Who was Mrs Beeton?
Her name is on the cookbooks in half the grandmothers' kitchens in Britain. The real Isabella Beeton was a 25 year old magazine editor who died at 28. This is her story.
A young editor
Isabella Mayson was born in London in 1836 and married the publisher Samuel Beeton in 1856. Samuel published a magazine for women, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, and Isabella started writing for it. She was good at it. Within a few years she was running the cookery pages.
The book
The Book of Household Management appeared in monthly parts from 1859, and as a single volume in 1861, when she was 25. It was more than a thousand pages long, and it was not only a cookbook. It told the mistress of a house how to run it: managing servants, buying meat, nursing the sick, and treating a household as a business.
What made it work
Her recipes were laid out clearly, with a list of ingredients first, the method second, and the cost and number of servings last. That layout is how recipes are still written today. The book was also a practical help for a new class of readers: the middle-class young wife who had to run a house without having been taught how.
Not all her own
Many of the recipes were gathered from other cookbooks and from readers' letters, and Isabella said so in the preface. What she did was to test, sort and present them in a way no one had before.
A short life
Isabella died on 6 February 1865, aged 28, from puerperal fever after the birth of her fourth child. She did not live to see how famous her book would become. It stayed in print for more than a century, and her name became a shorthand for English household cooking.
The print
Our Mrs Beeton's Kitchen print is made for the person who still has an old edition on the shelf, and for the kitchen wall that deserves a bit of history.
Browse more for the kitchen: Classic novels prints.
Questions
- Who was Mrs Beeton?
- Isabella Beeton (1836 to 1865) was a Victorian magazine editor and the author of The Book of Household Management, published as a book in 1861.
- How old was Mrs Beeton when she died?
- She was 28. She died on 6 February 1865.