"[7] As a young child, White was blinded in one eye while playing with a spinning-top and subsequently suffered from frail health, including neuralgic headaches and weakness that adversely affected her ability to prepare for Girton College, University of Cambridge, entrance exams.
She noted in her autobiography that she made her family a hot-bed of garden rubbish to grow vegetables, and that their being "frightfully poor" necessitated her care in the kitchen where she "learnt to make savoury dishes out of very little, and not to waste anything.
"[13] Because Harriet was suffering from an inoperable tumour and Louisa from creeping paralysis, White's responsibility was to assist in her aunts' care but also to help in the Red Lion kitchen, well-known for serving dishes that were still made on an open range where the food could be roasted in front of the fire.
It was during her time at the Red Lion that White further enhanced her cookery skills, learning to paunch hares, and draw, truss and roast poultry.
For much of her life, White worked as a journalist as well, including a period at the Edinburgh Evening News where she was the only woman on a staff of twenty men, and as such recalled in her autobiography the days “when Mrs Johnstone edited Tait's Magazine, in the time of Sir Walter Scott.” White told her colleagues that she was “‘no lady’ but just an ordinary journalist as any of [them]” and was allowed almost unlimited scope in topics to write about.
[15] White initially investigated a none-too-rare situation for her time period: A girl’s mother died, leaving the child five shillings a week to support herself.
Neither child knew how to buy or cook food, and so they survived on “bread and dripping, stewed tea, cheap pickles, and an occasional kipper or sausage, and porridge, anything to satisfy their appetites.
[16] Periods of her own ill health frequently interrupted White's work, but she often used convalescence to devote more time to understanding cookery and foodways, including in the late 1800s when a doctor prescribed a sea voyage.
“I wanted the real thing, and got it.”[17] White returned to England and determined on a course of study that would have profound implications for her career: She treated where she was living with cousins in Priest Hutton, City of Lancaster, as if it were as worthy of the same scrutiny she had given to abodes abroad, particularly as the place related to historic and regional foodways.
She explained how folk history, especially fashion and architecture, informed her understanding of food: "I knew the houses in which they lived and how they were furnished and the clothes they wore--but what did they eat?
The money earned from these ventures resulted in White gaining a bit more financial security and thus leaving her cousins to set out on her own, first to Carnforth, then Warton, Lancaster, later Melling, and Kendal.
In fact, she found it astonishing that in Scotland, a Presbyterian country, so many women had given over the importance of Sabbath worship to, in her words, the “idolatry of the parliamentary vote.”[21] While back in Edinburgh, White again wrote for the Edinburgh Evening News (likely freelancing), at one point publishing a leader article arguing that if Britain were again to be involved in a continental war, the crux of the situation would revolve around the food question, “and the woman who could make a meal for two out of the allowance for one would be worth her weight in gold.
Even though she was exonerated, White resigned from the Lodge to begin working in England on and off as a domestic servant, including looking after a succession of Roman Catholic Priests and then as cook-housekeeper for a women students' hall of residence in Kensington.
[24] Although she had some satisfaction with the work, using her employment as a time to indulge in “a number of interesting experiments in cookery,” White’s health suffered from the labour.
[26] From 1921 to her final years, White built her own library of cookery books by relying on second-hand booksellers while she also took up extensive journalism, including articles for The Times on Isabella Beeton and William Kitchiner, and for The Spectator where she considered herself "very good friends" of its editors, St. Loe Strachey and J.
Vachell went on to suggest that "ten days, without the option of a fine, would be the least punishment inflicted upon any house wife who dared tamper" with recipes that would be created by the State and overseen by an appointed Minister of the National Kitchens.
Nonetheless, she also knew from extensive travel and research that the nation offered an abundance of wonderful foods as well as highly skilled women as well as men who created them.
Why isn’t a memorial put up to her?” Alarmed at people’s ignorance as to what “English food” meant “beyond roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and Christmas Plum pudding,” White increasingly honed her focus and her mission to locate and not only write about the origins of Stilton cheese, Melton Mowbray pork pie, and Bath’s Sally Lunn bun, but to compile recipes for such foods from all over the British Isles.
'"[32] Undeterred, White published a query in the Times, calling on interested parties to join together and form an English Folk Cookery Association (EFCA).
The EFCA thus was able to produce in 1935 the Good Food Register, a directory primarily of small inns and teashops that offered excellent English cooking and regional products.
"The book belongs to the travelling public, and has been compiled solely for their benefit" as a means, she continued, to compel hotelkeepers to improve their meals and their standards.
"[37] Due to the efforts of Tom Jaine, Petits Propos Culinaires devoted volume 87, February 2009 to a reprint of the 1935 Good Food Register.