At Home - Bill Bryson [42]
Nearly everything about The Book of Household Management suggested it was done in carelessness and haste. The recipes were mostly contributed by readers, and nearly all the rest was plagiarized. Mrs. Beeton stole shamelessly from the most obvious and traceable sources. Whole passages are lifted verbatim from the autobiography of Florence Nightingale. Others are taken straight from Eliza Acton. Remarkably, Mrs. Beeton didn’t even trouble to adjust gender, so that one or two of her stories are related in a voice that, disconcertingly and bewilderingly, can only be male. Organizationally, the whole is a mess. She devotes more space to the making of turtle soup than to breakfast, lunch, and supper combined, and never mentions afternoon tea at all. The inconsistencies are little short of spectacular. On the very page on which she lengthily explicates the tomato’s dangerous failings (“it has been found to contain a particular acid, a volatile oil, a brown, very fragrant extracto-resinous matter, a vegeto-mineral matter, muco-saccharine, some salts, and, in all probability, an alkaloid”), she gives a recipe for stewed tomatoes, which she calls a “delicious accompaniment,” and notes, “It is a wholesome fruit and digests easily. Its flavour stimulates the appetite and it is almost universally approved.”
Despite its manifold peculiarities, Mrs. Beeton’s book was a huge and lasting success. Its two unimpeachable virtues were its supreme confidence and its comprehensiveness. The Victorian era was an age of anxiety, and Mrs. Beeton’s plump tome promised to guide the worried homemaker through every one of life’s foamy shoals. Flicking through the pages, the homemaker could learn how to fold napkins, dismiss a servant, eradicate freckles, compose a menu, apply leeches, make a Battenberg cake, and restore to life someone struck by lightning. Mrs. Beeton elucidated in precise steps how to make hot buttered toast. She gave cures for stammering and for thrush; discussed the history of lambs as a sacrifice; provided an exhaustive list of the many brushes (stove brush, cornice brush, banister broom, whisk broom, carpet broom, crumb brush—some forty in all) that were needed in any house that aspired to hygienic respectability; and discussed the dangers of making friendships in haste and the precautions to be taken before entering a sickroom. It was an instruction manual that could be followed religiously, and that was exactly what people wanted. Mrs. Beeton was decisive on every manner of topic—the domestic equivalent of a drill sergeant.
She was just twenty-eight when she died, of puerperal fever, eight days after giving birth for the fourth time, but her book lived on and on. It sold more than two million copies in its first decade alone and continued to sell steadily well into the twentieth century.
Looking back now, it is nearly impossible to get a fix on Victorians and their diet.
For a start, the range of foods was dazzling. People, it seems, ate practically anything that stirred in the undergrowth or could be hauled from water. Ptarmigan, sturgeon, larks, hare, woodcock, gurnet, barbel, smelts, plover, snipe, gudgeon, dace, eels, tench, sprats, smelts, turkey poults, and many more largely forgotten delicacies featured in Mrs. Beeton’s many recipes. Fruits and vegetables seemed almost infinite in number. Of apples alone there were, almost unbelievably, more than two thousand varieties to choose from—Worcester pearmain, Beauty of Bath, Cox’s orange pippin, and so