Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management facts for kids

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Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management
Title page: the first edition did not use the "Mrs." of later editions.
Author	Isabella Beeton
Language	English
Subject	Cookery
Genre	Manual
Publisher	S. O. Beeton Publishing
Publication date	1861

Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, also published as Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book, is an extensive guide to running a household in Victorian Britain, edited by Isabella Beeton and first published as a book in 1861. Previously published in parts, it initially and briefly bore the title Beeton's Book of Household Management, as one of the series of guidebooks published by her husband, Samuel Beeton. The recipes were highly structured, in contrast to those in earlier cookbooks. It was illustrated with many monochrome and colour plates.

Although Mrs. Beeton died in 1865, the book continued to be a best-seller. The first editions after her death contained an obituary notice, but later editions did not, allowing readers to imagine that every word was written by an experienced Mrs. Beeton personally. Many of the recipes were copied from the most successful cookery books of the day, including Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (first published in 1845), Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (originally published in 1769), Marie-Antoine Carême's Le Pâtissier royal Parisien (1815), Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Maria Eliza Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), and the works of Charles Elmé Francatelli (1805–1876). This practice of Mrs. Beeton's has in modern times repeatedly been described as plagiarism.

The book expanded steadily in length until by 1907 it reached 74 chapters and over 2,000 pages. Nearly two million copies were sold by 1868, and as of 2016^[update] it remained in print. Between 1875 and 1914 it was probably the most often-consulted cookery book. Mrs. Beeton has been compared on the strength of the book with modern "domestic goddesses" like Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith.

History
Book
Influence and legacy
- Contemporary
- Modern
Editions

History

Presentation of fish dishes: filleted soles, boiled salmon, cod's head and shoulders

The author, Isabella Beeton, was 21 years old when she started working on the book. It was initially serialised in 24 monthly instalments, in her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton's publication The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine; the first instalment appeared in 1859. On 1 October 1861, the instalments were collected into one volume with the title The Book of Household Management, comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady's-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc. – also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort.

In its preface she wrote:

I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.

Beeton's half-sister, Lucy Smiles, was later asked about her memories of the book's development. She recalled:

Different people gave their recipes for the book. That for Baroness pudding (a suet pudding with a plethora of raisins) was given by the Baroness de Tessier, who lived at Epsom. No recipe went into the book without a successful trial, and the home at Pinner was the scene of many experiments and some failures. I remember Isabella coming out of the kitchen one day, 'This won't do at all,' she said, and gave me the cake that had turned out like a biscuit. I thought it very good. It had currants in it.

Previously published as a part-work, it was first published as a book in 1861 by S. O. Beeton Publishing, 161 Bouverie Street, London, a firm founded by Samuel Beeton. The book was an immediate best-seller, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and totalling nearly two million by 1868. In 2010 a copy of the first edition of Household Management in "top condition" was stated to be worth more than £1,000. In 1863 a revised edition was issued.

In 1866, a year after Isabella's death, Samuel was in debt due to the collapse of Overend and Gurney, a London discount house to which he owed money. To save himself from bankruptcy he sold the copyright to all of his publications for a little over £19,000. Of that, the rights to Household Management were sold to publishers Ward, Lock and Tyler for £3,250. The early editions included an obituary notice for Beeton, but the publishers insisted it be removed "allowing readers to imagine – perhaps even as late as 1915 – that some mob-capped matriarch was out there still keeping an eye on them".

Revisions to Household Management by its publisher have continued to the present day. The effort has kept the Beeton name in the public eye for over 125 years, although current editions are far removed from those published in Mrs. Beeton's lifetime. By 1906 the book had 2,056 pages, "exclusive of advertising", with 3,931 recipes and was "half as large again" as the previous edition.

Book

First page of the first chapter of Book of Household Management

The following description refers to the 1907 edition; the book was greatly extended in the decades since Mrs. Beeton's death (in 1865) to 74 chapters and over 2000 pages; the first edition had 44 chapters.

