1875 Public Meeting Leads to Opening of Edinburgh School of Cookery
On 21 April 1875, the Scotsman newspaper carried an advertisement for a public meeting ‘to consider the expediency of establishing a course of lectures on cookery with demonstrations and relative arrangements’. This meeting led directly to the opening of the Edinburgh School of Cookery, the institution that would ultimately become ³ÉÈËÖ±²¥.
On 19 October 1875, a further advertisement appeared in the Scotsman, and in the Courant and the Review, announcing that the public opening of the Edinburgh School of Cookery would take place on Tuesday 9 November in temporary classrooms in the Royal Museum, now the National Museum of Scotland. It is estimated that an audience of over 1000 people crammed into the lecture theatre in the museum on the day of the opening.
The Scotsman reported*:
“University dons, influential citizens, blooming maidens, be-spectacled blue-stockings, grave matrons, with an occasional ‘lewd fellow of the baser sort’ were to be found converging…And what do our readers suppose was the cause of this remarkable excitement?...The new thing that in that instance brought the whole city together was – the cooking of an omelette."
But as one speaker at the event put it, “it was no simple question of cookery that they were occupied with. It was something much wider and much more important". That wider concern was the advancement of women and the reach of education.
*As recounted in Tom Begg’s book, The Excellent Women, pp 25-31.
