and enlightenment of any ladies who may be in like distress; and if through my editorial exertions, one of the fair or even sterner sex be spared a moment’s trouble on the subject…I shall…feel I am incontestably entitled to be looked upon as a benefactor of my species.’Elsewhere, Hill did away completely with the conventional form, opting, for example, for some thoughts on rabbits as pets, and as having health-giving properties, in the introduction to The Gourmet’s Guide to Rabbit Cooking, in one hundred and twenty-four dishes (1859), where she includes a little poem:For onions, you know, are generally saidTo be an excellent remedy for a cold in the head;And rabbits I’m told by those who are smart,Are a capital cure for a cold in the heart!As well as being quite playful in the introductions to her books, Hill also shows herself to be a woman interested in the world around her. French frequently appeared in recipes and on menus throughout the period, being, as it was, the de facto language of gastronomy. But Hill went further than simply paying lip service to the French. She included French, but also many Spanish recipes in her books, perhaps drawing on knowledge she had acquired when she worked as a language teacher in the 1850s.In Rabbits, Hill offers several Spanish-inspired recipes, such as ‘Spanish Conejo con Arroz,’ which involved a lot of garlic, and ‘Rabbits a la Ronda’:Take shred ham, cold veal, and beef suet…a little grated lemon-peel, nutmeg, Cayenne pepper, salt and the crumb of a penny roll. Pound all this in a mortar, bind it with two well-beaten eggs, and put it inside your rabbit, sew it up, truss it, and lay it in a stewpan, with a quart of strong stock, a bottle of white wine, two lemons cut in quarters, a bunch of sweet-herbs, a few cloves, and a slat-spoonful of pepper…rub it over with olive-oil, and place it before a slow fire for forty minutes, basting it frequently with oil.In Puddings, Hill mostly concentrated on English recipes, with only a smattering of French. Some of the recipes, like ‘Oxford Pudding’ or ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ had place names, and the same was true of ‘Berkshire Apple Dumplings’:Peel and core six middling-sized apples; cover them well over with white sugar; place them in a deep dish, and put them into your oven: when they become tender, pour over them a batter made with two eggs, two spoonful of flour, and sufficient milk to make it of the requisite consistency. Bake for twenty minutes, and serve with spiced sugar, apart.In both cases, Hill shows herself to be a skilled cook, who also expected skill of those she addressed, as in her recipe for ‘Pommes Farcies’ where she instructs that the apples are to be baked for half an hour ‘in a gay oven.’ These are recipes which were to be followed by cooks comfortable with the basics of the kitchen, and who had the confidence to follow instructions which left much to the discretion of the cook.Reading Hill’s recipes, I feel I am getting to know a smart and funny woman, who had either travelled, or wanted to travel, and loved all things Spanish. Hill never married. Her cookbooks, which are sympathetic to women, without being overly burdened with concerns about cleaning, nursing sick children or other common concerns of the domestic advice writer, might be a clue to either the cause or the effect of remaining single. In either case, Hill is a no-nonsense sort of woman, serious minded and comfortable with the idea of women as smart, competent and hard-working, for which her subsequent career as a nurse in the 1870s provides further evidence.  Writing someone’s life from their cookbooks may not become the next mainstream trend in biographical research. But it does seem like as good a way as any of getting to know this mysterious woman, who was at once a successful professional cookery writer, and a completely unknown, ordinary, respectable woman.In the coming months, I intend to write more about Hill and her recipes. If anyone knowns anything about her, I would love to hear from you!