Omelette and a Glass of Wine (48 page)

Finally, a jam recipe which is worth a trial:

RHUBARB JAM

‘Boil an equal quantity of rhubarb cut up, and gooseberries before they are quite ripe, with three-quarters of a pound of crystallized moist sugar to one pound of fruit. When boiled, it will make an excellent jam, similar to apricot.

‘It will keep some time in a cool place, tied down as usual.’

This recipe, Lady Llanover adds, was given to her by ‘the venerable Mrs Faulkner of Tenby, South Wales, aged ninety-three, for many years landlady of the principal hotel there, then the White Lion’. It sounds like a very worthwhile early summer preserve. Could it really be ‘similar to apricot’? Probably at any rate more similar than the gooseberry fool served to me at a riverside inn last summer was to gooseberry fool. It seemed to have been made with tinned gooseberry juice and flour – complete with lumps. One answer to the pudding problem would be to offer jam and cream rather than travesties of honourable old English sweet dishes.

Wine and Food
, Summer 1965

*

Readers interested in more of Lady Llanover’s recipes will find some relevant to Welsh oatcake and bread baking in my
English Bread and Yeast Cookery,
1977, and something about the author herself as well as her recipes in Mrs Bobby Freeman’s
First Catch Your Peacock;
Freeman Image Imprint, 1980.

1.
These are to be seen in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth.

Too Many Cooks

The cool blonde on the jacket picture of the centenary edition of Mrs Beeton keeps reminding me of Swinburne’s Proserpine: crowned with calm leaves, she stands, who gathers all things mortal with cold immortal hands.

White-sweatered, Lux-washed, pale hands pink-tipped she sits (actually), this implacable girl, at her pale blue laminated-plastic-topped table, weighing out flour while a machine is whisking the eggs and any minute the automatically controlled cooker will ring a bell to say its oven is ready for more food. For all the interest or animation shown by the cook she might indeed be gathering in mortals or for that matter operating a switchboard or dishing out stamps at the Post Office.

Messrs Ward Lock bought the copyright of
Household Management
from Sam Beeton in 1867 and have owned it ever since. I wish they had seen fit to include in their centenary edition a few notes on the life and extraordinary work of the dazzlingly competent young woman who wrote it. Untrained in cookery but for a pastry-making course and the housekeeping she had learned while helping to look after her mother’s and stepfather’s families of twenty younger children, Isabella Mayson married Samuel Beeton when she was twenty. At twenty-one she had already started compiling and editing the work which, as
Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, was published in 1861, when she was twenty-five. During these four years she bore two children, ran her household, led an active social life, supported her husband in his business activities, travelled abroad, and contributed translations of French novels as well as articles on fashion, cookery and other household subjects to Sam Beeton’s
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.
Just before the birth of her fourth child in 1865 she had corrected final proofs of the dictionary version of the book which had already become a phenomenal success. A week later, barely twenty-nine, she died.

No fewer than fifty-five experts are credited for their work on this new edition of her book – now renamed
Cookery and Household Management
, in case the customers might think the latter doesn’t include the former. And when so many hands have been at work on a book the result is bound to be uneven and to suffer from contradictions, errors of fact, and some confusion. I should indeed
like to see any such compendious volume which didn’t. Even the great
Larousse Gastronomique
is sometimes inconsistent and occasionally incorrect.

So I do not complain really of details such as the schoolgirl French –
glace à Veau de grappes
for grape water ice and
crème fouetté
for frothy sauce (milk, eggs, sherry) are two fair enough examples – you can find others on page after page – or that foreign recipes are sometimes slapdash and misleading – chicken roasted with bacon and served with bread sauce and gravy is described as French style; and you just cannot hope to explain a regional dish like bouillabaisse in one short paragraph. The statement that Camembert cheese comes from Brittany is a slip which shouldn’t have got by, as is the suggestion that three snipe make six helpings, and a brace of grouse five or six. And I suppose there
are
people who would believe that the best dressing for a potato salad is a cold béchamel mixed with egg yolk and vinegar, and who make dishes like Brussels sprouts salad, Ugli cocktail, Sardine Rissolettes and Coconut Mould.

