Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861)
There is an honourable place for junk food in the history of literature. You might think of Achilles’ souvlaki in The Iliad (see Chapter 38) or the Franklin’s meat pies in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (see Chapter 35). John Kennedy Toole’s glorious comedy of bad manners A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) is especially high on saturated fats and processed gluten. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1839) starts with an appalling man of business, Ralph Nickleby, attempting to become the prototype of Colonel Sanders by investing in the United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.
I confess that I think of a cookbook as something to read while you wait for the pizza to be delivered. Luckily, the mother of the genre, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, has an eye out for me. Mrs Beeton is ever practical. She says that macaroons are too much bother to cook. Go and buy them. Same with turtle soup, which is best purchased in tins.
Aside from that, she has eighteen hundred recipes, nearly all pilfered from other sources, for you to deploy. Her stockpile of culinary and other advice, plundered from wherever she could find it, is an arsenal to use against every conceivable domestic challenge. She sets out by describing the mistress of the house as ‘the commander of an army’. Her tone doesn’t deviate from that pitch, especially when she is railing against her pet hates, which include apples, potatoes, tomatoes and a shortage of servants.
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I don’t like the word ‘recipe’. Those of us who picked up a smattering of Latin at school may recall that the word is a verb. It is an imperative meaning ‘take’. It gained currency because the first word of any recipe was always ‘take’. Take two eggs, a cup of water and something else. The same word was used in dispensing, a reminder that cooking is, after all, a form of chemistry. Take two tablets, a cup of water and something else. My problem with this innocent little word is that what we call a recipe is not an imperative at all. It is an invitation. An invitation is a question. A recipe wants to pass on a lot of experience, but it also asks you to find your own way, to do it yourself. This is why I find Mrs Beeton’s imperious manner a source of grim amusement.
One of the most inviting recipes I know comes from a small book my mother picked up when she was paying her gas bill in the 1940s. Our kitchen was just about the smallest room in the house. It was Mum’s place but it belonged to us all as her invited guests. We practically lived in it, especially in winter when Mum would light the gas oven and leave its door open to heat the room. We had to sit in front of the oven to dry our hair. When that was done, our towels would be hung in front of it. Mum hated the cold. She waged a defensive war against it, so much so that I am the only person I know who thinks of Sydney, where I grew up, as a cold place. Mum curtly told anybody who left the kitchen door ajar to put the board in the hole. On cold mornings she would put our shoes in the oven to warm them before we went to school. I’m sure I thought that the oven was an item of laundry equipment. After all, Mum’s twin-tub washing machine nestled nearby. Most of the serious cooking happened in the electric frypan.
In our house, the kitchen was both the laundry and the phone room. We ate at the kitchen table, usually in shifts. Dad first, then the three kids, then finally Mum. There was a shelf over the table, just above head height, where one of Dad’s radios sat. He would emerge on the hour from some other part of the house to listen to the news. The kitchen was also the first-aid centre and the court of arbitration. It was the place where secrets were laid bare.
It was also the place where things could be kept hidden. There were plenty of cupboards for that. Every year, Mum would turn the cupboards inside out. This would invariably lead to the discovery of precious objects that had either been lost or impounded in the previous twelve months. It also led to the bringing forth of items with stories attached, and those stories would be told. There was an enamel pie dish that Mum’s dad had used, scone cutters he had made for Mum’s mum, a carving fork from Dad’s childhood home, items Mum had been given for her shower tea or her wedding—events which seemed unimaginably distant both in time and space. There were items of family significance kept behind glass in the living room, but the kitchen was the real family museum. We never knew Grandad, but we used his breadboard all the time. Mum only made stuffing according to her father’s recipe. He was still part of the family.
Perhaps it was lucky that neither of my parents believed in such an idea as a new kitchen. I realised this some years later when I was teaching a difficult fifteen-year-old boy. His form master was invited to his family house for dinner, a state-of-the-art mansion on Sydney’s North Shore. The teacher said he came home feeling sorry for the boy for the first time. I asked why. He said that the kid was growing up in a house where the only thing older than him were his parents. In our house we had takeaway food containers, washed out and neatly stacked, that were older than us.
Our meal of the week was Sunday lunch, which we ate about the time people now have brunch. We’d come home from church and Dad, never a well man, would put on the television to watch sports commentary from men in flashy shirts until it was time for a procedure known as ‘sitting up at the table’: Sunday was the only time we ate at the dining table and Sunday lunch was a tutorial in certain aspects of life. We learnt about the correct arrangement of cutlery and where to place the cruets—the salt, pepper and mustard. These days, children learn much more about what to eat: the basic food groups, the need for so many vegetables, the superiority of anything ‘organic’. In our day, the emphasis was far more on how to eat: gravy boats, fish knives, butter knives and salt spoons were as much the focus of dining as intolerances and photos are now. Even eating together has become individualised.
If we were lucky, the baked dinner was followed by one of Mum’s gingerbread puddings. It was produced in an old pudding bowl, bound up in brown paper and string. The bowl had come from her parents’ house.
