Thursday, April 05, 2007


The Amazing Mrs Beeton
By Ross Guy

Some of you may recall the brilliant 1970’s television drama series of Mrs Bridges with her ordering of well-regimented army of servants in “Upstairs, Downstairs”, which captured life in a Victorian household.
You could almost imagine the script came straight from the pages of the book “Mrs Beeton’s Household Management”, a rare find that I picked up in those same years at an Auckland secondhand bookshop. I loved the TV series because of the extraordinary lengths they would go to in the kitchen to produce the most exquisite banquets that to you or me might have been just an ordinary dinner at mealtime. There was no such thing as a meat and three veg as I knew it, but rather a roasted pheasant (Faisan Roti) or Quail, (Cailles Roties) garnished with watercress and accompanied by gravy, breadcrumbs served in nothing less than a fine china or stirling silver sauceboat. Weighing 1.8 kilos that took my arm with it when lifted from the shelf, it filled 1706 pages contained over 4,000 recipes, with 16 plates in colour and around 350 illustrations.
So after all who is Mrs Beeton? Isabella Mary Mayson, usually known as Mrs Beeton, was considered the most famous cookery writer in British history. However, many of the recipes were not her own. You could more say she was an editor rather than a writer. Mrs Beeton was introduced to Samuel Orchard Beeton, a publisher of books and fashionable magazines, and on July 10 1856 they were married. It was then that she began writing articles on cooking and household management for her husband’s publications. Between1859 and 1861, when she was 23, she wrote a monthly supplement to “The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine”. In 1861 this was published in a single volume as “The Book of Household Management”, selling over 60,000 copies in its first year of publication and nearly two million by 1868.
Essentially it was a guide to running a Victorian Household with advice on fashion, child care, animal husbandry, poisons, the management of servants, science, religion, industrialism and an enormous number of recipes you would never get through in one lifetime. It is said that many of the recipes were actually plagiarised from earlier writers, but the Beetons never claimed that the book’s contents were original.
It made absolute fascinating reading and night after night I would find myself completely buried in the pages of this amazing read. Take a point of interest for instance for Burnt Coffee.
Ingredients - Strong coffee, Brandy.
Method. - Allow 3 teaspoonfuls of good coffee to each ½ pint of water, and prepare according to any of the proceeding methods. Sweeten it rather more than originally, and strain it into small cups. Pour a little brandy into each over a spoon, set fire to it, and when the spirit is partly consumed the flame should be blown out, and the coffee drunk immediately.

Isabella couldn’t resist adding an interesting fact or note that often preceded each recipe or chapter. I would find myself completely yielding to late nights as I read her chapters on history, myth, religion, agriculture, animal husbandry, science, sociology and so on. Among other chapters there were pieces on violence and cruelty, illness and death, the birth and rearing of children, and farming. She tells of kitchens in which meat is still roasted on spits over open fires, with sauces and condiments we take so much for granted today were already available. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where many would have come from you see in your local supermarket. Its medical chapters offer advice on the uses of leeches for bloodletting and have opium use for pain.
Sadly Isabella Beeton died very early at the age of 28 after giving birth to her fourth child and contracting puerperal fever. You can still find copies of this wonderful book in secondhand bookshops or via the internet, allowing you a glimpse into a remarkable era in British culinary history.

(Ross Guy, a regular contributor to Café magazine, died in February. This was the last article he wrote.)

Note from Bookman Beattie:

The above story appears in the current issue of CAFE magazine, edited and published by long-time publisher and foodie Michael Guy.
Michael and Ross shared the same surname but in fact were not related, just bosom buddies.
This story is reproduced by kind permission of Michael Guy.


Cafe is a quarterly magazine, (the cover shown is not the cover of the latest edition), and is essential reading for all foodies and coffee lovers.


Coincidentally I am presently reading "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs.Beeton" by Kathryn Hughes (Fourth Estate) and will be writing about it in the next few weeks. You can find more about the amazing Mrs.Beeton on this website.

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