Florence White (1) (1863–1940)

Florence White was born in Peckham, England. Her parents were Richard White, a lace buyer for a firm in the City of London, and his second wife, Harriet Jane Thrikell. Her mother died when Florence was aged six, and her father remarried. Florence had a difficult relationship with her stepmother. As a young child, Florence was blinded in one eye and subsequently suffered from frail health, including neuralgic headaches and weakness. When her father had financial difficulties brought on by an economic depression in the late 1870s, she and her sister Kate were removed from school in 1877, ending their formal education. Kate became a governess and Florence became the White family's maid-of-all-work and her younger siblings' governess. She described herself at this time in her autobiography as "a veritable Cinderella." She and Kate also opened a small school to earn extra money. Due to their poverty, Florence learned to cook with ingenuity and creativity. She made her family a bed of garden rubbish to grow vegetables, and took full advantage of the edibles that grew in the lanes and hedgerows in their area, particularly the blackberries that she used to make puddings, pies, and jam. At age 18, she joined her two paternal aunts Harriet and Louisa, who ran the Red Lion Hotel in Fareham, and was introduced to traditional English cookery. She later held various jobs, including shopkeeping, before writing her first book, Easy Dressmaking, published in 1891 by the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The book was a great success and sold 110,000 copies over eight years. For much of her life, Florence White also worked as a journalist, including a stint at the Edinburgh Evening News, where she was the only woman on the staff. She took a particular interest in working class women and girls and their diet. During a period of convalesce from illness, she went to Paris, where she enrolled for professional culinary training at the newly-opened Le Cordon Bleu school.
Back in Edinburgh and London, she was the firt-ever freelance journalist specializing in food and cookery, writing articles for The Times on Isabella Beeton and William Kitchiner, and for The Spectator. The editor of The Westminster Gazette commissioned her to contribute a weekly article on "Household Catering." Her articles also appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Glasgow Herald, and The Caterer, among others. She established the English Folk Cookery Association in 1928 and compiled hundreds of recipes sent to her from all over England, and from Scotland and Wales as well. In 1932, she published the now-classic Good Things in England: A Practical Cookery Book, which remains in print. Her other books were Flowers as Food (1934); her autobiography, A Fire in the Kitchen: The Autobiography of a Cook (1938); and Good English Food, Local and Regional, published posthumously in 1952.