01/10/2019
On This Day in History: Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a 1,112-page guide to domestic duties in Victorian Britain, is published (1861).
In the preface, 25-year-old author/editor Isabella Beeton wrote "I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways." Apparently a lot of people agreed with her, because it was an instant best-seller, prompting a revised/expanded edition 2 short years later and selling millions of copies within a decade.
Mrs. Beeton's book was comprised largely of recipes culled from many different sources (including, ahem, other authors' books), and was enormously popular, even though Beeton herself was not what you would call a whiz in the kitchen. (She recommended cooking pasta for an hour and forty-five minutes, was "suspicious" of potatoes, and claimed that cheese should only be consumed by sedentary people.) She has been criticized for being more of a shameless plagiarist than a cook, but also praised for her "user-friendly formula listing ingredients, method, timings and even the estimated cost of each recipe," which was refreshingly clear and comprehensive compared to previous cookery books.
Isabella died only 4 years after her guide was first published (not, as you might assume, from overcooked pasta — it was a bacterial infection following childbirth), but her book lived on and on. It eventually swelled to over 2,000 pages, has gone through over 100 editions to date, and remains in print to this day. The makers of DOWNTON ABBEY relied on Beeton's book as an invaluable source for the food served in the series.
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