Prospect Books, Cornucopia, British Housewife

ISBN 1903018048, 494pp, Prospect Books, £40

Fine dining was a competitive sport in Georgian England, at least among those who could afford it. The whigs - aristocratic, vaguely internationalist -were particularly keen on buying up the best French chefs: when the Duke of Newcastle lost Pierre Clouet in the late 1740s he was positively lovelorn, writing melancholy letters about the thick and sticky sauces that the new man insisted on sending to table.

Running alongside this discourse of the exquisite was another more homely strand of cooking and eating. As the 18th century progressed, bourgeois tastes, buoyed by an influx of cash and confidence, began to assert themselves not only as delicious but wholesome too. Since Britain was at war with France for years at a time, there was something unpatriotic about smacking your lips over all those rich and complex flavours, especially since they were probably designed to disguise meat that was less than fresh. Instead, it made sense to look back to the 17th century - or at least a mythic version of it - in which English gentlewomen led the way in preparing food that was simple, truthful and close to home (no manor house was complete without a still room from which issued a stream of jellies and preserves, the products of a well-stocked kitchen garden).

Leading this revival of British cookery in the 18th century was a clutch of women who knew a good market when they saw it. For centuries mothers and daughters had swapped "receipts" in a haphazard way: now it made sense to fix that wisdom in print, and charge for access to it. The authors of these new cookbooks with brisk titles such as The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy were either female chefs who had worked in the kitchens of the gentry, or else harried housewives with a keen sense of what was really needed. These women wrote for money, pilfering recipes from earlier authorities and bringing out endless new editions if it looked as though the public would pay. Gilly Lehmann is too refined to push the point, but the implication is clear: here is the first sighting of that modem phenomenon, the cookery writer whose books have become a brand.

The picture is, of course, infinitely smudgier than this summary suggests. And it is one of the great strengths of Lehmann's magnificent scholarship that she manages to hold in her head-and her text - an almost infinite number of contradictions and qualifications to her central arguments. In particular, she worries away like a terrier at the fundamental (though until recently over-looked) problem of the gap between prescription and practice. The 18th century was no stranger to gastro porn: the mere fact that someone owned a book which suggested dishing up eight courses when the neighbours came round didn't mean they actually did it.

To find out how ordinary people really ate, Lehmann conducts a fingertip search of contemporary diaries and memoirs, noting down every mention of a mealtime, menu or standing snack. In the process she discovers a hundred little human dramas, fraught with greed and envy - Jane Austen, for instance, writes with contrived lightness to her sister Cassandra, joking about the provincial earliness of the dinner hour at Steventon. James Boswell records how surprised he is to call on a female friend in mid-afternoon and find her tucking into pigeon pie, beef and madeira (naturally, he joins in). Parson James Woodforde, meanwhile, gets his niece Nancy to make an extra effort with the cakes and custards on those headline occasions when the local squire is coming to dine.

As Britain's commercial empire expanded in the second half of the 18th century, new kinds of dishes appeared. Turtle was particularly popular because it screamed luxury, yet was defiantly bourgeois you'd be unlikely to find one ambling round someone's country park). Preparing the thing took days, and taxed the ingenuity of the finest chef (the fins alone had their own recipe). Perhaps for that reason, those cookery writers who continued to point their prose towards the humbler middle classes suggested substituting a calf's head.

It is this multi-layered nature of food fashion that Lehmann understands so well. As she rightly says near the beginning of her book, people go on eating dishes long after they have fallen off the smart radar (visiting your parents or grandparents this weekend, what are the chances of being presented with an avocado stuffed with prawns?).

In the 18th century, middle-class Britons were quite capable of consuming a family dinner, a scratch snack and a tavern meal within the space of 48 hours. Each event came trailing its own dense cultural atmosphere, a mix of commercial pressure, social aspiration and personal preference. Lehmann's great skill is to give full weight to the uniqueness of each meal, and yet still be able to present an overall picture of 18th-century eating that is neither bitty nor over-simplified. The result is a model of how food history, social history - all kinds of history - should be done.

