(Continued from August 23, 2010):

Brillat-Savarin’s comments about the English being the worst cooks in the world drew a sniff from the proper Isabella, sure that her book would right that situation.

In spite of the moralizing tone, and the plagiarism, BOHM became a runaway bestseller. Readers and critics considered the soup, fish, sauce chapters the best.

Quantities of food served at dinner now seem phenomenal. But Isabella emphasized strict economy,  sometimes distressingly so, especially with family meals. She tackled the problem of leftover joints of meat, indexed in BOHM under “Cold Meat Cookery.” For surely, as you well know, leftovers  signal prosperity and abundance, a luxury not possible for the poor, whose next meal may just be a dream and a wish.

And Sam Beeton, crafty publisher that he was, decided to take advantage of that situation. In 1863, he and Isabella created and published The Englishwoman’s Cookery Book — a compendium of cold meat recipes and economical dishes. Leftover meat presented huge problems for households and readers clamored for ideas of how to use up the huge joints of meats.

Cooks still mine BOHM for recipes, for the book reveals social and cultural history. According to Aylett and Ordish in First Catch Your Hare,

It is still in print today, though modernised. First editions are extremely valuable properties; all nineteenth-century editions are collectors’ pieces.

The book provides an invaluable guide to the domestic life of Victorian England, especially eating habits. People gorged themselves, at least in the upper classes and whenever there was enough money for food. Obesity was a problem then, too. BOHM reflects the urban life of most of the readers, in that no one appears to have grown their own food. Isabella focused on doing the marketing/purchasing of goods for the household, including the food. At the

time, houses had official “back doors,” to which the tradesmen came and sold their wares, thus relieving the housewife of having to go out to do the marketing. Female servants did go out if necessary. Isabella included copious information on servants, their ranks in the household, and the pay they received. All food was cooked and nothing eaten raw,  understandably so because of the dangers of contamination by poor water and dirty hands. Isabella’s book came out  before Pasteur confirmed his germ theory discoveries around 1862. And the legendary Sweeney Todd, the evil barber of Fleet Street, killed his customers to make meat pies out of them.

Keywords characterizing the times of Isabella Beeton include Industrial Revolution, growing female literacy, appearance of new consumer goods, breakdown of social class, and democratic movements. Charles Darwin published his The Origin of Species two years before. So Sam’s magazines filled an important niche and fed his readers’ hunger for knowledge propelled by the burgeoning intellectual life and growing literacy of the times. The contents of the book included items arranged according to the manner in which they were served or eaten at large dinner parties:

Sauces

Meat

The Sheep and Lamb

The Common Hog

The Calf

Birds

Games

Vegetables

Puddings

Creams

Preserves

Milk and Eggs

Breads and Cakes

Beverages and

Invalid Cookery

Sample recipes:

CAPER SAUCE FOR FISH.

383. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter No. 376, 3 dessertspoonfuls of capers, 1 dessertspoonful of their liquor, a small piece of glaze, if at hand (this may be dispensed with), 1/4 teaspoonful of salt, ditto of pepper, 1 tablespoonful of anchovy essence.

Mode.—Cut the capers across once or twice, but do not chop them fine; put them in a saucepan with 1/2 pint of good melted butter, and add all the other ingredients. Keep stirring the whole until it just simmers, when it is ready to serve.

Time.—1 minute to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 5d.

Sufficient to serve with a skate, or 2 or 3 slices of salmon.

CAPERS.—These are the unopened buds of a low trailing shrub, which grows wild among the crevices of the rocks of Greece, as well as in northern Africa: the plant, however, has come to be cultivated in the south of Europe. After being pickled in vinegar and salt, they are imported from Sicily, Italy, and the south of France. The best are from Toulon.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR CAPER SAUCE.

384. INGREDIENTS – 1/2 pint of melted butter, No. 376, 2 tablespoonfuls of cut parsley, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar.

Mode.—Boil the parsley slowly to let it become a bad colour; cut, but do not chop it fine. Add it to 1/2 pint of smoothly-made melted butter, with salt and vinegar in the above proportions. Boil up and serve.

