Biscuit recipe of the week: Littlehampton Honey & Fig Biscuits
The second biscuit recipe of this week, by Alison Hilton, MERL Marketing Officer Sometimes I really love social media! We’d never have come across this week’s recipes had it not been for a #ThrowbackThursday image we posted last week on Twitter. As it was #BritishSandwichWeek, the picture was of recipes for sandwich spreads from a […]
Name that beer!
Enter our competition to name a new beer for the MERL Village Fete! You may remember Adam’s recent post on brewing, in which he mentioned the beer tent at the MERL Village Fete, taking place on May 31st. We have had a beer tent at the Fete for a few years now, with a selection […]
Our Country Lives update: Michael Eavis's French wellies
Written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. Yesterday we picked up our newest acquisition: a pair of wellies. It seems strange that a museum of English rural life wouldn’t have this icon of the countryside already in the collection, but they never really came onto our radar as an endangered object. The welly has never needed […]
Biscuit recipe of the week: 1940s jam biscuits
By Shira Kilgallon, UoR History Student and MERL Library Volunteer This week’s biscuit recipe comes from Ministry of Food pamphlets found in the MERL Library collections; two pamphlets have been used to give you a recipe with a twist (and a bit of a challenge!!). This particular twist is definitely for the more experimental among […]
Weekly What's On: May 19th to 25th
You can find full details of all our forthcoming events and activities in our What’s On and MERL Families guides, which are now available from the Museum or to download from our website You can also see all events on our online calendar MERL Seminar series: The Great War & the countryside Food security in the Great War: the contribution of wartime […]
Press release: What's cooking in the community? Find out at the MERL Village Fete
Food Science students at the University of Reading have been challenged to create new dishes from ingredients used by the diverse communities in Reading. The results will be revealed in the ‘Reading, Steady, Cook!’ demonstrations at the MERL Village Fete on May 31st. The Village Fete at the Museum of English Rural Life, which is […]
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 […]
Rural Reads review #6: Harvest by Jim Crace
by Rob Davies, Volunteer Coordinator and Rural Reads regular. In April, members of Rural Reads read Harvest by Jim Crace – you can already guess the rural connection. Harvest was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2013 and had rave reviews, the quotes on the back of the book give it high praise. “One of his […]
Please touch: Future handling collection at MERL
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. One of the biggest complaints levelled at museums is that visitors cannot touch anything. Objects are put tantalisingly out of reach behind thin Perspex and glass, or an arms-length behind a velvet rope. It is annoying because objects are almost always meant to be touched, and especially so in […]
Our Country Lives update: How we research
written by Adam Koszary, Project Officer. You may have noticed that we’ve been a bit quiet recently about our HLF-funded redevelopment project, Our Country Lives. This is because we’re waiting for a response from the Heritage Lottery Fund due on June 13th (fingers crossed), but also because a lot of us have been busy catching […]