Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management — Selected & Modernised (1861) Companion Classics Edition [EPUB]

"As with the commander of an army — so is it with the mistress of a house." With that sentence, a twenty-five-year-old editor named Isabella Beeton began the most famous household book in the English language — and taught Victorian Britain how to run a home.

This Companion Classics volume is a SELECTED & MODERNISED best of the 1861 FIRST EDITION (London: S. O. Beeton, issued in twenty-four monthly parts, 1859–1861) — not one of the later rewritten "Mrs Beeton" editions. The Victorian text is printed unaltered; everything modern lives in clearly-marked editorial additions.

Inside: the complete household-management core — The Mistress, The Housekeeper, the Kitchen, and the Introduction to Cookery; all seventeen of Beeton's "observations" essays on fish, flesh, fowl and vegetables; 213 recipes chosen from every cookery chapter (mullagatawny and cock-a-leekie, beef à la mode and hunter's beef, jugged hare, cabinet pudding, plum puddings and mince pies, Scotch eggs, claret-cup and ginger beer); the complete Invalid Cookery; the great Dinners and Dining bills of fare; the Domestic Servants chapter in its most characteristic parts; and the Legal Memoranda entire — wills, leases and hiring, in a mistress's own handbook. The twelve chromolithograph colour plates of the 1861 edition are reproduced in colour.

Modernised means: full US/metric conversion tables (the imperial pint is not the American pint — this edition does the sums), modern oven equivalents for Beeton's "slow", "moderate" and "brisk", and frank safety notes where 1861 practice — home preserving, meat-keeping, copper vessels — is unsafe today. The original's chapters of Victorian medicine are framed or omitted, never offered as advice; a printed selection table shows exactly what was chosen and what was left out, and why. With an introduction, a short life of Isabella Beeton, who's who, five explainers (the servants' hierarchy and wages; period ingredients and measures; the dinner-service system; household accounts; the 1861 kitchen), and discussion questions throughout.

Isabella Beeton; Editor: Horace Harriott Jr. Public domain worldwide (the author died in 1865).