Книга домоводства миссис Битон: Полное руководство викторианской эпохи.

1861 book by Isabella Beeton

Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, also published as Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book, is an extensive guide to running a household in Victorian Britain, edited by Isabella Beeton and first published as a book in 1861. Previously published in parts, it initially and briefly bore the title Beeton's Book of Household Management, as one of the series of guidebooks published by her husband, Samuel Beeton. The recipes were highly structured, in contrast to those in earlier cookbooks. It was illustrated with many monochrome and colour plates. Although Mrs. Beeton died in 1865, the book continued to be a best seller. The first editions after her death contained an obituary notice, but later editions did not, allowing readers to imagine that every word was written by an experienced Mrs. Beeton personally. Many of the recipes were copied from the most successful cookery books of the day, including Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (first published in 1845), Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (originally published in 1769), Marie Antoine Carême's Le Pâtissier royal Parisien (1815), Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), Maria Eliza Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), and the works of Charles Elmé Francatelli (1805–1876). This practice of Mrs. Beeton's has in modern times repeatedly been described as plagiarism. The book expanded steadily in length until by 1907 it reached 74 chapters and over 2,000 pages. Nearly two million copies were sold by 1868, and it remained in print. Between 1875 and 1914 it was probably the most often consulted cookery book. Mrs. Beeton has been compared on the strength of the book with modern "domestic goddesses" On 1 October 1861, the instalments were collected into one volume with the title The Book of Household Management, comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House Maids, Lady's Maid, Maid of all Work, Laundry Maid, Nurse and Nurse Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc. also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort. Previously published as a part work, it was first published as a book in 1861 by S. O. Beeton Publishing, 161 Bouverie Street, London, a firm founded by Samuel Beeton. The book was an immediate best seller, selling 60,000 copies in its first year and totalling nearly two million by 1868. In 1863 a revised edition was issued. In 1866, a year after Isabella's death, Samuel was in debt due to the collapse of Overend and Gurney, a London discount house to which he owed money. To save himself from bankruptcy he sold the copyright to all of his publications for a little over £19,000. Of that, the rights to Household Management were sold to publishers Ward, Lock and Tyler for £3,250. The early editions included an obituary notice for Beeton, but the publishers insisted it be removed "allowing readers to imagineperhaps even as late as 1915that some mob capped matriarch was out there still keeping an eye on them". Revisions to Household Management by its publisher have continued to the present day. The effort has kept the Beeton name in the public eye for over 125 years, although current editions are far removed from those published in Mrs. Beeton's lifetime. By 1906 the book had 2,056 pages, "exclusive of advertising", with 3,931 recipes and was "half as large again" as the previous edition.

The following description refers to the 1907 edition; the book was greatly extended in the decades since Mrs. Beeton's death (in 1865) to 74 chapters and over 2000 pages; the first edition had 44 chapters. The book begins with general chapters on the duties of the "mistress", the housekeeper, and the cook. There follow chapters on the kitchen itself, "marketing" (choosing good quality produce at the market), and an introduction to cookery (Chapter 6). Together, these take up over 100 pages. Chapters seven to 38 (roughly 1000 pages) cover English cooking, with recipes for soups, gravies, fish, meat (principally veal, beef, mutton and lamb, and pork), poultry, game, preserves, vegetables, pastries, puddings, sweets, jams, pickles, and savouries. Chapter 39 describes the "art of carving at table", supported by eleven illustrations. Chapters 40 to 50 (some 200 pages) give instructions for dairy products, vegetarian and invalid (sick person) cookery, making bread, biscuits and cakes, and beverages. Chapters 51 to 59 describe cooking in various international styles including French, German, Spanish, Jewish, Australian, South African, Indian, American, and Canadian cookery. Chapters 60 to 68 guide on matters from trussing poultry to the definitions of culinary terms, arranging meals, decorating the table, making menus, and the duties of domestic servants. Chapters 69 to 73 describe "household recipes" and medical preparations. The final chapter, 74, offers "legal memoranda". There is a detailed index. The edition includes advertisements for products such as "Lemco" beef extract and "Cadbury's Cocoa". She explains that she was thus attempting to make the basics of cookery "intelligible" to any "housewife". The book thus advocates early rising, cleanliness, frugality, good temper, and the wisdom of interviewing servants rather than relying on written references. The text then swiftly passes to a description of simple measures like a table spoonful, and the duties of servants. Each recipe is structured into a title, a list of ingredients (with quantities, either naturalas a number of eggs or vegetables, a number of slices of hamor measured in Imperial unitsounces of salt, quarts of water. The actual instructions are headed "Mode", as "Cut up the veal, and put it with the bones and trimmings of poultry". A separate section gives the overall preparation time, and the average cost as, for example, "9d. per quart". Many recipes state in separate brief sections when a recipe is "seasonable and for how many persons it is "sufficient". Finally, a "note" gives any required advice, such as "When stronger stock is desired, double the quantity of veal, or put in an old fowl." This highly structured presentation was the book's main innovation.