Time.—2 minutes to simmer. Average cost for this quantity, 3d.

So too a number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.” — all originated in Isabella’s book.

Other features of the book included an index, recipes numbered and alphabetized within the chapters, cost information, preparation times, and number of servings. Granted, Eliza Acton had pioneered some of these features found in Isabella’s book, but that Isabella adapted them and that her book went on to be reprinted and revised so many times—unlike Acton’s work—virtually guaranteed that these items would be carried over by other cookbook authors, including Fanny Farmer of the Boston Cooking School in the United States.

Excited about the delivery of her fourth child, Isabella worked on Beeton’s Dictionary of Cookeran abridged version of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, up to a week before she died. She also started a magazine called The Queen (now called Harper’s & Queen).

She died of puerperal fever at age 28 one day after the birth of her fourth son, Mayson, in January 1865. Sam’s broken-hearted eulogy read:

USQUE AD FINEM (Forever At Rest) Her hand has lost its cunning, the firm, true hand that wrote these formulae and penned the information contained in this little book…exquisite palate, unerring judgment, sound common sense, refined tastes, all these had the dear Lady, who has gone, ere her youth had scarcely come…her duty no woman has ever better accomplished than the late Isabella Mary Beeton.

Bibliography:

Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive. “Mrs. Isabella Beeton, 1836-1865.” In: Aylett, Mary and Ordish, Olive, First Catch Your Hare: A History of the Recipe Makers. London: Macdonald, 1965, pp. 220-239.

Beeton, Mrs. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Oxford World’s Classics. Abridged Edition. Edited by Nicola Humble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

David, Elizabeth. “Isabella Beeton and her Book,” in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. London: Viking, 1986, pp. 303-309. Reprinted from Wine and Food, Spring 1961.

Day, Helen. “Isabella Beeton.” In: Arndt, Alice, editor, Culinary Biographies. Houston, Texas: Yes Press, 2006, p. 57-59.

Freeman, Sarah. Isabella and Sam: The Story of Mrs. Beeton. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1977.

Hughes, Kathryn. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. New York: Knopf, 2006.

(Excellent bibliography and analysis of the life and work of Isabella Beeton.)

Spain, Nancy. Mrs. Beeton and her Husband. London: Collins, 1948.

Online Resources:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10136

http://www.mrsbeeton.com/

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen

This initiates a series on the women who wrote cookbooks.

In today’s world, where people still attempt to discover themselves as they approach 30 or 40 or 50, it’s rather sobering to look at the accomplishments of people like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Isabella Beeton.  All of whom died before the candles on their cakes numbered 30. Yet they left mature works of almost immortal greatness.

Today in Britain, “Mrs. Beeton” is a culinary trademark not unlike “Betty Crocker,” whom General Mills created in a Frankensteinian moment to boost sales by appealing to Every Housewife.

The difference between the two ladies is that Mrs. Beeton was a real, breathing, living personage who wrote a monster of a book with a monster of a title: The Book of Household Management Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc.—also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort, BOHM for short.

But “ …Mrs. Beeton was a plagiarist.” So states biographer Kathryn Hughes In The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton, published in 2006, nearly 139 years after the death of twenty-eight-year-old author Isabella Mary Mayson Beeton, Mrs. Sam Beeton.

Kathryn Hughes was not the first twentieth-century writer to use the dreaded “P’ word. Elizabeth David, famed mid-twentieth century English food writer, pointed the turning fork at Isabella, too. And whispered all but the word “plagiarism, in her article, “Isabella Beeton and her Book.” David goes on to enumerate what happened to Isabella’s book after her death and the many revisions that occurred.

Antonin Carême

Isabella also took a leaf so to speak from the pages of several other English cookbooks popular at the time, written by female authors like Hannah Glasse, Maria Rundell, and the well-known Eliza Action. And she grabbed material from William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle, too. As well as Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste and Thomas Webster’s Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy. A Mrs. Parkes wrote a great deal of that book and included cost information and also listed ingredients at the beginning of the recipes, so Isabella really did not invent something new under the sun.

