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'The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton,' by Kathryn Hughes

Domestic Goddess

IN America, we've had Fannie Farmer and Betty Crocker, but for British home cooks the presiding deity of the kitchen has long been Isabella Beeton, the Victorian matron whose recipes once reigned from Bayswater to Lucknow. Her best-selling "Beeton's Book of Household Management," published in 1861, brought on an avalanche of revised editions and new "Mrs. Beeton" titles that still hasn't let up, including "Microwaving With Mrs. Beeton" and "Mrs. Beeton's Healthy Eating." But who, exactly, was she? It's hard to say. Lytton Strachey, Wyndham Lewis, J. B. Priestley and a host of playwrights and journalists have tried to dig out her story over the years, coming up mostly with scraps and fantasies. Her family let out very little information — in part because Mrs. Beeton died at 28 and had nothing whatever to do with most of what was published under her famous name.

Kathryn Hughes is the most recent and by far the most zealous of these literary detectives, and "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton" is a triumph. The author of "George Eliot: The Last Victorian," Hughes knows 19th-century England intimately; and she appears to have rounded up every last splinter and shard of Beetoniana. Lavish amounts of well-informed speculation, applied like plaster, hold together the bits she can actually document, but the result is a narrative that could have come straight from Trollope. Vicars and curates, tradesmen's families edging up the social ladder, tangled marriage plots — for lovers of Barsetshire, it's all here. (Though poor Trollope would have been scrounging nervously for euphemisms as he made his way through the seamier elements of this tale.)

Isabella grew up caring for 20 siblings and stepsiblings, and was delighted to escape at the age of 20 to marry the ambitious young publisher Samuel Beeton. She quickly began writing for his Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, and then plunged into another of his projects, a comprehensive manual on cooking and homemaking. Her approach to this mammoth task was efficiency itself: she simply stole everything she needed from other books, rewriting as necessary to give the text coherence and personality. It was the quality of the cutting and pasting that made the book a lasting treasure. Isabella plagiarized only the best, including cookbooks by Eliza Acton, Charles Francatelli, Alexis Soyer and Elizabeth Raffald. And that was the extent of her career: she died of peritonitis and puerperal fever just four years later.

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Kathryn Hughes

What turns this into "Masterpiece Theater" material is Isabella's struggle with syphilis, a wedding present from Sam. Though doctors rarely told such unfortunate wives the truth, Isabella was aware of what she called his "roving nature," and after suffering numerous miscarriages and the deaths of two babies she may have made her own diagnosis. Sam himself went into a spectacular decline — financial ruin, pointless court cases, physical collapse and an increasing mental derangement typical of syphilis. At one point, he began publishing pornography, inserting it into the unlikely pages of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Readers must have been startled indeed to find dozens of accounts, ostensibly submitted by subscribers, describing the delicious pleasures of having a maid lace them into tight corsets, or expressing how grateful they were to have been flogged at boarding school, with details of how this well-deserved punishment was carried out.

But the "Book of Household Management" rolled on, without a backward glance at the lurid denouements of its creators. Today Mrs. Beeton is often blamed for the legendary horrors of British cooking, but as Hughes makes clear, the damage was done in the editions produced after her death. The original text has a capacious and personable view of food that bears little resemblance to the custard-drenched school of British cuisine. Just take a look at how Mrs. Beeton deals with that quintessential British company dinner, boiled chicken in white sauce. In the bad old days, this was an exercise in library paste. But Mrs. Beeton offers the prelapsarian version, made the way God and the Victorians intended.

Choose your fowl, she instructs; then clean and eviscerate it ("be careful not to break the gall-bladder"), truss it and bring it to a boil. "Simmer very gently," she emphasizes, "and bear in mind that the slower it boils, the plumper and whiter will the fowl be." A fine béchamel sauce is the right accompaniment, made with white stock, fresh herbs and cream. And by the way, if you happen to keep a flock of chickens at the back door, don't even think of caging them. Free-range is a must. "You may pluck a fowl's wing-joints as bare as a pumpkin, but you will not erase from his memory that he is a fowl, and that his proper sphere is the open air," she warns. "If he likewise reflects that he is an ill-used fowl — a prison-bird — he will then come to the conclusion, that there is not the least use, under such circumstances, for his existence; and you must admit that the decision is only logical and natural."

If this excellent advice — never eat a depressed chicken — was swiped from somebody else, Mrs. Beeton deserves all our thanks for making it immortal.

Laura Shapiro's latest book is "Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America."

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