Despite professing to be a guide of reliable information about every aspect of running a house for the aspirant middle classes, the original edition devotes 23 pages to household management, then discusses cooking for almost all of the other 900. Even with the emphasis on food, some of her cooking advice is so odd as to suggest that she had little experience preparing meals. For example, the book recommends boiling pasta for an hour and forty five minutes. Like many other British people of her social class and generation, Mrs. Beeton adopted a distaste for unfamiliar foods, saying that mangoes tasted like turpentine, lobsters were indigestible, garlic was offensive, potatoes were "suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious", cheese could only be consumed by sedentary people, and tomatoes were either good or bad for a range of reasons.

In a critical letter, Mrs. Beeton's acquaintance Mrs. Henrietta Mary Pourtois English advised her that "Cookery is a Science that is only learnt by Long Experience and years of study which of course you have not had. Therefore my advice would be to compile a book from recipes from a Variety of the Best Books published on Cookery and Heaven knows there is a great variety for you to choose from." The recipes were largely copied from the most successful cookery books of the day, the copying in several cases unacknowledged in the text. The "variety" included Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families and her The English Bread–Book, Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Marie Antoine Carême's Le Pâtissier royal Parisien, Louis Eustache Ude's The French Cook, Alexis Soyer's The Modern Housewife or, Ménagère and The Pantropheon, Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Maria Eliza Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery, and the works of Charles Elmé Francatelli. In modern times Mrs. Beeton's practice has been criticised as plagiarism; Beeton's modern biographer Kathryn Hughes talks of her "lifting" and "brazenly copying" recipes from others, and says that this was "the way that cookery books had been put together from time immemorial ". The New York Times said, "Isabella [Beeton] plagiarised only the best". This led to the comment that "Mrs Beeton couldn't cook but she could copy". Hughes recounts that Beeton's "first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs" and that her work was "brazenly copied  almost word for word, from books as far back as the Restoration". and later wrote: "I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs. Beeton to learn from".

The 1907 edition runs to some 30 full page colour plates and over 100 full page illustrations in monochrome. These include photographs, such as of the housekeeper standing with hands behind her back in her kitchen (pictured), facing the first page of Chapter two, "The Housekeeper". An idea of the amount of detail may be gained from the fact that there are eleven illustrations of types of fish (one pictured), such as "steamed sole" and "soused mackerel", and another of "fish entrées". One full page colour plate (pictured) illustrated a range of puddings, showing jelly, raspberry cream, a centre dish piled high with fruits, a trifle, and an ornamental flowerpot containing a strawberry plant. The Oxford English Dictionary recognised that, by the 1890s, Beeton's name "was adopted as a term for an authority on all things domestic and culinary". The Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science observed that "it was probably found in more homes than any other cookery book, and [was probably] the most often consulted, in the years 1875 to 1914".

Mrs. Beeton has been described as "the grandmother of modern domestic goddesses", like Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, who saw, as Beeton did, the need to provide reassuring advice on culinary matters for the British middle classes. For the book's 150th anniversary in 2011, the Royal Society of Chemistry planned to feature one of Beeton's recipes. Due to the financial climate at the time in wake of the Great Recession, the Society selected Beeton's toast sandwich, a dish that Beeton included to cater to the less well off. In 2012 the food economist for the British television period drama Downton Abbey described Beeton's book as an "important guide" for the food served in the series. During Season 1 Episode 2 from 2019 of Good Omens, a Victorian style hardback book is used as a prop by the archangel Gabriel (played by Jon Hamm) as he visits the angel Aziraphale (played by Michael Sheen) at his book shop, and the binding is displayed at 1:17 into the episode. While the title of the episode is referring to a different book, the close up shot of the binding and the width make it clear to the viewer that Jon Hamm's character is holding the 2,000 page full text, with "Modern Edition" added below the title on the spine.