Mrs Beeton to the rescue

Julian Barnes finds a wealth of information in this Victorian gem

The Guardian, Saturday April 5 2003

When I was a boy, my parents used to furnish our house from local auction sales. Thus we had an antique television the size of a child's tree-house, whose "wardrobe-style" double doors ate up half a can of polish every time. On top of this vast machine sat a family Bible, also booty from an auction. I once asked why this item was so displayed, given that none of us ever went to church. My mother gave me to understand that it was the sort of thing people in our circumstances tended to have. Inside the front cover was a family tree of the previous owners, who had presumably died out or lost their faith. How strange, I thought, to have the family Bible of another family.

In the kitchen was a family bible of another kind, equally an indicator of class, equally acquired secondhand at auction: Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, in the 1915 Ward Lock edition. It was a real porker of a book, four inches thick and 1,997 pages long. My mother accorded it active respect, covering its boards and art nouveau spine with transparent fablon. The text held little interest for me at the time, but the multiple plates in both monochrome and full colour were fascinating. There were, for instance, 17 pages illustrating how to fold napkins: the art of constructing The Boar's Head and The Bishop, The Flat Sachet, The Cactus and The Slipper. Each was made from a vast canopy of the purest linen, freshly laundered and lightly starched. There seemed little point in experimenting with the limp and smeary cotton item that I daily rolled up and stuffed into my bakelite serviette ring.

And that was just the napkins. The rest of the book had the same combination of weirdness and luxury. Had people ever lived like this, my suburban mind wondered. Somewhere, might they still be doing so? Perhaps there really were houses with a butler's pantry; perhaps voluptuaries really did pile slag-heaps of soft fruit on to stemmed porcelain display plates, and serve dishes of stuffed quail in the shape of a Ruritanian crown. Were there really as many soups in the world as the colour plates indicated? And look at this line-up of liquors: 28 bottles crammed into a single picture, Chateau Lafite next to Emu Brand Burgundy. Finally, did - could - anyone have anything resembling "Illustration 1: The Kitchen"? Component parts: a towering Welsh dresser, huge tables, a station clock, and there, standing unignorably in the corner, hands behind her back, a plump and dutiful cook. How could any of this possibly apply to our life?

It didn't much. Mrs Beeton was occasionally used as an authority of last resort, like the dictionary. "Let's look it up in Mrs Beeton," my mother would say, though she was more likely to consult the household and medical notes ("Liniment for Unbroken Chilblains") than the recipes. Having Mrs Beeton on your shelf was like having a chromolithograph of Queen Victoria on the wall, or a toby jug of Florence Nightingale. It was both reassuring and a vaguely patriotic statement. Vicky and Flo-No, however, both lived to a great age and into the 20th century. Isabella Beeton was born in 1836 and died at the age of only 28, having been delivered of four children and a cookbook. Conan Doyle, in his study of married life, A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, has his heroine say, "Mrs Beeton must have been the finest housekeeper in the world. Therefore, Mr Beeton must have been the happiest and most comfortable man." Not, alas, for very long.

The Book of Household Management went on growing to monumentality without her; my 1915 edition is about twice the length of the 1861 version. Mrs Beeton became, after her death, a construct, a brand; also, a goddess in the sense of one who defies mortality. As Elizabeth David pointed out, early reprints of her book carried an obituarial note from the widowed Beeton. But Ward Lock, which bought the copyright from the grieving relict, later suppressed this item, allowing readers to imagine - perhaps even as late as 1915 - that some mob-capped matriarch was out there still keeping an eye on them.

When I finally inherited our family kitchen bible, I found a brochure tucked into it: my grandmother's copy of the Women's Institute "Introduction to Soft-Slipper Making" (which looks no harder than, say, a Heston Blumenthal recipe). I also re-examined the text. Some of the weirdness remained: a recipe for roast corncrake, another for tinned grouse (open the tin, take out the grouse, roast it). I wondered how, as a child, I had missed the entry under Typical Australian Dishes for Roasted Wallaby (ingredients: "1 Wallaby, veal forcemeat No 396, milk, butter"); or how, as a prurient adolescent, I had overlooked the wicked passage about what to look out for when examining a potential wetnurse's breasts.

Food insiders tend to prefer Eliza Acton (1799-1859), many of whose recipes Mrs Beeton transcribed. The editors of the Dictionary of National Biography favoured her too: Acton, being a poet as well, made it into the very first volume in 1885; Beeton had to wait until the sorry-we-forgot-you "Missing Persons" volume of 1993. The reputation of Mrs Beeton, as opposed to Mrs Beeton, has also taken some stick: Christopher Driver, in The British at Table (1983), wrote that its "progressive debasement" under successive revisers and enlargers "may either explain or be explained by the relative stagnation and want of refinement in the indigenous cooking of Britain between 1880 and 1930".

I'm not sure I'd actually choose to cook from my copy: scallops stewed for 60 minutes or mint sauce made with a quarter of a pint of vinegar to four dessertspoons of mint make the contemporary palate wince. But both Mrs Beeton and Mrs Beeton remain classically Victorian in the best sense: encyclopaedic, deeply systematic, rational, progressive, humane (see the pages on child care). Far from being bulldog-British, Household Management exhibits a proper cultural cringe in the face of French cookery and eating habits. Far from being over-luxurious, it was in its time an attempt to combine good living with economy. Thus cost is listed alongside cooking times and the number of servings each dish should provide.

Apart from anything else, this reminds us of the stability of money - and the assumption of its future stability. In its certainties and expectations, timetables and costings, Mrs Beeton resembles nothing so much as Bae-deker: helping make the kitchens run on time, smoothing your transit to Destination Dinner. So there are lengthy, multiple-choice menu suggestions: each month of the year, you are offered four different, and differently priced, ways of feeding eight people. If it is April, the top dinner (Clear Leafy Soup via Pigeon and Leg of Lamb to Garibaldi Cream and Farced Olives) will set you back £2/3/6d; the cheapest (Cream of Barley Soup via Stewed Trout and Fillets of Beef to College Pudding and Anchovy Rolls) comes in at £1/9/5d. Note that fivepence: not even rounded up to sixpence. What sublime confidence; except these costings come from the 1915 edition, published when the world that the book represents, and all its underpinnings, were already being blown apart.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/apr/05/julianbarnes.houseandgarden

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