As an adult, I asked Mum to dig out the recipe for her ginger pudding. I discovered that one of my strongest childhood memories was occasioned by a single line at the end of what was actually a recipe for gingerbread in a promotional giveaway: ‘Half of this mixture, steamed for one and a half to two hours, also makes one excellent ginger pudding.’ Mum had produced a dilapidated booklet she’d acquired from the North Shore Gas Company long before she was married. It had been hidden in a kitchen cupboard. It was falling apart by now, but you could still read the advertisements for a gas-operated refrigerator (another marvel of modern science) and for a product called Mum’s Baking Powder (made with the finest English cream of tartar). This advertisement says:
When dad and the boys tell mum what wonderful cakes and scones she has made, she has every reason to be proud. Such praise makes up for the work and thought which are every bit as necessary as the other ingredients in good cooking.
My mother was also a working pharmacist. She knew that praise didn’t pay the bills.
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Whether or not she knew it, my mother’s kitchen, as well as her own mother’s, were, like countless others, a product of the worldview expressed by one of the publishing phenomena of the nineteenth century, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Isabella Beeton (1836–65) was only twenty-eight when she died of puerperal fever. There may have been more elegant works of Victorian literature, but few as formative of their culture. It is a curious tome, consisting of 2,751 numbered paragraphs, some of them long, many digressing into history and lore. It covers everything from doctors to lawyers, from what to pay your servants to the fact that it is not necessary to pay more than a shilling for a presentable mustard pot.
It is full of the most wonderful eccentricities, yet the line most commonly attributed to Mrs Beeton is nowhere to be found. Her recipe for roast hare is said to start: ‘First, catch your hare.’ Actually, it begins: ‘Choose a young hare; which may be known by its smooth and sharp claws, and by the cleft in the lip not being much spread.’ Such detailed knowledge is far more intriguing. The recipes for hare follow those for grouse, duck, black-cock, cygnet, guinea pig and wheatears. They precede those for landrail, leveret, partridge, pheasant, plovers, ptarmigan, quail, snipe and teal. These are just the small creatures.
Mrs Beeton is nothing if not thorough. If sometimes she sounds less like a cook and more like her contemporary Charles Darwin, trying to account for every creature on the earth, there may be good reason for this. One of her biographers, Kathyrn Hughes, has described her as a person in search of a ‘lost Eden’. This may explain her enormous appeal at a time when the romance of the countryside was receding into myth as more and more land was devoured by new suburbs.
Isabella Mayson, as she was christened, was tossed out of her own Eden when she was five and her father died suddenly, before his fourth child was born. Her mother soon married a man who already had a family but before long more children were on the way. This meant Isabella grew up as one of the responsible girls in a household of twenty-nine, some of whom had to live in the grandstand of the Epsom Racecourse, twenty kilometres from London, where her stepfather worked.
Perhaps it was in this context that she gained her redoubtable powers of domestic organisation. She believed a ginger pudding should be steamed for three hours, a full hour longer than my mother had free to invest. She was a great believer in suet. Indeed, she believed in a great many material things. That was also part of her success. In an age of existential doubt, the book of household management is supremely confident. She says that nobody should ever get out of bed while it is still dark, otherwise you are just wasting candles.
Isabella married Sam Beeton, much to the annoyance of her stepfather. Sam was an enterprising publisher. He went to America to try to crack a business deal with Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The successful author ran rings around him. Sam was a chapter of chaos, possibly another reason the Book of Household Management is the opposite. But he pioneered magazines such as Boy’s Own, which led in turn to books published as Boy’s Own Library. These titles offered all the adventure of empire for young men confined to the safety of the suburbs. They were a hit.
Sam believed in boy’s own adventures for himself. Soon after they were married, he passed syphilis on to his wife. This led to the death in infancy of their first child, Sam. The next child survived and was also called Sam. A man who is happy to play round and then name not one but two sons after himself is harder to stomach than his wife’s turnip broth.
It was Sam who came up with the idea of the Book of Household Management, which first appeared in forty-eight monthly instalments. There had been numerous comprehensive cookbooks before it and Isabella borrowed, to put it politely, liberally from them. She plagiarised material from Alexis Soyer, the legendary cook of the Reform Club who tried to feed the poor of Ireland and went to Crimea to help Florence Nightingale cook for the suffering troops. Come to think of it, she borrowed from Florence Nightingale as well. Much of her medical advice is taken word for word from Miss Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing (1859).
The public loved her life-coaching skills: ‘Friendships should not be hastily formed nor the heart given, at once, to every new-comer.’ Modern cookbooks tend to focus on food. Mrs Beeton focusses on everything. She paints a picture of a world in order and under control. Every recipe has not just ingredients but a price as well. Mrs Beeton’s magisterial tome often sat in middle-class houses beside the Bible. Indeed, her work was often referred to as a bible, the function it came to fill. There are, of course, recipes in the Bible. And Mrs Beeton has hundreds of commandments.