#Mrs Beeton

[rmelster]

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton (orig. published 1861; above from the 1888 edition)

[frimleyblogger]

Another Helping Of Mince Pie

Continuing the #history of #mincepies and explaining why mincemeat is called #mincemeat and where does #fish come into the story?

Cooks and bakers in the 17th century were keen to explore the potential of the mince pie, becoming ever more adventurous with their recipes. Thomas Dawson delighted his readers in The Good Housewife’s Jewel (1598) with a recipe for a spiced pie using the humbles or innards of a deer, while others used one or more of tongue, lamb’s stones otherwise known as testicles, udder, and tripe. Instead of…

[fremedon]

Once again, recommending Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. "Domestic Servants" is chapter 41; it lays out in very granular detail the duties of each servant in a Victorian English house at various levels of staffing, and what they could expect to be paid, and what duties the mistress of the house would have.

One of my personal nitpicks for historical fantasy is a lack of servants, staff, subordinates, and... idk... subjects? Like, their absence is not... a total dealbreaker for me, depending on the situations the characters are in and whether or not I can just assume that other people are there in the background... but so many of the protagonists in historical fantasy stuff are higher-ranking (very often royalty), and/or have busy jobs, and/or have enormous houses that would necessitate having at least part-time staff.

Like, girl, you should have a maid! WHERE is your chaperone?! WHO is driving this carriage?! Where are your footmen? Are you trying to imply that a WEALTHY DUCHESS is taking a CAB?! You know that you probably have tenants, right? Where is your steward?! Where is your lawyer? Your accountant?! (Like, yeah, you're not going to have your lawyer living in your house, but you HAVE one, right???)

Or, man, you're supposed to be a military commander and you don't even have a single secretary?! Where is your SQUIRE?! (In the spirit of historical fiction, I am jumping wildly across time periods with every sentence here.) Man, I know you aren't looking after your own boots. Where are your GUARDS?! Who set up this tent for you?! Who is looking after your horse?! Who is making and carrying the incredibly valuable maps people are recklessly stabbing daggers into?!

SOMEONE has to be scrubbing these floors and delivering the mail and cooking the meals, and they're probably all DIFFERENT people! My dentist has at least three different receptionists and we can't even get ONE for our court wizard here? A sorcerer's apprentice to take notes? Sherlock Holmes can get away with just having a housekeeper and taking taxis, sure, but your character is supposed to be a KING?! Why is he answering his own front door? He's going to get assassinated.

Like, yes, I understand that a lot of servants in certain places at certain times were supposed to make their labor invisible, but there have always been servants who still had to interact directly with the masters of the house?! Yeah, there are potentially really messy ethics here, class divisions are bullshit, but I don't think ignoring the reality that humans have ALWAYS been doing work for other humans (even if it's just having a collective cooking pot for the group and the cook not necessarily being subservient to anyone) is better than just including some servants and employees? Because a complete absence of them, especially where logically for the worldbuilding there MUST be servants, often makes me think that your main characters just don't care enough to notice the "lower class" people or know their names.

Also, even Frodo Baggins had a gardener and Samwise Gamgee might be the best damn character in the story?! Sam saved the world?! Servants are PEOPLE. Servants are often the funniest and most interesting characters, tbh, with the most to say about a society and its workings, and also the joke of some romantic scene being carefully orchestrated by a stage crew of servants frantically diving into bushes to stay out of sight never gets old to me. Team work makes the dream work!

I don't want to gatekeep historical fiction, especially not historical fantasy, because the worlds don't necessarily have to conform to our own and may have magic and characters are often in very unique circumstances, but... sometimes I pick up a story and it's like... "Author, please tell me that you know there is a difference between a butler and a valet?!"

[actaecon]

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Hey! Thanks for all the work you do for us!

Thought this might interest you. This cooking channel on YouTube has tried to make some of the recipes from Mrs. Beeton's Cookery and Household Management!

In some ways, I can kind of see why Gabriel picked it up....

Oh thank you! :) The only fun fact I remember about the book is this: :D

[bindingwhore]

Another of my Nanna's books; Mrs. Beeton's is a Victorian recipe book my Nanna used throughout her life. It's possible that her mother or grandmother had a copy; I never asked. Her copy was printed in the 1960s, and my mom and uncle grew up with it. I have not inherited this book; my uncle asked that I rebind it for him.

The book has an interesting history; first published as a segment in Isabella Beeton's husband Samuel Beeton's publication, it wasn't published as a book until 1861. It was an instant best-seller.

Mrs Beeton died in 1865, and a year later the copyright was sold to publishers Ward, Lock, and Tyler after Samuel Beeton fell into debt. The book has been revised steadily into the modern day.

[rmelster]

—Isabella Mary Beeton, a good writer and a gentle soul, and Elizabeth Emma Soyer, a prolific and brilliant painter since her childhood, forever yet to turn twenty-nine.

[alessia-photography]

Caravaggio's Rome is My Rome the book I've been writing for the past 20 years

When I first moved to Italy in 2003 I began researching, writing, taking photographs, collecting recipes, stories, experiences; I began gathering together the material that would become The Book, My Book

The book, my book began its life as "Under a Fig Tree in Rome", my love letter to the five years I lived on the streets, named after my first home, a fig tree on the Tiber Island.