The British Housewife is the first attempt to study systematically the explosion in culinary literature and consequent adaptation in taste and manners that characterized eighteenth century Britain. It makes a few key points, all of which resonate with the well-worn idea that middle-class values gradually inflected virtually all social phenomena. These points emphasize: 1) the reinterpretation of French haute cuisine for a bourgeois readership concerned with elegance but skittish of extravagance; 2) the market penetration of this renovated, anglicized culinary discourse, owing to progressive disengagement of middle-class women from culinary duties, in emulation of ladies who passed such duties on to servants; 3) the rise of a servant/reader and a female author who, unlike professionally trained male authors, understood that culinary texts could not assume a reader who knew how to cook; 4) a decline in formality at table, as middle-class ease becomes more important than stiff, upper-class, French-inspired protocol; and 5) a widening disjunction between culinary texts and actual meals, always less elegant and elaborate than aspirational culinary discourse leads modern readers to believe. ‘The British Housewife’ expounds these ideas in a redundant, often numbing style, offering bourgeoisification itself as a pivotal phenomenon, and circling around questions one is dying to ask: How did cookbooks contribute to the desire for exotic ingredients, hence to international rivalries, colonialism, and globalization of trade? How did authors compete with the discourse of domestic manuscripts, which assured readers of a local authority for virtually every recipe? How did culinary discourse adapt to increasing urbanization, which engendered smaller households and fewer people at home to offer instruction? What were reader expectations, and how were readers induced to think that cooking could be learned without supervision? Cookbooks from this period are fascinating because they are ideologically potent, raucously competitive, and yet psychologically competent instruments of pedagogy - characteristics that do not seem to capture Gilly Lehmann's imagination.

‘The British Housewife’ is right to point out the increasing separation of savory and sweet, and the decline of the sweet course in middle-class cuisine during the first half of the century. Yet there were reasons for these developments apart from changing tastes, economics being primary. One looks in vain for a discussion of the price of sugar, which until mid century was a considerable luxury. An economic vacuum permeates Lehmann's discussion, leaving one to conclude (falsely) that taste was always the crucial desideratum in eighteenth-century cuisine. The cost of food and availability of transport were constant factors affecting alimentary practice. Even more jarring is Lehmann's dismissal of domestic manuscript culture, which she claims had waned by theRestoration. Yet as Janet Theophano has shown in ‘Eat My Words’, this culture was alive and well into the nineteenth century (a trip to the Wellcome Institute or the Winterthur Library bears this out). The importance of such manuscripts is that they present a foil to printed texts, forcing on such texts a new marketplace rhetoric bent on inspiring readers to try new, ostensibly standard recipes in place of local standbys. Lehmann's insistence that culinary texts were often derivative and out of date is too simplistic, given the immense vigor of the competition. Cookbooks in this period perfected the idea that culinary knowledge could be acquired by following expert advice, yet one looks in vain in The British Housewife for a discussion of pedagogical psychology based on the projection of expertise and the dispersal of notions that cookery requires more than actual experience. The most potentially interesting part of The British Housewife is its examination of the divergence between culinary texts and actual meals, raising questions of the function of these texts. Lehmann quotes recorded menus, demonstrating that they were rarely up to the standards of culinary authors. But then why did people read cookbooks? The question is tantalizing, but Lehmann offers no provocative answer. The most comprehensive part of The British Housewife is its examination of mealtimes, especially that of dinner and "nuncheon." Lehmann documents the gradual postponement of the dinner hour and the necessity therefore of a midday snack. Late meals were a sign of status, and lesser visitors could be kept waiting past their normal mealtime so as to reinforce the host's superiority. Sophisticated visitors to the traditional gentry derided the early dinners served on country estates. There is much information in ‘The British Housewife’, but it is old history. Lehmann's subject still awaits a more engaging, theoretically aware treatment.