Born 1836, in Cheapside, London, Isabella was the oldest daughter in a family of 21 children, which she called a “living cargo of children.” At age 19, she married Samuel Orchard (Orchart as some researchers write it) Beeton. Sam Beeton made his fortune by publishing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Britain. He adorned the book with the beehive symbol/logo of his company. Isabella served as his editor, copy editor, and compiler from 1859–1861 for The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which Sam started in 1852. She also wrote a monthly cooking supplement for the magazine. In October 1861, Beeton published the twenty-four “supplements” as a single volume.

The only problem was that she did not know much about cooking— her own sisters called her “an indifferent cook.” A damning quote from a letter from Mrs. Henrietta Mary Pourtois English, who married Robert English in 1835, formerly a footman to George IV and well-versed in the ways of the kitchens of noble households and Henrietta also worked in the grand ancestral homes of the English aristocracy. The letter reads in part:

Cookery is a Science that is only learned by Long Experience and years of Study, which, of course, you have not had … .

Samuel Beeton

Mrs. English wrote to Isabella Beeton, July 21^st, 1857, when the Beetons were seeking support for what would become Isabella’s magnum opus, published in 1861 with an ornate front piece painted by Henry George Hine.

In her letter, Mrs. English brings up questions about just for whom Isabella was writing the book. The ensuing tone of the book resembled the voice of a comfortable, middle-aged lady appalled at the declining standards of competent womanhood. And Isabella was particularly concerned with extravagance of women driving their families into ruin, never mind their husbands with their gambling, horseracing, and other sundry vices!

Charges of plagiarism against Isabella take on a different perspective with this letter from Mrs. English. For Mrs. English is blatantly telling Isabella to “lift” the recipes from other sources, namely Simpson’s Cookery! This is, according to Hughes,

the way that cookery books had been put together from time immemorial … .

And so Isabella began her book with a poignant preface:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

The book contained a number of interesting and somewhat unique characteristics, or at least features not common in many of the cookery books published at the time. A number of classic phrases and sayings first appeared in Household Management: “Dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely”, “A place for everything and everything in its place”, and “In cooking, clear as you go.”

In addition to anecdotal stories and history peppered throughout the recipes, Isabella quoted Byron, Milton, Keats and Tennyson in the chapter on “Dinners and Dining.” She created a usable index, numbered and alphabetized the recipes within the chapters, estimated cost information, measured preparation time, and included the number of servings for each recipe. She also paid attention to seasonality of ingredients.

The detailed engravings/illustrations — some in color — were outstanding, a very different thing for a book of it price (7S 6d). The first review appeared a year after publication in a magazine called Athenaeum. Even so, sixty thousand copies sold during that first year. A moralizing tone characterized many cookery books of the past, a trend which came and went like waves at the seashore, sometimes present during certain time periods and then absent for a while. BOHM took on a somewhat moralizing tone, as was the fashion of the time. Forty-six intensive detailed chapters, beginning with “The Mistress of the Household” and ending with “Legal Memoranda” comprised the book. The title page oozed ripely with Victoriana. Over 1,112 pages made this a massive book, with 900 of those pages devoted nearly 1400 recipes.

As Hughes and David mention in their twentieth-century analyses of BOHM, Isabella plagiarized a number of recipes from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families.

It was one of the first books to publish recipes in the format that we find familiar. With her maid, Isabella also supposedly tested every recipe, but Hughes is skeptical about that.  She chose recipes to be used in middle-class homes, with few of the fanciful flourishes favored by Charles Francatelli, chef to the Queen Victoria and author of another popular book of the time, The Modern Cook.  Beeton’s book made a tremendous impact on Englishwomen’s cookery, for better or worse, like a marriage.  She provided a list of prepared/canned foods available at the time, and includes the prices. One section focused on the nutritional value of various foods and is quite on the money.  Seven recipes for Plum Pudding appear in BOHM, catering to the pocketbooks of the various economic situations of her readers. Cakes were a luxury food until the end of the nineteenth century. “A Nice Useful Cake,” recipe number 2414, calls for new-fangled baking powder. She also included recipes for Australian, Indian, French, German, and Italian dishes.

(Continued on August 26, 2010.)

© 2008, 2010 C. Bertelsen