Mrs Beeton’s Book Of Household Management Was A Masterpiece

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27406, 20 July 1954, Page 9

Mrs Beeton’s Book Of Household Management Was A Masterpiece

When Professor H. W. Rhodes nominated, at a recent university discussion, the massive tome produced nearly 100 years ago by Mrs Isabella Beeton as his choice of literature for the castaway, he was not necessarily indulging in gastronomic day-dreams. Phis is a tremendous work—it took four years to write—and even the announcement on the title page, that it is “The Book of Household Management ’ sadly understates its scope. To say it is a cookery book would be hke referring to the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a dictionary. • Something like 2000 recipes appear in the 1750 close-printed pages of “Mrs Beeton,” but they certainly do not outnumber the hints and suggestions she offers the mistress of the house. The index itself takes 46 pages, and there are in addition a profusion of pictures, many of. them in colour, in which the delights of the table are temptingly conveyed. Small wonder, then, that small boys a generation ago were as nappy wandering through the pages of “Mrs Beeton” as their elder brothers w^£ e rea ding the “Boys’ Own Annual.” For the young wife about to set up house, there is a wealth of information, although some of the facts appearing in the 1889 edition (the book was first produced in 1861) seem a little out of date. Fot instance, the wages paid a servants’ hall boy are quoted at £5 to £7—a year. A head gamekeeper was a man of substance, on a wage of £BO to £l2O a year, and the under-house-maid earning £8 to £l4 a year ihust have envied the housekeeper who was paid £2O to £5O, “without tea, sugar and beer, or allowances for same.” Mrs Beeton approaches the problems of household management with the eye for detail typical of a successful general, and if the woman reader is made to feel rather like a sort of female Montgomery, she may be forgiven, for dozens of servants flit through the pages of the book. Some of the recipes too recall more spacious days, and the modern housewife would

recoil in horror if asked to use 16 eggs in one recipe. The mistress is lectured by Mrs Beeton on how to treat servants, how to furnish the house, the etiquette of making and receiving calls, the conduct of family evenings at home, and the filling-in of the “difficult half-hour before dinner is served.” This particular problem is not one which worries the modern wife with a young family. Variety in Recipes The recipes vary from the most exotic dishes to such things as boot polish. The preparation of boot polish comes under the heading of “recipes for the valet” and it requires him to mix eight parts of treacle with one of lamp black, one of sweet oil, one of gum arabic, one of isinglass, 32 of water, one of spirits of wine, and a little ox-gall. There is no recipe for making soap. The average prices of the foodstuffs cfuoted in the book are startling to modern eyes. Lamb could be bought for 8d a pound, fish for 2d, the best tea for 3s, salmon 8d a tin, and biscuits cost from 9d to 2s 9d —a tin. A bottle of Amontillado cost 4s to 6s, and if the best champagne was £7 a dozen, British wines could be had at Is 2d a bottle. Old Scotch whisky was priced at 42s to 60s a dozen, and ale in the cask was 12s for nine gallons. The housewife Mrs Beeton wrote of carried- in her kitchen more items of equipment than the modern golfer. She lists about 110 items which are “desirable” but the total cost of them

is only £76 13s 3d. She even suggests to the young wife that “golden rules for the kitchen” should be drawn up and displayed for the benefit of all: “a good cook wastes nothing” and “stew boiled is stew spoiled” are the sort of encouraging remarks she quotes.

On page 137 the student is at last permitted to cook something, for it is here the first recipe appears. Mrs Beeton, coaxing her pupils along, gives them 129 soup recipes as a beginning. In this section, and in most of the others, there are delightful little passages explaining, for example, the “natural history of fishes” and “general observations on quadrapeds.” History, biology, chemistry, they are all there. Mrs Beeton however, evidently did not think highly of the hog. Page 523 is headed “the slovenly habits of the pig” and she produces on it a lovely piece of Victorian prose:—“But however, few or however many young pigs there may be to the farrow, there is always one who is the dwarf of the family circle, a poor, little, shrivelled, halfstarved anatomy, with a melancholy voice, a staggering gait, a woebegone countenance, and a thread of a tail,

whose existence the complacent mother ignores, his plethoric brothers and sisters repudiate, and for whose emaciated jaws there is never a spare or supplemental teat, till one of the favoured gormandisers, overtaken by momentary oblivion, drops the lacteal fountain, and gives the little squeaking struggler the chance of a momentary mouthful.” Essay on Puddings On the subject of puddings, (377 recipes) Mrs Beeton also waxes eloquent, but what could be more British than this: “However great may have been the qualifications of the ancients in the art of pudding making, we apprehend that such preparations as gave, gratification to their palates would have generally found little favour among the insulated inhabitants of Great Britain. Here, from the simplest suet-dumpling up to the most complicated Christmas production, the grand feature of substantiality is primarily attended to. Variety in the ingredients, we think, is held only of secondary consideration with the great body of the people, provided that the whole is agreeable and of sufficient abundance.”

There is one disappointment. In this edition, at least, the reciepe for jugged hare is not prefaced by the words “first catch your hare.” The book also includes dissertations on Continental and Australian cooking with of course recipes from each country—“soup of kangaroo tails,” “roast wallaby” and “parrot pie” from Australia. Even the business of laying the table cloth produces 1100 words of instruction from the indefatigable Mrs Beeton, but she might have given some thoughtless husbands a basis for comparison when she recalls that a Croatian captain once said “When, in campaign, we feel hungry we knock over the first animal we find, cut off a steak, powder it with salt, put it under the saddle, gallop over it for half a mile, and then eat it.” There are “little teas for the family.” and “a ball supper for 60 people”; nothing is overlooked, and there are even weighty sections on medicine and legal memoranda.

“Mrs Beeton” has survived, in her various forms, so long because the recipes have been tested and proved by thousands all over the world. The book may suggest the harness room and the aspidistra, but it no more “out of date” than the pyramids.