	The British Housewife Cookery-books, Cooking and Society in 18th-century Britain
	Gilly Lehmann 494 pages; 250 x 175mm; hardback ISBN 1903018 048 £40.00 'The British Housewife' has been shortlisted by The Guild of Food Writers for its award for the best book on English cookery published in 2003. Gilly Lehmann received her doctorate in France for her dissertation on the cookery book in eighteenth-century Britain. She now teaches English at the University of Besançon. She introduced the facsimile of Martha Bradley's The British Housewife of 1756 for Prospect Books, and made several contributions to learned journals both here and in France. Dr Lehmann's original thesis, submitted to the University of Burgundy in Dijon, has always had mythic status: the French taking English cookery seriously? So much material about 18th-century cookery books locked away in a doctoral vault, hidden from our hungry eyes? This is not the whole text, but is the substance; and I hope it will go some way towards driving cookery and its literature into the heart of English academic discourse. Now that would be a real achievement. The book is at once a study of the development of cookery itself in the 17th and 18th centuries, a discussion of the relationship between the authors of cookery books and their readers, a portrait of the British at table during the 18th century - manners, customs, mealtimes and intentions, and an annotated bibliography of the literature of cookery. This last takes the form of complete transcriptions (and some facsimiles) of all the title pages of works referred to by Dr Lehmann. As the title page is often the only point at which something that might be described as 'philosophy' or theory enters into the text of a household manual, it will be admitted that such a gathering will have great utility. This is a biggy.		Notes from the dust jacket This is the first full-scale study of the world of eighteenth-century British cookery books, their authors, their readers and their recipes. For many decades, we have treated them as collectables - often fetching thousands at auction and in rare-book catalogues - or as quaint survivors, while ignoring their true history or what they have to tell us about the Georgians at table. The publication of cookery books was pursued more vigorously in Britain than in any other west European country: it was also the genre that attracted more women writers to its ranks - indeed, perhaps the very first woman to earn her living from her writing in modern Britain was Hannah Woolley, author of The Cook's Guide and other works. Reason enough to look more closely at the form. This book pursues the authors: their identity, their intentions, their biographies; and it weighs up their audience. How far did the one determine the other? How far did the character of the authors and their output direct the course of British cookery during the eighteenth century? While books advised and encouraged their readers to cook, create and compound, the experience at table may have been very different. The British Housewife tests the fantasy against the reality perceived in contemporary diaries. correspondence and other sources. Meal-times, table manners and the actual procedures of dining are laid out for the modern reader in much greater detail than hitherto. And the curious may discover how eighteenth-century noblemen fought for the favours of the best French chefs, how cookery book writers traded insults in the public print, or how celebrity chefs' of the day wrote not a word of the books that were put out under their name. La plus ça change... There is an extensive bibliography together with a long appendix giving the full wording of the title pages of many of the cookery books under discussion, making this an indispensable handbook as well as a major contribution to understanding a subject we know too little about. There are several illustrations of table layouts, title pages and frontispieces from the original books. Click here to view a chapter of the author's draft in the scholars' section

	Contents PART I COOKERY BOOKS AND COOKERY BEFORE 1700 Medieval and Early Tudor: from Manuscript to Print Elizabethan and Jacobean: Expansion and New Developments The Commonwealth and Restoration: the Rise of Court-Cookery The Situation in 1700 PART II COOKERY BOOKS AUTHORS AND READERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Introduction Authors and Readers 1700-1730 Authors and Readers 1730-1760 Authors and Readers 1760-1800 Conclusion		PART III CULINARY STYLES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Introduction Culinary Styles 1700-1730 Culinary Styles 1730-1760 Culinary Styles 1760-1800 Conclusion THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AT TABLE Introduction Meals and Mealtimes The Rules for Dining Exploring the Meal Conclusion APPENDICES I: Cookery Book Production II: Meal-times III: Some Eighteenth Century Cookery Books in Detail SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

