Biscuit recipe of the week: Picnic Café's famous macaroons

by Alison Hilton, Marketing Officer and biscuit sampler. Fans of Picnic Café in Reading will share my excitement about this week’s recipe, which owner, Jon Amery has kindly agreed to share. Picnic is supplying the cake for the tea tent at the MERL Village Fete again this year, and Jon will be a judge on the […]

Biscuit recipe of the week: Chocolate chip cookies

Another recipe to practise for the Biscuit Bake-off, written by Alison Hilton At the recent launch of the Biscuit Bake-off competition, Andrew Palmer’s wife, Davina, very kindly presented MERL staff with a signed copy of her book ‘Kitchen Diplomacy: 30 years of Foreign Service Cooking’. I was amazed to discover, on reading the introduction, that […]

Crowning the May Queen – origins of a folk tradition

Inspired by our seminar series earlier this year, MERL Curator, Isabel Hughes, reflects on a timely example of intangible heritage from her childhood. Earlier this year, MERL hosted a series of seminars under the banner of Untouchable England.   Inspired by the fact that the MERL collections may soon be packed away temporarily as part of […]

Focus on Collections #5: Brewing Beer

Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. England is ale, and ale is England. It is an old adage, and people grasping at a description of ‘English culture’ very often reach for the low-hanging fruit of ale, pubs and Morris dancing (when they’re not already listing smocks, village greens and other aspects of the rural idyll). […]

Biscuit recipe of the week: Anzac biscuits

Since the recent launch of our Village Fete Biscuit Bake-off , we have started publishing a biscuit recipe each week to inspire you to practise baking biscuits and to enter the competition at the Fete on May. Our Librarians and archivists are digging out some interesting recipes from the MERL collections, and we’d also welcome […]

Picture of the month #9: Lambs

After watching ‘Lambing Live’, seeing lambs in fields on my way to work and  cute pictures of lambs from @herdyuk, @farmersoftheuk and many more, every time I log on to Twitter, lambs seemed to be the obvious seasonal subject matter for our Picture of the Month post this time. One picture from our collections immediately […]

Biscuit recipe of the week: Rich Traveller biscuits

Welcome to our series of biscuit recipes to inspire you to take part in the Biscuit Bake-off at the MERL Village Fete on May 31st! At the recent launch of the Biscuit Bake-off, University student Deiniol Pritchard experimented with a Huntley & Palmers recipe for ‘University Rusks’, which everyone at the special Todder Time event […]

My Favourite Object #6: 'Check Rein' and Blacksmithing Tools

This post was written by Christina Avramakis, Project Assistant for our Sense of Place project. My role at MERL has been to accession and catalogue new objects coming into the Museum, and so I have been very lucky to get up close and personal with many interesting objects and stories. For this reason, it was difficult to […]

Student Spotlight #4: Joseph Arch hand casts

Maria Rabbani is a 2nd year Archaeology student at the University of Reading. The objects which I have chosen are the white plaster casts of Joseph Arch’s right and left hand. The length of the casts is 18cm and their breadth (across the knuckles) is 12cm. His hands look small and delicate, which may be […]

Student Spotlight #3: Lave Net

Mubariz Rabbani is a second year Archaeology student at the University of Reading. I have chosen to write about a lave fishing (pictured below) net as the fishing industry is an important part of the British economy as well as a contemporary issue, as increased fishing may result in environmental damage and may affect the […]

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