Summary
Firmly of the belief that a home should be run as an efficient military campaign, Mrs Beeton, the doyenne of English cookery, offers timeless tips on selecting cuts of meat, throwing a grand party and hosting a dinner, as well as giving suggestions on staff wages and the cost of each recipe.
With such delicious English classics as rabbit pie, carrot soup, baked apple custard, and fresh lemonade - as well as invalid's jelly for those days when stewed eels may be a little too much - this is a wonderful collection of food writing from the matriarch of modern housekeeping.
Isabella Beeton was born in London in 1836, one of twenty-one brothers and sisters. Between 1859-1861, Beeton wrote articles on cooking and household management for her husband's publications. The collection of these articles became the single volume, The Book of Household Management , a guide to all aspects of running a household in Victorian Britain that included not only recipes, home-made remedies and how to deal with servants' pay but also smaller yet surprising subjects such as violence, cruelty and death. It remains a classic piece of domestic literature, providing us with invaluable insight into the Victorian household. Beeton died just four years after its publication at the age of twenty-eight.
