I am enjoying an unexpected treat today. Laid up with something so
unglamorous I am not prepared to discuss it, other than to say it involves hopping round the house with no shoes on going "Ow, ow, ow", I have taken it upon myself to examine the contents of my cookery book shelf. This will serve two purposes – it will keep me seated for some time, there being over a hundred books to look at
within arm's reach and it will provide my husband with some peace and quiet, he having taken a day out of the office to write reports without distraction and who has, instead, unexpectedly found himself in possession of a wife making more noise than the entire workforce that inhabits the elegant Adam building he would normally be in at this time.
I'm trying my hardest not to read the best bits out, but it's very difficult. How could you not share a recipe for Corned Beef Hash that involves heating through two tins of Fortnum & Mason Corned
Beef Hash? Or another, for Stone Cream, that involves spreading the floor with newspaper, preparatory to climbing one's tallest stepladder and pouring cream from its top step, in order to produce an aerated result?
Apart from occasional mutterings from the distaff side who, on re-reading his treatise on office procedure, has just noticed a recommendation to amend a clause in the Due Diligence section and garnish it with pink and green potato swirls forced through a muslin bag, all is peaceful.
Until now.
I have happened across my facsimile copy of The Book of Household Management, by Mrs Isabella Beeton. She came up in conversation recently as having been responsible for some of the worst food in the history of English cuisine, giving it a reputation from which it is still struggling to free itself over a hundred years later. I tend to agree with the assertion that a lot of her recipes were unremittingly bland and overcooked, but I don't think she alone can be held to book for this lamentable state of affairs.
There have been countless versions over the years – in addition to The Book of Household Management and which I have just flung at the wall, a smaller dent has been effected by the 1923 edition of Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book, still providing revolting recipes, but in a slightly clearer format. A 1972 edition (of which there were four)
of Mrs Beeton's Family Cookery will be joining its confreres shortly.
The Book of Household Management, whatever else it was, was certainly egalitarian. Invaluable hints on employing a footman who knows he must do all the dirty chores around the house before donning his clean apron preparatory to laying the breakfast table are offered only pages before a section on how to deal with Carbonic
Acid Gas – "A poisonous gas met with in rooms where charcoal is burnt and where there is not sufficient draught to allow it to escape; in coalpits, near limekilns, in breweries and in rooms and houses where a great many people live huddled together in wretchedness and filth and where the air in consequence becomes poisoned."
Doubtless these huddled masses were exhaling poisonous breaths of irritation on discovering that they had neglected to purchase flowers for the dining table: "There should always be flowers on the table and as they form no item of expense, there is no reason why they should not be employed every day." I bet the poisoned miners
wished they could be employed every day and sod the flowers.
But is to the recipes that I find I return. There is one for Macaroni Soup that starts off in the 1861 original by requiring 3oz of macaroni to be boiled in water with a knob of butter for half an hour, then added to two quarts of stock and simmered for another 15 minutes, before serving with Parmesan cheese. This recipe has been
ditched in the 1925 edition and rightly so. Forty-five minutes' cooking of macaroni, whether in stock or water, simply doesn't bear thinking about.
But what is this? Leafing through the 1972 version I notice a recipe for Macaroni Soup. Nearly a hundred years have passed and what have we learned in the interim? We should cook the macaroni for only twenty minutes, but we must thicken the soup with flour and butter (or margarine) and we must further enhance the flavour with yeast or meat extract and a little powdered mace. It beggars belief that it would be possible to make this already disgusting concoction worse. It is also apparent that Mrs Beeton, who died aged 29, could not be held responsible for this updated abomination.
So whose fault is it? The publishers of the 1972 version have, sensibly, to my mind, neglected to include the names of any authors and lucky for them, frankly.
To have been in any way responsible for fostering the French assertion that our food is some of the worst in the world is not only genuinely unpalatable. It is unpatriotic.
