Perhaps my own upbringing, in a large northern city with a famously socialist attitude, has coloured my perception a little, but much of the book seemed to be comprised of opportunities for name dropping, more than the actual experience of life in service. That being said, whilst her upbringing may have been more old fashioned, her respect and poise was never lacking. I think much of this was due to the close relationship with her mother, and her learning about the world from her mother's perspective of her own experiences in service. However, despite Mrs Wadlow's time in service coming in the inter-war years - a time of great social change - I felt her mindset was more in keeping with that of a servant at least 50 years before. This was a very interesting and entertaining book, painting a clear picture of the duties and expectations of a kitchen maid/cook in domestic service. A servant would offer an opinion in a much more diplomatic manner if at all they weren't paid to have an opinion and they knew it. She was right about one thing-'Downton Abbey' bears very little resemblance to the reality of service in the stately homes of the time. I'm here to tell you, she must have had more than one failure that wasn't just cake! (I did wonder, if she had made the cake once and realised she put too much baking powder in the first time, why on earth did she do the same thing again?) Compared to the envious moaning about 'Us' and 'Them' in Below Stairs: The Classic Kitchen Maid's Memoir That Inspired 'Upstairs, Downstairs' and 'Downton Abbey', it's a much more pleasant read, and not just because Wadlow worked for a better class of employer she did her best at each job, not trying to get by with the minimum and taking each difficulty as a challenge to her ingenuity. I started cooking family meals myself at about age 11, and have been doing it ever since. I wished there might have been a bit more depth-not dishing dirt, but a few more tales of her misadventures as a beginning kitchenmaid cook. She also moved around too much, spending little more than a year in most posts until she got married-and in those days married women weren't expected to remain in service unless their husband was the butler or something.Ī light, fast read.

No dissing on the great and the good to be found here-Wadlow is the essence of the 'family retainers' of 19th and early 20th century fiction, though down in the kitchen she was too far from the action to live vicariously through her employers.

Over a Hot Stove by Flo Wadlow