Tillypronie is a Victorian era house between Ballater and Strathdon in Scotland, just east of the Cairngorms National Park, overlooking the valley of the River Dee; the gardens are open to the public.

[1] Lady Clark collected thousands of recipes for her own use between 1841 and 1897;[2] among her house-guests in the 1870s was Henry James, who commented in a letter "I bless the old house on the mountain and its genial and bountiful tenants".

[4] Living in Europe gave Lady Clark a detailed insight into Italian and French cooking – there are five recipes for Tartare sauce; and she was well informed about Anglo-Indian cookery, with dishes such as "Rabbit Pish-pash".

of Recipes (1899) and Hilda's Diary of a Cape Housekeeper (1902), both published by Chapman and Hall; but Frere's name had not appeared on their title pages.

There is an Appendix, under Frere's name, with sections summarized from the RSPCA on how "To spare animals unnecessary pain" and "Bad meat" (which gives advice on the best ways to kill rabbits and birds).

"[15] For most of the twentieth century there was only one edition, that of 1909, published by Constable: This changed in the 1990s: The feminist author Virginia Woolf reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement in 1909, writing that "Cookery books are delightful to read... A charming directness stamps them, with their imperative 'Take an uncooked fowl and split its skin from end to end'[b] and their massive commonsense which stares frivolity out of countenance".

[16][17] The Spectator review in 1909 speculates that Lady Clark inherited the "practical study of cookery" from her father, "Mr. Justice Coltman" who though "abstemious himself" was "careful to provide a well-furnished table for his guests".

[18] The cookery writer Elizabeth David describes one of Lady Clark's recipes in her 1970 book Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen as follows: Thick Parmesan Biscuits.

[2] Dyson and McShane state (after discussing the contents) that "The recipes are not difficult as Lady Clark preferred simplicity and was annoyed with contrivance."

"[2] Vanessa Kimbell of the Sourdough School writes that Frere carefully catalogued all the recipes, removing any that she could trace to a published source, and comments that they "are all delightfully straight forward".

Kimbell notes that Clark "collected cooked and annotated over three thousand pages of manuscripts and recipes between 1841 and 1897, including many from her time spent living in France and Italy.

"[20] In her introduction to the 1994 edition, Geraldene Holt writes that while most cooks collect recipes, Clark's achievement was "astonishing", her thousands of pages of notes on dishes she had liked "not only written over every available margin, but often crossed like a shepherd's plaid".

"[21] Hope adds that Lady Clark's "personal jottings – sometimes no more than aides-mémoire – unconsciously convey the world of the late Victorian hostess in London, abroad, and at home in Tillypronie.