The book begins with general chapters on the duties of the "mistress", the housekeeper, and the cook. There follow chapters on the kitchen itself, "marketing" (choosing good-quality produce at the market), and an introduction to cookery (Chapter 6). Together, these take up over 100 pages. Chapters seven to 38 (roughly 1000 pages) cover English cooking, with recipes for soups, gravies, fish, meat (principally veal, beef, mutton and lamb, and pork), poultry, game, preserves, vegetables, pastries, puddings, sweets, jams, pickles, and savouries. Chapter 39 describes the "art of carving at table", supported by eleven illustrations. Chapters 40 to 50 (some 200 pages) give instructions for dairy products, vegetarian and invalid (sick person) cookery, making bread, biscuits and cakes, and beverages. Chapters 51 to 59 describe cooking in various international styles including French, German, Spanish, Jewish, Australian, South African, Indian, American, and Canadian cookery. Chapters 60 to 68 guide on matters from trussing poultry to the definitions of culinary terms, arranging meals, decorating the table, making menus, and the duties of domestic servants. Chapters 69 to 73 describe "household recipes" and medical preparations. The final chapter, 74, offers "legal memoranda".

There is a detailed index. The edition includes advertisements for products such as "Lemco" beef extract and "Cadbury's Cocoa".

Approach

Full-page 1907 colour plate of types of fish to buy from the fishmonger: red mullet, grayling, John Dory, mackerel, cod, whiting, salmon, herring, plaice, flounder, gurnet, crayfish

The preface sets out the book's goal of providing "men" with such well-cooked food at home that it may compete with what they could eat "at their clubs, well-ordered taverns, and dining-houses". Mrs. Beeton claims that:

I have attempted to give, under the chapters devoted to cookery, an intelligible arrangement to every recipe, a list of the ingredients, a plain statement of the mode of preparing each dish, and a careful estimate of its cost, the number of people for whom it is sufficient, and the time when it is seasonable

She explains that she was thus attempting to make the basics of cookery "intelligible" to any "housewife".

The first chapter sets the tone of the book with a quotation from the Book of Proverbs, and in early editions cites also The Vicar of Wakefield with:

The modest virgin, the prudent wife, and the careful matron, are much more serviceable in life than petticoated philosophers, blustering heroines, or virago queens. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue

The book thus advocates early rising, cleanliness, frugality, good temper, and the wisdom of interviewing servants rather than relying on written references.

Cookery is introduced with words about "the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilization", with a mention of man "in his primitive state, [living] upon roots and the fruits of the earth", rising to become in turn "a hunter and a fisher"; then a "herdsman" and finally "the comfortable condition of a farmer." It is granted that "the fruits of the earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea, are still the only food of mankind", but that:

[T]hese are so prepared, improved, and dressed by skill and ingenuity, that they are the means of immeasurably extending the boundaries of human enjoyments.

The text then swiftly passes to a description of simple measures like a table-spoonful, and the duties of servants.

The whole rest of the book is taken up with instructions for cooking, with an introduction in each chapter to the type of food it describes. The first of these, on soups, begins "Lean, juicy beef, mutton, and veal form the basis of all good soups; therefore it is advisable to procure those pieces which afford the richest succulence, and such as are fresh-killed." The account of how to make soup consists of a single essay, divided into general advice and numbered steps for making any kind of (meat-based) soup. This is followed in early editions by a separate chapter of recipes for soups of different kinds.

Each recipe is structured into a title, a list of ingredients (with quantities, either natural – as a number of eggs or vegetables, a number of slices of ham – or measured in Imperial units – ounces of salt, quarts of water. The actual instructions are headed "Mode", as "Cut up the veal, and put it with the bones and trimmings of poultry". A separate section gives the overall preparation time, and the average cost as, for example, "9d. per quart". Many recipes state in separate brief sections when a recipe is "seasonable and for how many persons it is "sufficient". Finally, a "note" gives any required advice, such as "When stronger stock is desired, double the quantity of veal, or put in an old fowl." This highly structured presentation was the book's main innovation.