All the same, too much space is occupied by expendable recipes. To cookery students – who will find this book for years to come in their training college libraries – the inclusion of a separate section of recipes from the original work and Mrs Beeton’s own instructions on, for example, roasting, would have been of the greatest interest. Copies of the 1861 edition are very scarce,
¹
and I find it quite astonishing that Ward Lock have not had sufficient historical sense to give students a chance to see some of its contents for themselves. Surely they couldn’t have been afraid of comparison between the achievement of fifty-five trained and experienced domestic experts and that of one young amateur cook aged twenty-five?

However, general principles are on the whole concisely explained and important details like the making of breadcrumbs, the clarifying of fat, the egging and crumbing of fish for frying are briskly written and easy to find. The section on stock is most sound. Bread making, yeast cookery generally, cake and scone mixing and baking, fresh milk cheeses, and the chapters on marmalades and fruit bottling strike me as most valuable. I wish that bad faults in some of the other cookery chapters had not made me doubt the validity of the whole.

Surely what we look for in
Household Management
are authoritative and decisive answers to the basic cookery problems likely to
arise every day. We feel that Mrs Beeton promises us the godlike wisdom of a revered professor combined with Nanny’s protective comfort. We don’t get it.

Out of this gigantic volume, consider just one aspect of cookery. One which touches us all. Just suppose one is a young person with little experience of shopping for food or of cooking it. One wants to produce a decent, conventional English meal. One looks up the recipe for roast beef. It calls for ‘a joint suitable for roasting’ and gives one system of timing for meat on the bone and another for a boned joint. No indication of whether one should buy 2 lb. of meat or ten. One turns to the general instructions relative to beef cookery. Where do they say what is or is not a joint suitable for roasting? Sirloin is mentioned. Topside and top rump can be ‘cooked in the oven with a small quantity of water’, ‘it is common today for silverside to be roasted but it is… eminently suitable for salting and boiling’. The fore ribs and back ribs require ‘rather more care in roasting, that is to say a lower heat, a longer time and the addition of a little water to the pan’. ‘The top ribs and flat ribs come half-way between the two types of cut and may be very slowly roasted.’ Back to the recipe. The temperature given for roasting after the initial sealing of the meat is a medium hot one – gas no. 5, 380°F. – but the inexperienced won’t know what this implies. Fat is demanded for basting, but not a mention of ‘a little water’ or of what timing and temperature to apply for a ‘very slowly roasted joint’. No beginner and, if I know anything about cookery-book readers, which I do, extremely few old hands are going to have any idea that they must turn to yet another part of the book to find more paragraphs on roasting, slow-roasting, braising, grilling … And even then – I don’t think they’ll extract the necessary information before they go out shopping. What is needed is a table showing which cuts are, and especially which are
not
, suitable for roasting, and why.

When we get to the cheaper cuts, these are competently explained in the beef section, and the differences in cooking quality between cuts from the fore and hindquarters indicated. Too many of the recipes, however, call for nothing more specific than ‘stewing steak’ or ‘lean beef’. Nowadays, if housewives want good value for money and the best results from their recipes they
must
be taught to ask the butcher – the one who can and will help them is now very rare – for the appropriate cut of meat.

As for veal, the editors can hardly be blamed for shirking a diagram or picture of veal cuts – the proper method of veal cutting is
a sore subject to English butchers. But they might at least have had a crack at telling us how to get escalopes properly cut.

In 1960, when young people really are crying out for technical knowledge, it is not enough to say that what is needed for
escalopes viennoises
is 1 ¼ to 1½ lb. fillet of veal cut into six slices, or to tell the reader that ‘once the preceding facts about beef, pork and lamb have been acquired there is little to be added on veal’.

