Victorian Periodicals Review

Angela Thirkell, the British novelist who refashioned Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire series for twentieth-century readers, offers a wealth of information about English food, especially how it can reveal her characters’ social status and tastes. In The Brandons (1939), for example, Lavinia prepares her servants to welcome Miss Morris, the soon-to-be jobless companion of Lavinia’s elderly Aunt Sissie, now on her deathbed. Although a widow living with only her two grown children, Lavinia nonetheless retains a full servant staff, including a cook who holds high standards when it comes to food. When Lavinia informs her of poor Miss Morris’s impending visit, the cook begins “thinking of making some beef tea and some calves’ foot jelly, because it was as well to be prepared and she always liked two clear days for her jellies, and if people had had a shock there was nothing like it.”¹ As expected, a shaken Miss Morris arrives at Lavinia’s, and the cook assumes command. She “felt it would go against her conscience to send up calves’ foot jelly till it had stood twenty-four hours, but put her whole soul into the beef tea, and at seven o’clock a tray was ready” to take to Miss Morris. After sipping the restorative, a grateful Miss Morris begins her convalescence.²

Although a minor scene in Thirkell’s comedy of manners, I begin this article with beef tea and calves’ foot jelly because they exemplify a truth about English cooking: over the course of approximately eighty years, industrialization began to turn the most humble foods into status markers. Writing about Jane Austen in the late 1700s, culinary historian [End Page 101] Colin Spencer describes her family’s methods of preparing food as a “country estate” style, one that he celebrates in contrast to the industrial cooking that ultimately defined the Victorian era.³ Although taken for granted by much of the English population into the early 1800s, the traditional foods of Jane Austen’s day began a slow decline in the Victorian era, and by the 1930s when Thirkell was writing novels about country gentry, old-fashioned English cooking and knowledge of how to create many of its signature dishes had fallen out of an average cooks’ repertoire, due to the expense and time necessary to prepare these foods, and also because a processed foods industry had made it easier and cheaper to rely on inferior substitutes. Thirkell’s audience would have appreciated the restorative powers of the cook’s home-brewed beef tea and her old-fashioned calves’ foot jelly, and they would have understood that Lavinia’s success at hiring such a competent cook distinguished her from the masses who were compelled to resort frequently to tinned soup and gelatin granules (fig. 1).

To explore how industrialization affected food and cooking, I wish to go back to 1852, when publisher Samuel Beeton launched his two-pence Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. Over the course of its first decade, this popular monthly both recorded and participated in the transformation of the English diet during one of the most tumultuous and important periods in English food history. In its earliest years, the EDM’s cookery columns still reflected a pre-industrial nation, when most people lived and worked on the same premises where they raised, preserved, and stored much of their own food, and where they relied on town grocers to supply a small amount of expensive imports such as tea, sugar, citrus fruits, and spices. However, by 1856, when Isabella Mayson and Sam Beeton married and Isabella assumed control over the magazine’s cookery column, the recipes gradually became more modern. Living in respectable, but nonetheless modest terraced homes in cities and suburbs, EDM readers struggled with small spaces and few servants, and they relied increasingly on a burgeoning processed foods industry to compensate for those limitations. By recognizing and confronting both the physical and financial limits of many middle-class English households, the EDM adopted a culinary approach that has had significant ramifications for...