The real woman behind Mrs. Beeton

By Laura Shapiro -- The New York Times

The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton. By Kathryn Hughes. 480
pages. $29.95. Alfred A. Knopf.

In America, we've had Fannie Farmer and Betty Crocker, but for British
home cooks the presiding deity of the kitchen has long been Isabella
Beeton, the Victorian matron whose recipes once reigned from Bayswater
to Lucknow. Her best-selling "Beeton's Book of Household Management,"
published in 1861, brought on an avalanche of revised editions and new
"Mrs. Beeton" titles that still hasn't let up, including "Microwaving
With Mrs. Beeton" and "Mrs. Beeton's Healthy Eating."

But who, exactly, was she?

It's hard to say. Lytton Strachey, Wyndham Lewis, J. B. Priestley and a
host of playwrights and journalists have tried to dig out her story over
the years, coming up mostly with scraps and fantasies. Her family let
out very little information - in part because Mrs. Beeton died at 28 and
had nothing whatever to do with most of what was published under her
famous name.

Kathryn Hughes is the most recent and by far the most zealous of these
literary detectives, and "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton"
is a triumph. The author of "George Eliot: The Last Victorian," Hughes
knows 19th-century England intimately; and she appears to have rounded
up every last splinter and shard of Beetoniana.

Lavish amounts of well-informed speculation, applied like plaster, hold
together the bits she can actually document, but the result is a
narrative that could have come straight from Trollope. Vicars and
curates, tradesmen's families edging up the social ladder, tangled
marriage plots - for lovers of Barsetshire, it's all here. (Though poor
Trollope would have been scrounging nervously for euphemisms as he made
his way through the seamier elements of this tale.)

Isabella grew up caring for 20 siblings and stepsiblings, and was
delighted to escape at the age of 20 to marry the ambitious young
publisher Samuel Beeton. She quickly began writing for his
Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, and then plunged into another of his
projects, a comprehensive manual on cooking and homemaking.

Her approach to this mammoth task was efficiency itself: she simply
stole everything she needed from other books, rewriting as necessary to
give the text coherence and personality. It was the quality of the
cutting and pasting that made the book a lasting treasure.

Isabella plagiarized only the best, including cookbooks by Eliza Acton,
Charles Francatelli, Alexis Soyer and Elizabeth Raffald. And that was
the extent of her career: she died of peritonitis and puerperal fever
just four years later.

What gives this its dramatic quality is Isabella's struggle with
syphilis, a wedding present from Sam. Though doctors rarely told such
unfortunate wives the truth, Isabella was aware of what she called his
"roving nature," and after suffering numerous miscarriages and the
deaths of two babies she may have made her own diagnosis.

Sam himself went into a spectacular decline - financial ruin, pointless
court cases, physical collapse and an increasing mental derangement
typical of syphilis.

At one point, he began publishing pornography, inserting it into the
unlikely pages of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Readers must
have been startled indeed to find dozens of accounts, ostensibly
submitted by subscribers, describing the delicious pleasures of having a
maid lace them into tight corsets, or expressing how grateful they were
to have been flogged at boarding school, with details of how this
well-deserved punishment was carried out.

But the "Book of Household Management" rolled on, without a backward
glance at the lurid dénouements of its creators. Today Mrs. Beeton is
often blamed for the legendary horrors of British cooking, but as Hughes
makes clear, the damage was done in the editions produced after her
death.

The original text has a capacious and personable view of food that bears
little resemblance to the custard-drenched school of British cuisine.
Just take a look at how Mrs. Beeton deals with that quintessential
British company dinner, boiled chicken in white sauce. In the bad old
days, this was an exercise in library paste. But Mrs. Beeton offers the
prelapsarian version, made the way God and the Victorians intended.

Choose your fowl, she instructs; then clean and eviscerate it ("be
careful not to break the gall-bladder"), truss it and bring it to a
boil.

"Simmer very gently," she emphasizes, "and bear in mind that the slower
it boils, the plumper and whiter will the fowl be." A fine béchamel
sauce is the right accompaniment, made with white stock, fresh herbs and
cream.

And by the way, if you happen to keep a flock of chickens at the back
door, don't even think of caging them. Free-range is a must.

"You may pluck a fowl's wing-joints as bare as a pumpkin, but you will
not erase from his memory that he is a fowl, and that his proper sphere
is the open air," she warns. "If he likewise reflects that he is an
ill-used fowl - a prison-bird - he will then come to the conclusion,
that there is not the least use, under such circumstances, for his
existence; and you must admit that the decision is only logical and
natural."

If this excellent advice - never eat a depressed chicken - was swiped
from somebody else, Mrs. Beeton deserves all our thanks for making it
immortal.

Laura Shapiro's latest book is "Something From the Oven: Reinventing
Dinner in 1950s America."