Eliza Action, Modern Cookery in All Its Branches, 1845
Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861
Modern autobiographers and food critics fall into one of two camps – followers of Eliza Acton or of Isabella Beeton (the famous Mrs Beeton). The beef goes back to 1861 when Isabella Beeton wrote her mammoth *Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management*, and bulked it out by lifting a very large number of recipes from Eliza Acton’s work. Both were vastly popular in their day, but Beeton’s husband’s relentless promotion meant she came to be seen as the definitive nineteenth century cook and Acton’s contributions were overlooked.
Acton’s Modern Cookery in All Its Branches, 1845
Very little is known about Eliza Acton – there are only four letters to her that have survived so basically what you get in her books is what you know about her. She produced three massive cookbooks and one collection of verse. Her recipes appear to have all been individually tested as she adds an ‘observations’ note at the end of most, which implies personal experimentation, often with reference to adapting recipes to local tastes or to make them cheaper.
As an example:
QUINCE OR APPLE CUSTARDS
Add to a pint of apple juice prepared as for jelly, a tablespoonful of strained lemon juice, and from four to six ounces of sugar according to the acidity of the fruit; stir these boiling quickly, and in small portions, to eight well beaten eggs, and thicken the custard in a jug placed in a pan of boiling water, in the usual manner. A larger proportion of lemon juice and high flavouring of the rind can be given when approved. For quince custards, which if well made are excellent, observe the same directions as the apple, but omit the lemon juice. As we have before observed, all custards are made finer when made with the yolks only of the eggs, of which the number must be increased nearly half when this is done.
Prepared apple juice (see page 427), 1 pint; lemon juice, I tablespoonful; sugar, 4 to 6 ozs; eggs, 8. Quince custards, same proportions, but no lemon juice.
Obs – In making lemon creams the apple juice may be substituted very advantageously for water, without varying the receipts in other respects.
We read the ingredients list as a normal part of the recipe, but this was Acton’s brilliant contribution to the genre. Previously there had been no list of ingredients – you had to scan the recipe to check you had everything. And previously the measurements were imprecise – ‘a handful’, ‘as much as makes a good mix’ etc. Acton made it clear and repeatable.
The full title of her cook book says the instructions were ‘given with the most minute exactness’, and her improvements to the standard way of setting things out certainly made it a lot easier to successfully follow the book’s instructions.
My observations of Acton’s work… She has a sense of humour. She includes recipes for a publisher’s pudding ‘which can scarcely be made too rich’ and an author’s pudding that is essentially some cinnamon in milk heated over a candle.
One thinks about Victorian cooking as consisting of endless meals of over-cooked cabbage, and Acton did record the first brussel sprout recipe. However, she includes a whole section on curries and another on ‘chatneys’. She attributes the ‘great superiority of the oriental curries over those generally prepared in England’ to the freshness of the available ingredients. She gives a variety of recipes and notes that some would be ‘somewhat too acid for English taste in general, and the proportion of onion and garlic by one half too much for any but well seasoned Anglo-Indian palates’. This is a reminder that Victorian London was at the centre of a trading empire, which for Acton domestically meant a brother in the East Indies.
Acton, wrote that ‘until very recent years, [English] cookery has remained far inferior to that of nations much less advanced in civilization’. She means here French and Italian cuisine, but even that is charming to meet in what one thinks of as the insular innards of English cooking.
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861
Beeton took Acton’s success with listing the ingredients and gave it a twist. She put the information at the top of the recipe and also added some details on how much is made and how much it costs.
So her recipes look like:
PLAIN AND ECONOMICAL; A NICE PUDDING FOR CHILDREN
Ingredients: 1 teacupful of rice; 2 tablespoonful of moist sugar; 1 quart of milk; ½ oz of butter or 2 small tablespoonfuls of chopped suet; ½ teaspoonful of grated nutmeg
Mode: Wash the rice, put it in a pie dish with the sugar, and stir these ingredients well together; then add the butter cut up into very small pieces, or, instead, add the finely minced suet; grate a little nutmeg over the top, and bake in a moderate oven, from 1.5 to 2 hours. As the rice is not previously cooked, care must be taken that the pudding be slowly baked, to give plenty of time for the rice to swell, and for it to be very thoroughly done.
Time 1.5 to 2 hours. Cost 7d. Sufficient for 5-6 children. Seasonable at any time.
In addition to taking Acton’s idea about recipe lay out, Beeton shamelessly copied whole sections of Acton’s recipes. Beeton was operating under time pressure and picked up one third of her soup recipes straight from Acton; one quarter of the fish recipes, usually without mentioning the plagiarism.
She also provided a lot more than recipes. Acton was content to produce a really good cook book. Beeton wrote a guide to household management – covering all areas. The index is astonishing, with references to a random section running…. Tartlets (subdivision Polish), Tarrogan, Taxes, Tea (subdivisons on And coffee, Mrs Nightingale’s opinion on, To make), Teacakes (subdivision To toast), Teal (subdivisions To carve, To roast), Teething, Tenancy.
While Beeton lacked the patience to create her own recipes, she does have a great turn of phrase. Her introduction is notably stirring, with its martial comparison of the housekeeper as warrior defender. Acton used a similar idea: ‘Who, indeed, can guard all the interests of home as [women] can?’ But this generic, diffused guarding is a lot less memorable than Beeton’s warrior defender.
‘As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of the house. Her spirit will be seen throughout the whole house; and in just proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.’
I am an Actonite.
Food History Notes
When I read these books I realise how easy modern life is. When I want to make jelly, I get a packet of jelly crystals. When they wanted to make jelly, they started with some calf feet and began by skinning them.
Also, lucky me to live in the age of food testing and standards. Both books are full of advice of how to test for adulteration and how to clean the food after it was received from the grocers. Acton’s description of how to check currants goes into the most gruelling detail, but remember that the currents were packed in hessian sacks that can easily pick up gravel and are stored in batches, complete with stalks and leaves.
TO CLEAN CURRANTS FOR PUDDINGS OR CAKES
Put them into a cullender [sic], strew a handful of flour over them and rub them with the hands to separate the lumps, and to detach the stalks; work them round in the cullender, and shake it well, when the small stalks and stones will fall through it. Next pour plenty of cold water over the currants, drain and spread them on a soft cloth, press it over them to absorb the moisture and then lay them on a very clean oven tin or a large dish, and dry them very gradually (or they will become hard), either in a cool oven or before the fire, taking care in the latter case that they are not placed sufficiently near it for the ashes to fall amongst them. When they are perfectly dry, clear them entirely from the remaining stalks, and from every stone that may be amongst them. The best mode of detecting these is to lay the fruit at the far end of a large white dish, or sheet of paper, and to pass it lightly, and in very small portions, with the fingers, towards oneself, examining it closely as this is done.’
I would have run out of energy at this point and eaten the currants without pudding, I think. After individually flouring, washing, drying and inspecting them, of course.
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