A Brief History of Darwin’s Marmalade

Watch this space as our volunteers are busy making Marmalade to sell in our shop (available soon!). They’ve stuck to Darwin’s family recipe but here’s a brief history of where the recipe came from…

The book which is held in our collection comprises a notebook, on handmade paper with a watermark of 1801. Its first use was as an index to a lost letter book of some sort. The book was then used for copying medical prescriptions between 1845 and 1846, many by one “R.L”, who has defied identification. Later, the book was used for copying in recipes up to 1877. These are associated with mostly with a “Mrs E. Burd”.

The Burd family was well established in Shropshire, and they seem likely to have been the originator, or a close friend of the same, for both these medical and cooking entries. These Burds were long Burgesses of Shrewsbury,  from 1568, which helps to identify them. These descend from one Benjamin Bird (1728 – 1814) of Westbury. The Burd family appear also in the online Darwin Correspondence Project when, in October 1833, Sarah Harriet Mostyn Owen (1802-1886) a close friend of Charles Darwin before his infamous Beagle voyage, had then noted that her brothers Charles (1817-1894) and Henry (1802-1843) were now “at school at Mr Burd’s”. This was a Shrewswbury school run by one of this family. Then again in November 1848, when Erasmus Darwin’s son Robert Waring (Charles’ father) died in Shrewbury, the surgeon Henry Edward Burd was one of those who saw no hope he would live. It is thus no wonder that one of these recipes in this cookery section is for “Dr [Robert Waring] Darwin’s Orange Marmalade”

The recipe book was kindly gifted to the Museum by one of the original founders Denis Gibbs.