In first-person narrative I told the tales that weaved together those five years. A way of apologising, forgiving, celebrating, remembering those faces & places. An exorcism of ghosts of sorts as most of the characters i wrote about are dead now. My book is a memorial. A glorification of the inglorious. But it was no Kerouac. I printed and bound "Fig Tree" and placed it in my bookcase.

My obsession with Rome remained a roaring fire in my heart after i left the city in the summer of 2007. By 2009 I enrolled in the history of art program at Birkbeck, University of London, graduating with a Masters degree in 2017, the majority of my credits being Roman/ Renaissance modules. I had learnt a great deal which made me aware that I knew absolutely nothing.

In 2016 I began writing about Rome again, but from a different angle. My boyfriend had a rickshaw which he used to transport tourists around the city. I realised the rione of Rome I had lived in & written about in The Book, My Book was also the backdrop of Michael Merisi da Caravaggio's twelve years in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century.

I began to draw different lines on the same map, joining dots, making connections. I wrote another book, based on a series of walks in which you saw the paintings of Caravaggio as well as where he lived, where he drank, where he worked overlayed with where I lived, where I drank, where (and what) I wrote. Caravaggio's Rome is My Rome.

The lockdowns of 2020-21 changed everything for Francesco & I. No tourists, no work. Required by law to stay at home, 25 km east of Piazza Navona, I began to explore my patch the city, Giardinetti, just off exit 18 of the Grande Raccordo Anullare, the ring road around Rome. My geography had changed. & then our circumstances changed too.

In December 2022 Francesco had a car accident that left him semi-paralysed. From the moment he was discharged from hospital in February of this year I became a cook, cleaner & carer. My Rome work became a Mrs Beaton-like grimoire of recipes, household management tips, hedgewitchery and notes on a nightmare commute - with a wheelchair - across the city relying on (extremely unreliable) public transport.

My role changed, so my Rome changed and the book, my book gets re-written, again. More like a Cy Twombley painting than ever - scribble, scribble, scribble, WORD IN CAPITAL LETTERS, whitened, sanded back, text comes through the titanium white.

[frimleyblogger]

Gentleman’s Relish

The delights of #GentlemansRelish #anchovies #umami #foodhistory

Sometimes simplicity is best. Take hot, buttered toast. The joy that it can bring was wonderfully encapsulated in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), where a plate “piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb” sent Toad into ecstasy, evoking images “of warm…

[pargery]

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[the-goblin-queen]

It is well known that some persons like cheese in a state of decay, and even 'alive'. There is no accounting for tastes, and it may be hard to show why mould, which is vegetation, should not be eaten as well as salad, or maggots as well as eels. But, generally speaking, decomposing bodies are not wholesome eating, and the line must be drawn somewhere.

-- Page 95, Isabella Beeton, "The Campaign for Domestic Happiness"

[delightfulmysteries]

Tried making this, too. Mine is very different in color (probably because I used beef stock instead of chicken). I honestly like it. The apple dominates in a way that is enjoyable with strong spiciness.

Mrs Beeton's Apple Soup

I have just come in from the garden of my borrowed house with aching arms and the guilt-inducing smell of fermenting apples in my nose.  This is not because I am making hooch out there, but rather that I have - too late - been raking up the leming-like apples that threw themselves onto the wet grass one windy day last week.  Some of them are rescued and awaiting orders in the kitchen; the others have gone into the green bin where, judging by the speed with which they rot and the look of inebriated smugness on the sluggy faces of my bête noires, they will make fine, sweet compost. 

Yesterday, I recorded the Guardian podcast with Kathryn Hughes, the social historian and biographer of Mrs Beeton, who made me laugh by saying that the Victorians hated salad; they were terrified of lettuce and would die rather than eat a raw tomato.  Mrs Beeton must have thought that apples, well-boiled and pulverized, were safe, because she does have a recipe for Apple Soup. 

This isn’t the sort of thing I would usually inflict on a co-eater, in case it was really horrid.  But finding myself long on windfall apples but short on company a week or so ago, I gave it a go.  It is probably the simplest recipe in the world.  Boil some apples in stock, puree, and add a few spicey and peppery things to give it a kick.  And, surprisingly enough, it doesn’t really taste as if it is just a few cookers boiled up in cheat’s chicken stock, but it is its own thing; a tart, fiery soup with a faintly glutinous texture. 

It must be incredibly healthy too; but since I’m not I added some Stilton as you see (Wensleydale would be nice too), although this felt rather modern for Mrs Beeton.

[profamer]

CHEESE SANDWICHES

Ingredients.—Slices of brown bread-and-butter, thin slices of cheese. Mode.—Cut from a nice fat Cheshire, or any good rich cheese, some slices about ½ inch thick, and place them between some slices of brown bread-and-butter, like sandwiches. Place them on a plate in the oven, and, when the bread is toasted, serve on a napkin very hot and very quickly. Time.—10 minutes in a brisk oven. Average…

[sebastianbenbenek]

Brytyjska kultura herbaty

Na jednej z herbacianych grupa padło pytanie, jak to jest z kulturą picia herbaty u brytoli. Padła odpowiedź, że chyba nigdy nie mieli zbyt rozwiniętej. Otóż istniała i to nie gorsza, niż w Chinach czy Japonii. Przed państwem, herbata po brytyjsku z domieszką ignorancji po polsku. Continue reading Untitled

[almostoutofmilk]

just found out that a song i like may or may not be about brexit. lol. lmao even