The Cookery Queen

by

Lauren Roberts

Cooking has for most of human history been the domain, whether voluntary or involuntary, of women. Today people like Martha Stewart and Britain’s Nigella Lawson attempt to elevate cooking and other home arts far to a level associated with art rather than home but the origins of cooking and of cookbooks lies in the unknown past of family homes and kitchens. For centuries, mothers have handed down to their daughters family cookbooks, often composed of handwritten pages or 3x5 index cards and later, recipes cut from magazines and newspapers.

Public cookbooks—those developed and designed to be sold on a large-scale basis—existed long before Rachel Ray, before Betty Crocker, before Fanny Farmer. One of the first successful cookbook authors was Isabella  Mary Beeton (1836-1865). Mrs Beeton was the famous English author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It was such a popular book, one ensuring her ongoing fame as one of the world’s most famous cookery writers, that even today it is still published, albeit in updated editions.

She had been born in a section of London called Cheapside. Her father died when she was young, and her mother later married a widower after which they went to live in Epsom, Surrey. As a girl, Isabella was sent to school in Germany for two years, and during this time she became an accomplished pianist. Shortly after her return to England she visited London where she met Samuel Orchart Beeton, political radical, brilliant conversationalist, and an energetic publisher of books and popular magazines geared to the socially mobile and educated readership who wanted to know about things. Their two mothers had known each other and kept in touch even after Samuel’s parents’ move to London. They were married in July of 1856, the only note of disharmony being that her stepfather refused to attend the wedding because he didn’t approve of the match.

The young couple moved into a large Italianate property on the Woodridings Estate in Hatch End where nine months later she gave birth to a boy. The child, unfortunately, lived only three months, and he was the first of several miscarriages, stillbirths, and other deaths.  (In her biography, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, author Kathryn Hughes speculated that “the reason for this disastrous obstetric history might be syphilis, contracted from her husband.” But no one knows for sure.) But the Beeton’s did eventually have two sons who survived to adulthood: Orchart (b. 1863) and Mayson Moss (b. 1865). Orchart went on to lead a prosperous life in the army and Mayson initially followed in his father's footsteps as a publisher and later as a journalist.

It was in Hatch End that Isabella began to write articles on cooking and household management for her husband’s publications. Society was changing rapidly, and young married middle-class women were, for the first time, more likely than not to be living at some distance from their original communities. Railroads and urbanization had seen the splintering of families from what had been lifelong communities. Where once a young bride could pop next door to consult her mother about how to save butter from becoming rancid or how to deal with a upstart of a maid, there now was no support. The articles and later the book provided a sort of Mother in substitute of nearby family.

Samuel and Isabella made a terrifically successful and prolific team. Between 1859-1861, she also wrote a monthly column for The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine: an Illustrated Journal combing Practical Information, Instruction & Amusement. Isabella was only twenty-five—she had begun writing the book at age twenty-one—when in October of 1861, the supplements were collected into and published as a single volume by her husband’s firm, S. O. Beeton Publishing: 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, edited by Mrs. Isabella Beeton.

It became known as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and as the subtitle states went far beyond cooking—offering advice on fashion, childcare, animal husbandry, poisons, the management of servants, science, religion, and industrialism—even though more than 900 of its 1,112 pages contained recipes. Most of the recipes were illustrated with color engravings—and it is upon those original engravings that the illustrations on the bookmark are based. Given their look I’d say this bookmark dates from the mid-twentieth century.

The book was meant to provide a guide of reliable information about running a Victorian household for the aspirant middle class. It was in some ways innovative: it was the first book to show recipes in a format that is still used today with all the ingredients listed at the start of the recipe and to say how long something should be cooked. But the recipes were not, nor was it ever claimed by either of the Beetons, to be her originals. According to biographer Hughes, many were taken word-for-word from earlier books, some of those going back to the Restoration. Eliza Acton but also from Alexis Soyer, Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Antonin Carême and many others were uncredited “donors” to the book. What the Beetons did was to compile all this into one source, edit it, and present it in a single bound and illustrated volume. It was a success with more than 60,000 copies sold in its first year of publication and nearly two million by 1868.

Isabella was proud of it yet in her introduction she noted:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labor 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. Men are now so well served out of doors,—at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses, that in order to compete with the attractions of these places, a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as be perfectly conversant with all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.

Far more a working woman than a homemaker and no feminist, Isabella nevertheless embraced the traditional role of woman as queen of the home. The home, she maintained, is the responsibility of the woman, and she felt it her role to teach others how to achieve the best results. In a way she was, her biographer Kathryn Hughes  noted in her introduction to a facsimile edition, “a kind of universal mother” who would help others gain the skills needed to fulfill their role in the home.

But it’s the recipes that make the book—and also, alas, make it clear why English cooking is the way it is. Though it is probable that no one today boils carrots for one to two hours (as she recommended), it is easy to see why that country’s food has not risen to any heights of culinary delight.

Still, it was and continues to be an important book in the history of culinaria. When it was reissued in an Oxford World's Classic edition in March of 2000, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management sold out in central London bookstores within weeks. Nicola Humble, editor of that edition, explained why: “Ultimately, Household Management is so much more than a cookery book. It tells a story of a culture caught between the old world and the new, poised between modernity and nostalgia.”

Sadly, Isabella died of puerperal fever the day after giving birth to her fourth child in January 1865. She was twenty-eight years old. Samuel lived another twelve years before dying of tuberculosis in 1877 at the age of forty-six. But his efforts to market and promote the book after her death continued. One year after her death, however, he was forced to give up the copyright on all his publications, including Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management due to the collapse of Overend and Gurney, a London discount house to which he was in debt. Saving himself required the sale of the copyrights to publishers Ward, Lock and Tyler for £3,250. Nevertheless, he continued to run it. Ward Lock’s revisions were the first of many. The book continues to be published. In fact, her name has become so valuable that there have been a number of home- and food-related books published under it from the late nineteenth century up to today.

Her book is in the public domain and easily available online (Google Books, an audio version, Gutenberg, Kindle, and more). As for the bookmark, there is no indication of which publisher or which books—more than likely, books that are not the Book of Household Management—to which it refers. But that’s okay. I am fond of the illustrations and having been to England I can say that it is unlikely I will ever be interested in enjoying more than an image of her recipes.

Bookmark specifications: Mrs Beeton’s Cookery Books
Dimensions: 7" x 2 1/4"
Material: Paper
Manufacturer: Unknown
Date: Circa mid-twentieth century
Acquired: eBay

Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines has reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, nearly 1,300 bookmarks and approximately the same number of books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She is a member of the National Books Critics Circle (NBCC) as well as a longtime book design judge for Publishers Marketing Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Contact Lauren.