	The GUARDIAN Review 02.08.03
	Food		02.08.03
	KATHRYN HUGHES tucks into a satisfying study of Georgian dining First, catch your turtle
	Summer harvest... calendar/seed catalogue, 1732 ART ARCHIVE/VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
	The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in 18th-Century Britain by Gilly Lehmann ISBN 1903018048, 494pp, Prospect Books, £40 Fine dining was a competitive sport in Georgian England, at least among those who could afford it. The whigs - aristocratic, vaguely internationalist -were particularly keen on buying up the best French chefs: when the Duke of Newcastle lost Pierre Clouet in the late 1740s he was positively lovelorn, writing melancholy letters about the thick and sticky sauces that the new man insisted on sending to table. Running alongside this discourse of the exquisite was another more homely strand of cooking and eating. As the 18th century progressed, bourgeois tastes, buoyed by an influx of cash and confidence, began to assert themselves not only as delicious but wholesome too. Since Britain was at war with France for years at a time, there was something unpatriotic about smacking your lips over all those rich and complex flavours, especially since they were probably designed to disguise meat that was less than fresh. Instead, it made sense to look back to the 17th century - or at least a mythic version of it - in which English gentlewomen led the way in preparing food that was simple, truthful and close to home (no manor house was complete without a still room from which issued a stream of jellies and preserves, the products of a well-stocked kitchen garden). Leading this revival of British cookery in the 18th century was a clutch of women who knew a good market when they saw it. For centuries mothers and daughters had swapped "receipts" in a haphazard way: now it made sense to fix that wisdom in print, and charge for access to it. The authors of these new cookbooks with brisk titles such as The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy were either female chefs who had worked in the kitchens of the gentry, or else harried housewives with a keen sense of what was really needed. These women wrote for money, pilfering recipes from earlier authorities and bringing out endless new editions if it looked as though the public would pay. Gilly Lehmann is too refined to push the point, but the implication is clear: here is the first sighting of that modem phenomenon, the cookery writer whose books have become a brand. The picture is, of course, infinitely smudgier than this summary suggests. And it is one of the great strengths of Lehmann's magnificent scholarship that she manages to hold in her head-and her text - an almost infinite number of contradictions and qualifications to her central arguments. In particular, she worries away like a terrier at the fundamental (though until recently over-looked) problem of the gap between prescription and practice. The 18th century was no stranger to gastro porn: the mere fact that someone owned a book which suggested dishing up eight courses when the neighbours came round didn't mean they actually did it. To find out how ordinary people really ate, Lehmann conducts a fingertip search of contemporary diaries and memoirs, noting down every mention of a mealtime, menu or standing snack. In the process she discovers a hundred little human dramas, fraught with greed and envy - Jane Austen, for instance, writes with contrived lightness to her sister Cassandra, joking about the provincial earliness of the dinner hour at Steventon. James Boswell records how surprised he is to call on a female friend in mid-afternoon and find her tucking into pigeon pie, beef and madeira (naturally, he joins in). Parson James Woodforde, meanwhile, gets his niece Nancy to make an extra effort with the cakes and custards on those headline occasions when the local squire is coming to dine. As Britain's commercial empire expanded in the second half of the 18th century, new kinds of dishes appeared. Turtle was particularly popular because it screamed luxury, yet was defiantly bourgeois you'd be unlikely to find one ambling round someone's country park). Preparing the thing took days, and taxed the ingenuity of the finest chef (the fins alone had their own recipe). Perhaps for that reason, those cookery writers who continued to point their prose towards the humbler middle classes suggested substituting a calf's head. It is this multi-layered nature of food fashion that Lehmann understands so well. As she rightly says near the beginning of her book, people go on eating dishes long after they have fallen off the smart radar (visiting your parents or grandparents this weekend, what are the chances of being presented with an avocado stuffed with prawns?). In the 18th century, middle-class Britons were quite capable of consuming a family dinner, a scratch snack and a tavern meal within the space of 48 hours. Each event came trailing its own dense cultural atmosphere, a mix of commercial pressure, social aspiration and personal preference. Lehmann's great skill is to give full weight to the uniqueness of each meal, and yet still be able to present an overall picture of 18th-century