Food - You can't beat Mrs Beeton
It has recently become fashionable to disparage Mrs Beeton. Her critics charge her with plagiarism, with not knowing anything about cooking, with - philistine Victorian that she was - stifling a previously flourishing tradition of British gastronomy and, most grave of all, with being responsible for our deep attachment to overcooked vegetables.
At the vanguard of the anti-Beetonites is the estimable Clarissa Dickson Wright. Being rude about Mrs Beeton is evidently a good dinner-party turn, which Wright performs with characteristic bonhomie. People never fail to be amused when she wheels out Beeton's litany of shortcomings. The best joke of all seems to be that Beeton, far from being the portly dame in crinolines and cap most people imagine, was a decorative girl of 25 when her Book of Household Management was published in 1861. She must, therefore, have been a fraud.
Isabella Beeton's youth is indeed extraordinary. But it makes her more admirable, not less. That a woman of 25, who had recently buried one son and given birth to another, should find the spirit and time to produce 556,000 bestselling words on the subject of domestic economy is remarkable enough. That they should be 556,000 words of matchless information, grace and clarity is almost fantastical. Perhaps only David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published when he was 28, can compare with her achievement. But whereas Hume was to enjoy many more years of productive life, Isabella Beeton died of puerperal fever, contracted from the birth of her fourth child, before she reached her 29th birthday.
Knowledge of her end lends even greater urgency to her sentiment that "dine we must and we may as well dine elegantly as well as wholesomely". She was not one to waste time or words. "In cooking, clear as you go" and "A place for everything and everything in its place" are timelessly economical sayings. Every page of Household Management radiates authority. Her husband and publisher, Sam, although five years Isabella's senior, called her "dear master" and "master mine". He endearingly signed himself "S O B".
She may have been bossy, but Bella wasn't stuffy or pompous. She wrote to Sam of her hatred of "formal feeds", and begged him "not to leave me to sit three or four hours with some old man I do not care a straw about". Her book, too, contains flashes of dry Victorian humour, not to mention eccentricity. Where else would you find a recipe for toast sandwiches? ("Place a very thin piece of cold toast between two slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt.")
But what of the charges against her? Was she ignorant about cooking? No one who reads her book, with its sound kitchen tips on how to carve meat, peel chestnuts and crack eggs, could think as much. Was she a plagiarist? Yes and no. A talented linguist, Mrs Beeton plundered works in French, German and English. Her originality certainly didn't lie in gastronomic innovation; her food is mainly "plain English", with the odd flurry of curry powder and garlic. What was original, however, was the tireless compilation of advice on all aspects of household management in a single volume, for the newly numerous audience of the urban middle classes. Moreover, Beeton's inclusion of natural histories of foodstuffs, such as tarragon, Berkshire pigs, or even cygnets and guinea-pigs, was so innovative that it has never quite been equalled in cookbooks since. As for the accusation that she is responsible for the long-held British love of soggy vegetables, it just won't wash. The injunction to overcook greens goes back to Eliza Acton in 1845; Bella was only copying her. After all, as her accusers remind us, Beeton was just a naive girl of 25. If the British ate badly after her book appeared, this was hardly her fault. They might have eaten better, however, had they actually followed her recipes.
As a practical guide on how to cook, Household Management is still useful; more importantly, the author writes with what Sam called "exquisite palate", and simply makes you want to cook. Her "Indian Chetney Sauce", thick with brown sugar and sharp apples, is excellent, as are her stocks and slow-cooked soups. Her sweet recipes, such as Herodotus pudding with figs, orange cream or Bakewell pudding ("very rich"), are serenely comforting. In 1936, the New Statesman lamented that, while Mrs Beeton's person was revered, her advice was ignored. It would be even worse if, while her advice is still ignored, Isabella Beeton's majestic achievement should be forgotten.
A facsimile edition of Beeton's Book of Household Management (£29.99), complete with colour plates, is published by Southover Press (1998). I would buy this in preference to this year's Oxford World's Classics abridged edition (£7.99).
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