I don’t have a coherent argument to make about this book, just some observations.
Firstly, I believe she may bear some responsibility for the English tradition of terrible vegetables. Seriously - carrots 1–3/4 to 2–1/4 hours? How do you have any carrot molecules left at the end?
Secondly, reading this makes me aware of how easy I have things. If I want to make jelly, for instance, I use a safety match and gas to boil the kettle, I add it to a packet of jelly, and I refrigerate. If a Victorian woman wanted to make jelly, she started with chipping bits of a cow’s feet. Seriously. Check out the recipe.
And I like that Mrs Beeton made the radical analogy with a military leader. She wrote: ‘AS WITH THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.’ Militant femininity!
I'm also impressed that she fitted so much into such a short life. She died at the age of 28, having had four children (two survived birth), worked as a journalist and editor, and written one of the most widely read books of the Victorian era.
I made her flanc of apples. It tasted great but only after I fiddled with the recipe quite a bit. Her proportions were definitely not right - she called for three quarters of a pint of water to boil the apples in and that simply did not cover the apples. Also I used 7 apples rather than 9 as she called for, on the assumption that our pesticide-grown apples are larger than hers were.
Indeed, as I ate I wondered how the food tasted in the nineteenth century. Were the apples sweeter in the way that old fashioned roses are sweeter smelling? Nineteenth-century authors rave about fruit in a way that we don’t today, perhaps because we have access to a lot more sugar. Can we even begin to experience quotidienne life the way people did a century ago?
Firstly, I believe she may bear some responsibility for the English tradition of terrible vegetables. Seriously - carrots 1–3/4 to 2–1/4 hours? How do you have any carrot molecules left at the end?
Secondly, reading this makes me aware of how easy I have things. If I want to make jelly, for instance, I use a safety match and gas to boil the kettle, I add it to a packet of jelly, and I refrigerate. If a Victorian woman wanted to make jelly, she started with chipping bits of a cow’s feet. Seriously. Check out the recipe.
And I like that Mrs Beeton made the radical analogy with a military leader. She wrote: ‘AS WITH THE COMMANDER OF AN ARMY, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.’ Militant femininity!
I'm also impressed that she fitted so much into such a short life. She died at the age of 28, having had four children (two survived birth), worked as a journalist and editor, and written one of the most widely read books of the Victorian era.
I made her flanc of apples. It tasted great but only after I fiddled with the recipe quite a bit. Her proportions were definitely not right - she called for three quarters of a pint of water to boil the apples in and that simply did not cover the apples. Also I used 7 apples rather than 9 as she called for, on the assumption that our pesticide-grown apples are larger than hers were.
Indeed, as I ate I wondered how the food tasted in the nineteenth century. Were the apples sweeter in the way that old fashioned roses are sweeter smelling? Nineteenth-century authors rave about fruit in a way that we don’t today, perhaps because we have access to a lot more sugar. Can we even begin to experience quotidienne life the way people did a century ago?