Agnes Marshall
English culinary entrepreneur and cookery writer
Biography
Agnes Marshall (Walthamstow, 1855 - Pinner, 1905) was an English culinary entrepreneur and cookery writer of the Victorian era. Known as the “Queen of Ices”, she helped popularise ice cream at a time when it was still a novelty, and she is often regarded as one of the people who brought the modern ice cream cone into common use. She matters because she combined teaching, publishing and commerce in a field rarely open to women of her time, and because her ideas on freezing anticipated techniques that are common today.
Her origins remain uncertain. For years it was assumed that she was born in 1855 in Walthamstow, but later research points to 1852, in the East End of London, as the illegitimate daughter of a working-class mother. She married Alfred William Marshall in 1878, and in 1883 the couple bought a cookery school on Mortimer Street, in central London, renaming it the Marshall's School of Cookery. It taught high-end English and French cuisine to large classes. In 1885 she published The Book of Ices, which contained 177 recipes for ice cream and frozen desserts, and her husband took out a patent for an improved freezer that could make a pint of ice cream in under five minutes. From 1886 she edited the weekly magazine The Table, which mixed recipes with lighthearted essays on a range of subjects.
The business also sold kitchen equipment, ran an agency for domestic staff and kept a food shop selling flavourings and syrups. After a fall from a horse in 1904 she never fully recovered, and she died the following year. Her books passed to a well-known publisher, and her name faded from public memory for decades. Interest returned in the late twentieth century, with a collection of essays in 1998, and partly through modern chefs such as Heston Blumenthal, who called her one of the great culinary pioneers and who makes ice cream with liquid nitrogen, a method she had proposed.
Key contributions
- The Book of Ices (1885): a collection of ice cream and frozen dessert recipes that also showcased her inventions and moulds.
- The patented ice cream freezer (1885): a machine that could freeze a pint of ice cream in under five minutes.
- Marshall's School of Cookery: a London cookery school that trained a large number of students.
- The Table (from 1886): a weekly magazine combining recipes with articles on cookery, leisure and social questions.
- The cornet recipe in her 1888 cookbook: possibly the first printed mention of the edible ice cream cone.
- The proposal to use liquid nitrogen to make ice cream, a method now used by some contemporary chefs.