Oddities

Despite professing to be a guide of reliable information about every aspect of running a house for the aspirant middle classes, the original edition devotes 23 pages to household management, then discusses cooking for almost all of the other 900. Even with the emphasis on food, some of her cooking advice is so odd as to suggest that she had little experience preparing meals. For example, the book recommends boiling pasta for an hour and forty-five minutes. Like many other British people of her social class and generation, Mrs. Beeton adopted a distaste for unfamiliar foods, saying that mangoes tasted like turpentine, lobsters were indigestible, garlic was offensive, potatoes were "suspicious", cheese could only be consumed by sedentary people, and tomatoes were either good or bad for a range of reasons.

Unlike earlier cookbook authors, such as Hannah Glasse, the book offered an "emphasis on thrift and economy". It also discarded the style of previous writers who employed "daunting paragraph[s] of text with ingredients and method jumbled up together" for what is a recognisably modern "user-friendly formula listing ingredients, method, timings and even the estimated cost of each recipe".

Illustrations

The 1907 edition runs to some 30 full-page colour plates and over 100 full-page illustrations in monochrome. These include photographs, such as of the housekeeper standing with hands behind her back in her kitchen (pictured), facing the first page of Chapter two, "The Housekeeper". An idea of the amount of detail may be gained from the fact that there are eleven illustrations of types of fish (one pictured), such as "steamed sole" and "soused mackerel", and another of "fish entrées".

One full-page colour plate (pictured) illustrated a range of puddings, showing jelly, raspberry cream, a centre dish piled high with fruits, a trifle, and an ornamental flowerpot containing a strawberry plant.

Another full-page colour plate (pictured) showed a variety of fruits including apricots, white and black cherries, white, red, and black currants, a melon, strawberries, and varieties of plums, all piled high on circular dishes or fruit stands.

Kitchen with a housekeeper, 1907
Kitchen equipment, 1907
Full-page colour plate of puddings
Full-page colour plate of fruits
Roast meats, 1901

Influence and legacy

Contemporary

The preface of Wilhelmina Rawson's Queensland Cookery and Poultry Book (1878), published in Australia, observes that: "Mrs. Lance Rawson's Cookery Book ... is written entirely for the Colonies, and for the middle classes, and for those people who cannot afford to buy a Mrs. Beeton or a Warne, but who can afford the three shillings for this."

The Oxford English Dictionary recognised that, by the 1890s, Beeton's name "was adopted as a term for an authority on all things domestic and culinary". The Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science observed that "it was probably found in more homes than any other cookery book, and [was probably] the most often consulted, in the years 1875 to 1914".

A chapter of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus (1899) is entitled, "Concerning Mrs. Beeton"; a character declares: "Mrs. Beeton must have been the finest housekeeper in the world, therefore Mr. Beeton must have been the happiest and most comfortable man".

Modern

Mrs. Beeton has been described as "the grandmother of modern domestic goddesses", like Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, who saw, as Beeton did, the need to provide reassuring advice on culinary matters for the British middle classes. However, while Lawson and Smith "insist that cooking can be easy, fun and uncomplicated", Beeton "acknowledges the labour and skill required to cook well".

The food writer and chef Gerard Baker tested and revised 220 of Beeton's recipes, and published the result as Mrs. Beeton: How To Cook (2011).

For the book's 150th anniversary in 2011, the Royal Society of Chemistry planned to feature one of Beeton's recipes. Due to the financial climate at the time in wake of the Great Recession, the Society selected Beeton's toast sandwich, a dish that Beeton included to cater to the less well-off.

In 2012 the food economist for the British television period drama Downton Abbey described Beeton's book as an "important guide" for the food served in the series.