eating that is neither bitty nor over-simplified. The result is a model of how food history, social history - all kinds of history - should be done. Kathryn Hughes is writing a biography of Mrs Beeton. To order The British Housewife for £36 plus p&p call Guardian book services on 0870 066 7979. Review of The British Housewife by Sandra Sherman, Gastronomica, Spring 2004 The British Housewife is the first attempt to study systematically the explosion in culinary literature and consequent adaptation in taste and manners that characterized eighteenth century Britain. It makes a few key points, all of which resonate with the well-worn idea that middle-class values gradually inflected virtually all social phenomena. These points emphasize: 1) the reinterpretation of French haute cuisine for a bourgeois readership concerned with elegance but skittish of extravagance; 2) the market penetration of this renovated, anglicized culinary discourse, owing to progressive disengagement of middle-class women from culinary duties, in emulation of ladies who passed such duties on to servants; 3) the rise of a servant/reader and a female author who, unlike professionally trained male authors, understood that culinary texts could not assume a reader who knew how to cook; 4) a decline in formality at table, as middle-class ease becomes more important than stiff, upper-class, French-inspired protocol; and 5) a widening disjunction between culinary texts and actual meals, always less elegant and elaborate than aspirational culinary discourse leads modern readers to believe. ‘The British Housewife’ expounds these ideas in a redundant, often numbing style, offering bourgeoisification itself as a pivotal phenomenon, and circling around questions one is dying to ask: How did cookbooks contribute to the desire for exotic ingredients, hence to international rivalries, colonialism, and globalization of trade? How did authors compete with the discourse of domestic manuscripts, which assured readers of a local authority for virtually every recipe? How did culinary discourse adapt to increasing urbanization, which engendered smaller households and fewer people at home to offer instruction? What were reader expectations, and how were readers induced to think that cooking could be learned without supervision? Cookbooks from this period are fascinating because they are ideologically potent, raucously competitive, and yet psychologically competent instruments of pedagogy - characteristics that do not seem to capture Gilly Lehmann's imagination. ‘The British Housewife’ is right to point out the increasing separation of savory and sweet, and the decline of the sweet course in middle-class cuisine during the first half of the century. Yet there were reasons for these developments apart from changing tastes, economics being primary. One looks in vain for a discussion of the price of sugar, which until mid century was a considerable luxury. An economic vacuum permeates Lehmann's discussion, leaving one to conclude (falsely) that taste was always the crucial desideratum in eighteenth-century cuisine. The cost of food and availability of transport were constant factors affecting alimentary practice. Even more jarring is Lehmann's dismissal of domestic manuscript culture, which she claims had waned by theRestoration. Yet as Janet Theophano has shown in ‘Eat My Words’, this culture was alive and well into the nineteenth century (a trip to the Wellcome Institute or the Winterthur Library bears this out). The importance of such manuscripts is that they present a foil to printed texts, forcing on such texts a new marketplace rhetoric bent on inspiring readers to try new, ostensibly standard recipes in place of local standbys. Lehmann's insistence that culinary texts were often derivative and out of date is too simplistic, given the immense vigor of the competition. Cookbooks in this period perfected the idea that culinary knowledge could be acquired by following expert advice, yet one looks in vain in The British Housewife for a discussion of pedagogical psychology based on the projection of expertise and the dispersal of notions that cookery requires more than actual experience. The most potentially interesting part of The British Housewife is its examination of the divergence between culinary texts and actual meals, raising questions of the function of these texts. Lehmann quotes recorded menus, demonstrating that they were rarely up to the standards of culinary authors. But then why did people read cookbooks? The question is tantalizing, but Lehmann offers no provocative answer. The most comprehensive part of The British Housewife is its examination of mealtimes, especially that of dinner and "nuncheon." Lehmann documents the gradual postponement of the dinner hour and the necessity therefore of a midday snack. Late meals were a sign of status, and lesser visitors could be kept waiting past their normal mealtime so as to reinforce the host's superiority. Sophisticated visitors to the traditional gentry derided the early dinners served on country estates. There is much information in ‘The British Housewife’, but it is old history. Lehmann's subject still awaits a more engaging, theoretically aware treatment.