Miss Eliza's English Kitchen

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship by Annabel Abbs

Read April 2024

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen

This was an enjoyable book.  Although, as with some other historical fiction novels, I sometimes feel an author works too hard to add ‘personal intrigue’ when the book would have been quite good enough without it.  I will say that I was intrigued enough by the character/real person of Eliza Acton to go searching for more information about her upon completing this book.  So perhaps the author was doing it correctly all along!  :D  

The story is told in two voices - Eliza Acton and Ann Kirby.  Eliza Acton is a young woman of privilege in Victorian England.  She is a poet and is disappointed when a publisher wants her to write a ‘cookery book’ instead of publishing her volume of poetry. When her father goes bankrupt she decides to write the cookery book after all.  She and her mother open a boarding house for upper class travelers in Tonbridge.  There Eliza meets Ann who is hired as a scullery maid.  Eliza recognizes that Ann has real talent for cooking and coming up with recipe ideas.  Together they work to create a cookery book for a domestic audience - a revolutionary idea in upper class Victorian England where all cooking was done by servants and the ‘ladies of the house’ never even entered a kitchen, so were completely inept in cooking.  Eliza Acton is credited with being the first person to include a list of ingredients and even suggested cooking times for each recipe.  Her cookbook, Modern Cookery for Private Families, was released in 1845 and was so popular that parts of it were plagiarised by Isabella Beeton in her 1861 book Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.  :( 

Throughout the dual voice storyline, we learn more about not only Eliza’s life and past but also Ann’s.  While Ann (and many other characters) are not based on ‘real’ persons, they are illustrative of the times and provide a picture of the lower class living conditions of Victorian England.  I did love the way the author developed a lovely friendship between the two women, which allowed for both storylines to feel fully developed. 

I rated this book a 4. 

Here are a few websites that provide more information about Eliza Acton and her cookery book.  I enjoyed looking through them. 

Eliza Acton: Victorian Cookbook Author

https://www.cooksinfo.com/eliza-acton 

Eliza Acton: Cookery writing pioneer

https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/eliza-acton-cookery-writing-pioneer 

This site, especially, intrigued me.  The author of this site recreates historic recipes as they are written.  She has many that are tagged as ‘Eliza Acton’. 

https://history-in-the-making.com/tag/eliza-acton/ 

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: A Novel of Victorian Cookery and Friendship by Annabel Abbs

Read April 2024