During Season 1 Episode 2 from 2019 of Good Omens, a Victorian style hardback book is used as a prop by the archangel Gabriel (played by Jon Hamm) as he visits the angel Aziraphale (played by Michael Sheen) at his book shop, and the binding is displayed at 1:17 into the episode. While the title of the episode is referring to a different book, the close-up shot of the binding and the width make it clear to the viewer that Jon Hamm's character is holding the 2,000-page full text, with "Modern Edition" added below the title on the spine.

Editions

The book has appeared in many editions, including:

Editions
1st edition in 24 monthly parts, S. O. Beeton, 1859–1861 1st bound edition, S. O. Beeton, 1861. New edition, Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1861 S. O. Beeton, 1864 Ward, Lock, 1865 S. O. Beeton, 1865 S. O. Beeton, 1866 Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1867 3rd edition, Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1868 New edition, Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1869 Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1870 New edition, Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1878 London and New York: Ward, Lock, 1879 Entirely new edition, London: Ward, Lock, 1880 Entirely new edition, London and New York: Ward, Lock, 1886 London: Ward, Lock, 1888 London: Ward, Lock, 1890 London: Ward, Lock, 1891 London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1891 Melbourne: E. W. Cole, 1891 London, New York, Melbourne, Sydney: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1892 London, New York: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1893 London, New York: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1894 London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1895 London and New York: Ward, Lock, Bowden, 1896. Six hundred and twentieth thousand. London, New York, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1898 London, New York: Ward, Lock, 1899 London: Ward, Lock, 1900 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1901 Sydney: Anthony Hordern & Sons, 1901 London: Ward, Lock, 1902 Melbourne: Foy & Gibson, 1902 London: Ward, Lock, 1903 London: Ward, Lock, 1904 London: Ward, Lock, 1905 London: Ward, Lock, 1906 Adelaide: E. S. Wigg & Son, 1906 Ward, Lock, 1907 London, New York: Ward, Lock, 1908 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1909 London, New York, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1910 London: Ward, Lock, 1911 London, Melbourne, Toronto: Ward, Lock, 1912 London: Ward, Lock, 1913 London: Ward, Lock, 1914 London: Ward, Lock, 1915 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1920 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1923 London, Melbourne, Sydney: Ward, Lock, 1924 London, Melbourne, New York: Ward, Lock, 1925 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1926 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1927 London: Ward, Lock, 1929 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1932 London: Ward, Lock, 1936 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1939 London: Ward, Lock, 1948 London: Ward, Lock, 1949 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1950 London, Melbourne: Ward, Lock, 1951 London: Ward, Lock, 1952 Ward, Lock, 1960 London: Ward, Lock, 1961 London: Pan Books, 1961 London: Ward, Lock, 1962 London: Ward, Lock, 1963 London: Pan Books, 1963 Facsimile edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1968 New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969 London: Ward Lock, 1969 London: Ward Lock, 1971 London: Pan Books, 1972 London: Ward Lock, 1972 New York: Crescent Books, 1972 Facsimile edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1974 New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977 Facsimile edition, London, New York: S. O. Beeton, 1977 London: Ward Lock, 1978 Adelaide: Rigby, 1981 London: Ward Lock, 1982 London: Chancellor Press, 1982 London: Chancellor Press, 1984 New York: Exeter Books, 1986 Facsimile edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1986 London: Ward Lock, 1986 London: Ward Lock, 1989 London: Ward Lock, 1990 London: Ward Lock, 1991 London: Ward Lock, 1992 London: Ward Lock, 1993. London: Chancellor, 1994 Lewes: Southover Press, 1998 London: Brockhampton, 1999 London: Cassell, 2000 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 London: Brockhampton, 2000 London: Brockhampton, 2001 New York: Barnes & Noble digital, 2002 Lewes: Southover, 2003 Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2006 London: Impala, 2006 New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 Oxford: Benediction Press, 2010

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