What do you imagine when you picture Mrs. Beeton, author of the 1850s classic, The Book of Household Management? Most of us guess she was portly, middle aged and upper middle class. The truth, as told in a biography by Kathryn Hughes, is that Isabella Beeton was a 21-year old suburban journalist who knew nothing about cooking. The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton is a collection of fact and conjecture, pieced together after lengthy research. What is known is that Isabella suffered several miscarriages, lost her first baby and a three-year old child, and died herself at the age of 28.
She was married to the publisher Sam Beeton who encouraged her to trawl the works of previous cookery writers to produce the 2000 recipes in what first appeared as a series of part-works. It may come as a shock to know that many of her ideas were never tested and were lifted almost word for word from Eliza Acton and Hannah Glasse, (but it turns out that Glasse herself borrowed 342 of her 972 'receipts' from earlier texts).
Hughes' biography makes compelling reading. Where she doesn't know, she imagines. She interweaves extracts from Beeton's advice for housewives with some preposterous guesses about her early life and the medical condition that caused her to lose her babies. Hughes suggests that she caught syphilis from her husband Sam. The book is full of insightful nuggets, but to get a flavour here is:
Turtle Soup
"Cut off the head of the turtle the previous day. Boil off the beast's shell and then make an accompaniment out of calf's udder." After more instructions Beeton continues: "But it might be simpler, after all, to buy tinned green turtle fat in hermetically sealed cannisters for 7s 6d from which 6 good quarts of soup may be made."
The Book of Household Management first appeared in 1859. Since then it has been republished several times. The number of recipes was vastly increased (one for Dover sole had 8 recipes in 1861 and 20 in 1906.) Although she herself borrowed profusely from previous writers, by the 1930s changes to her original work were such that not a single word of her original voice remained. One of the books published in 1869 now sells for nearly £200. The name Mrs. Beeton lives on. But don't imagine that a £4 used copy of an abridged version of her book, published in 2000, will be anything other than a poor imitation.