Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
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Published in 1861, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management was a guide to all aspects of running a household in Victorian Britain. Its 2751 entries include tips on how to deal with servants' pay and children's health, and above all a wealth of cooking advice, instructions and recipes. It was an immediate bestseller, running to millions of copies within just a few years.
Perhaps surprisingly, author Isabella Beeton was just 21 years old when she started working on the book, and she died before she was thirty.
The book gives a charming and historically significant insight into Victorian domestic management. Although its entries have little practical relevance today the name "Mrs Beeton" still has iconic status in Britain: most people recognize it and know its connotations, although very few have actually come into contact with the book itself. One of Isabella Beeton's most famous pronouncements, "first catch your hare", in a recipe for jugged hare, is widely known and quoted.
Today's superstar chefs (especially Delia Smith) might be seen as the direct descendents of Mrs Beeton, who saw as they did the need to provide reassuring advice on culinary matters for the British middle classes, the Industrial Revolution having sealed the demise of traditional rural cooking skills.
Its preface begins "I must frankly own, that if I had known, beforehand, that this book would have cost me the labour which it has, I should never have been courageous enough to commence it. What moved me, in the first instance, to attempt a work like this, was the discomfort and suffering which I had seen brought upon men and women by household mismanagement. I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife's badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways."