Nicola Humble, the editor of the new edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management , shows how misplaced our view of Mrs Beeton, and her bestseller, has become.

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management is the most famous English cookery book ever published. It stands four-square in the nation’s imagination as a bastion of traditional English fare and solid Victorian values. It represents extravagance (‘take 12 dozen eggs’), and a lost rural way of life (‘first catch your hare’). We imagine Mrs Beeton as a sturdy matron (perhaps resembling Mrs Bridges of the 1970s television series Upstairs, Downstairs), ordering a well-regimented army of servants. Yet this popular perception of the book is false in every particular. Far from being traditional, Household Management was markedly innovative, introducing the newly expanded and self-consciously respectable Victorian middle class to the latest manufactured food products, to a wide range of foreign recipes, and to fashionably different modes of dining. Those famous lines about eggs and hares were never written by Beeton, but represent the persistent misinterpretation to which the book has been subject. Although it contains a smattering of extravagant recipes, if anything it errs on the side of frugality, with many pages devoted to plain family dinners and the use of left-overs. The rural economy in which most people produced their own food had long been lost by the time Beeton embarked on her book, and she is as nostalgic for that old connection to the land as we are today. Finally, Isabella Beeton was never the stately matron of our imaginings: she worked as a journalist throughout her married life, and died of an infection after giving birth to her fourth child, at the age of 28.

Household Management must rank as one of the great unread classics. Everyone has heard of it, a number of people own a copy (often an early twentieth-century edition, much expanded and bearing little relationship to Beeton’s original text), but it is rarely considered as anything other than a culinary curiosity. Yet it was one of the major publishing success stories of the nineteenth century, selling over 60,000 copies in its first year of publication in 1861, and nearly two million by 1868. For the next century the names ‘Mrs Beeton’ and ‘Household Management’ were to continue to make enormous profits for Ward, Lock & Co., to whom Isabella’s publisher husband Sam sold the rights in a disastrous deal soon after her death. A considerable amount of the book’s success can be attributed to the assiduity and ingenuity with which its various publishers have exploited its title and its author’s name as trademarks. Revised and abridged editions were issued constantly, both in Isabella Beeton’s lifetime, when she and Sam made use of the book’s phenomenal success to sell various spin-off projects, and ever since: even today we can buy books with titles as absurd as ‘Mrs Beeton’s Caribbean Cooking’ and ‘Microwaving with Mrs Beeton’, few of which contain a word written by their putative author.

This edition aims to make this monumental work accessible to the modern reader by restoring it to its original social and cultural context. Isabella Beeton worked as a journalist on her husband’s magazines, and published Household Management when she was 23 years old. Hardly typical of the middle-class woman in the mid-nineteenth century, she nevertheless made a major contribution to the domestic ideology that dominated such women’s lives. Massive in its scope as well as its influence, Household Management was much more than just a cookery book.

Isabella made no claims for herself as an originator of recipes, and only a handful of the nearly two thousand the book contains are presented as her own. Her skill was in clarity of language and the organization of a mass of information into easily digestible nuggets. Household Management is encyclopaedic in its range, and Isabella clearly found it hard to resist an interesting fact: the notes that precede each recipe chapter are packed with information on history, myth, religion, agriculture, animal husbandry, science, sociology, and so on. Among its lesser themes are violence and cruelty, illness and death, the birth and rearing of children, and factory-farming.

Ultimately, Household Management is so much more than a cookery book. It tells a story of a culture caught between the old world and the new, poised between modernity and nostalgia. It tells of kitchens in which meat is still roasted on spits over open fires, but where many of the bottled sauces and condiments we take for granted today were already available. Its medical chapters describe the significance of vaccination while also offering advice on the use of leeches for bloodletting. The book offers markedly advanced advice on the bearing and rearing of children warning parents of the dangers of drunken or incompetent nurses, castigating the common practices of binding small babies tightly with wrappers and dosing children with alcohol or laudanum to get them to sleep, and calling for the invention of nappies without pins and elastic baby clothes. These anticipations of modern thinking on the subject are made heavily ironic by the fact that the author of the book in which they appear suffered repeated miscarriages, lost two children in infancy, and died - along with tens of thousands of her contemporaries - as the result of an avoidable infection contracted in childbirth.

This tension between old and new is matched by all those other contradictions: the eccentrically raised woman-journalist devoting herself to the promotion of domestic conformity; the attempt to expand women’s social roles through an increase in their domestic responsibilities; and the shifting of sympathy and modes of address between mistress and servant. It is precisely because Household Management maintains its dialogic stance throughout, with no attempt made to unify different positions, that it is such a useful document of a multifarious, contradictory, and rapidly changing society.

The Mistress
‘. . . to be a good housewife does not necessarily imply an abandonment of proper pleasures or amusing recreation; and we think it the more necessary to express this as the performance of the duties of a mistress may, to some minds, perhaps seem to be incompatible with the enjoyment of life.’

General Observations on Beverages
‘The beverage called tea has now become almost a necessary of life. Previous to the middle of the 17th century it was not used in England, and it was wholly unknown to the Greeks and Romans. Pepys says, in his Diary,- “September 25th 1661. - I sent for a cup of tea (a China drink), of which I had never drunk before.” Two years later it was so rare a commodity in England, that the English East-India Company bought 2 lbs. 2oz. of it, as a present for his majesty. In 1666 it was sold in London for sixty shillings a pound. From that date the consumption has gone on increasing from 5,000 lbs. to 50,000,000 lbs.’

A Few Rules to be Observed in Cooking for Invalids
‘In sending dishes or preparations up to invalids, let everything look as tempting as possible. Have a clean tray-cloth laid smoothly over the tray; let the spoon, tumblers, cups and saucers etc., be very clean and bright. Gruel served in a tumbler is more appetizing than when served in a basin or cup and saucer.’

General Observations on Puddings
‘However great may have been the qualifications of the ancients, however, in the art of pudding-making, we apprehend that such preparations as gave gratification to their palates, would have generally found little favour amongst the insulated inhabitants of Great Britain. Here, from the simple 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.’

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is published this March priced £7.99.