Marcelle Azra Hincks (25 October 1883[1] – 1938), known by the pen name Countess Morphy, was a British food writer, dance critic, and cookery demonstrator, famed for her book on world gastronomy.
[6] She died at a comparatively early age only four years later in 1938 at "Sorrento", Lyme Regis, the "beloved wife of Major Ellert Forbes".
He thinks this might be of note to those interested in “international gastronomy”, and that “It was not her only aim to teach the appreciation of good food, but she hoped that by telling us how other nations fared, we might learn to understand each other better and to live more peaceably.”[8] There is a story behind her adoption of the name Countess Morphy.
[9] Countess Morphy is nowadays mainly connected with cookery and food writing but she began her career in print as a dance critic.
In Europe itself, the abyss between the palates of one nation and another explains the enmity and hostility which exist between human whose conception of feeding is completely antithetic.’[13]Morphy goes on to say her motive in writing the book ‘is to help the modern housewife who takes an intelligent interest in cooking to have excellent, varied and inexpensive food in her own home.’ She does not flatter her readers, asserting that ‘English food is apt to be monotonous, and the average woman is frightened of foreign cookery.’ She concludes by hoping to dispel the myths about foreign cookery and introduce English housewives to the ordinary cooking of foreign lands.
)[14] Although some critics picked on the inevitable mistakes which occurred in this giant and wide-ranging book, and some ridiculed the recipe for fricassée of iguana from Guinea, on the whole the work was greeted with enthusiasm and was in print for a long period.
A review in the Times noted that she wrote for those needing to cook a good meal for a hungry family and thus cited bourgeois and peasant recipes, which were also economical.