It’s not that I’m all that set on the
real
Mrs Beeton’s book. In many ways I prefer that of her predecessor Eliza Acton, who, in her
Modern Cookery
, published in 1845, was the first English writer to go into the minutest of detail in her recipes and who first used the concise and uniform system of setting them out which was later adapted by Mrs Beeton. But the great points about Isabella Beeton’s
Household Management
were the clarity and detail of her general instructions, her brisk comments, her no-nonsense asides. No doubt she was sometimes a governessy young woman. That was just what made her voice the voice of authority. Mrs Beeton commands … Her pupils obey. When she says, for example, of a steak and kidney pudding recipe that because the meat is cut up into very small pieces ‘this pudding will be found far nicer and more full of gravy than when laid in large pieces on the dish’ – well, you jolly well do what she says and if you can’t be bothered you know you’ve only yourself to blame for poor results. What young Mrs Beeton knew instinctively was that if instructions to the inexperienced are going to be effective they must be given in decisive terms. Nobody ever learns anything from a teacher who can’t make up her own mind.

The Spectator
, 21 October 1960

1.
But see my note p. 309.

Isabella Beeton and her Book

Isabella Mayson, eldest of Benjamin and Elizabeth Mayson’s four children, was born in 1836. When she was seven her young widowed mother married Henry Dorling, Clerk of the Course at Epsom. He too had four children by his previous marriage. In the course of time Mr and Mrs Dorling produced thirteen more. From the bondage of helping with the housekeeping for this
‘living cargo of children’, as she herself once described her step-family, Isabella escaped at the age of twenty into marriage with Sam Beeton. Sam was an erratic, neurotic, exceptionally bright and publicity-minded young publisher. Without delay, his bride was set to work for him.

At the age of twenty-one she had already started collecting and compiling recipes, and writing and editing all the general information and instructions which eventually appeared in
Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

During the four years she devoted to this task, four years, as she told readers in her preface, ‘of incessant labour’, she was also contributing translations of French novels, articles on fashion as well as cookery and other domestic subjects to her husband’s
Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine
, running her household, leading an active social life, keeping in close touch with her own ‘large private circle’, and travelling abroad. She also, during these years, bore two sons and suffered the loss of the first of them three months after his birth.

Here, one begins to see, was a young woman with capacities and intelligence, drive and will-power far and away beyond the ordinary.

Household Management
first appeared in book form in 1861. Isabella was then twenty-five. In 1863, her second child died – he was three years old – and her third was born. In January 1865, she completed work on a dictionary version of the book which had already become an undreamed-of success. On the 29th of January, Isabella gave birth to her fourth son. A week later, in her twenty-ninth year, she died.

In 1867, Sam Beeton, as a result partly of injudicious publishing ventures, but mainly owing to the disastrous failure of the Overend, Gurney Bank, found himself in a serious financial plight. He was also gravely ill with consumption and mentally still suffering from the grief and shock of his wife’s death. He had relied so heavily upon her support and advice that without her he was lost. He now signed away to Messrs Ward, Lock and Tyler, the publishers with whom he had already been associated, all his own copyrights, including that of his wife’s book and its subsidiaries.

And we shall never know how different a course English household cookery might have taken had the successive directors of this publishing house not turned the book they had bought from Sam Beeton into something far more than the best-seller it already was –
into what eventually became the great British domestic legend of the twentieth century.

To that legend Ward, Lock’s editors very largely contributed. Mrs Beeton’s own recipes were for sound, solid, sensible, middle-class mid-Victorian food. In many cases they were more economical and produced dishes of less finesse than those of her predecessor, Eliza Acton, from whom she had borrowed the admirable system of setting out the ingredients, the quantities, and the timing of the recipes in a uniform and concise manner. For, although it seems incredible now, Eliza Acton’s
Modern Cookery
, published by Longmans in 1845, was the first English cookery book in which such instructions were given. Alexis Soyer, from whose books Mrs Beeton also learned, was another celebrated writer of the same period who endeavoured to establish order in these matters. But Soyer was a man of diffuse-interests and inconstant genius. It was the singleness of purpose animating Eliza Acton, her methodical mind and meticulous honesty which made her cookery book then, and makes it even still, far and away the most admired and copied in the English language.