Selecting an object in the Dalnavert Museum to study is not as easy as it seems. When I visited Dalnavert, my eyes wandered through the rooms and halls filled with many different kind of objects. However, my appetite led me to the kitchen and although this room features many different pots, kettles, and cups, I decided to ask for a cookbook. From the collection of cookbooks stored on a shelf in the butler’s pantry, I was given Mrs. Beeton’s Every-Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book: Entirely New Edition Revised and Greatly Enlarged, published in 1893.

This book is, as its title advertises, greatly enlarged from previous editions. Containing more than 500 pages of densely printed text as well as illustrations, this book looks substantial and like it weighs a pound or more. It has a sage-green hardcover, with the title printed on the spine, as well as on the front, in a gold-coloured ink. On the top of the front cover is an illustration of white and blue china plates displayed standing up so as to show the decorations on the face of the plates. The plates have designs that look like birds, trees, and houses. Hanging on the same shelf on the left side are three pitchers of different sizes. Below the title is a gorgeous dinner setting on a table; it features a pink decorative lamp, a runner in sage green with a pink trim, fan-folded napkins sitting in fluted glasses, plates, silverware, a stand holding pink grapes, and a wine bottle, among other items. All these items are placed on a white tablecloth. On the right side of the table is a chair with a pink cushion back. All in all, it is a luxurious scene.

This book is, as its title proclaims, more than a recipe book. It includes chapters on subjects such as: choosing and buying provisions, keeping housekeeping accounts, the science of cookery, and guidance on how to manage “A Happy Home.” Reading through the pages, I found some intriguing information, such as a paragraph on ‘Punctuality and Regularity’ where it states that, for good health, “irregularity is dangerous”¹ and time must be scheduled between meals for proper digestion. I discovered a page with beautiful illustrations of different types of table glass. The chapter on every-day meals gives a detailed dinner plan for twelve people; on the next page, I found a coloured illustration of what a dining room table should look like. I found detailed charts on how long to cook meat and vegetables based on the portion and how each item should be cooked (boiled, baked, steamed or stewed). Unquestionably, this book contains enough information for its reader to run a household with justified confidence in her knowledge of cooking, nutrition, and household work.

The first question that came into my head is, who is this book for? A volunteer at Dalnavert Museum shared with me that although the lady of the house would manage the staff, she would not perform work alongside them in the kitchen. Thus, this book would most likely be bought by a middle-class woman and given to her cook. The editors of the book address the question of their readership when they write, “we have been driven to feel that for all girls in every station of life cookery should be a necessary part of education; and that to cook without knowing anything about the continents or properties of the various kinds of food used is a great mistake”.² Sharing knowledge with women of different classes, but likely used by female servants, this book was informative rather than entertaining reading and would consequently be read and referenced in the kitchen, not the parlour. The servants in this house, responsible for the cooking and the cleaning, used a book like this one to do those important and challenging forms of work but also to learn about topics such as etiquette, punctuality, and the fashionable setting of the dinner table.

Advertisements for this book confirmed my sense that it was written for and marketed exclusively to women. It was, for example, advertised in The Gentlewoman, a periodical for women readers. An advertisement for a rival cookbook called The Treasure Cookery Book shares a quotation from a popular novel to encourage women to invest in books of this kind. It shares that a character named Mrs. Berry, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, says to a young bride: “Don’t neglect your cookery. Kissing don’t last; cookery do!”.³ A second advertisement documents how a company that sold dehydrated soup aligned their brand with Mrs. Beeton’s brand: “If you have not already purchased the new edition of Mrs. Beeton’s splendid large book on Household Management, published at 7s. 6d. net, remember you can obtain it FREE in exchange for Lemco Weight Coupons representing 5 lbs. Lemco”. ⁴

The marketing of cookbooks to women reminds us of the role that food preparation played in the formation of ideals of feminine identity in the Victorian era. According to scholar Jenny Lawson, “popular cultural female food figures” such as Mrs. Beeton, had a key role in “shaping and producing domestic ideologies, food practices and developing the role of the culinary feminine.”⁵ The publication and popularity of books on cooking and household management signal what historian Mary Procida describes as “a new approach to imperial domesticity,”⁶ where domestic values became a way to not only to shape ideas about femininity but also to create and maintain hierarchical divides between different groups in colonized spaces, namely, colonized people and British settlers.⁷ This cookbook’s purpose therefore is to not only to promote values related to the maintenance of a well-ordered feminine domestic sphere, but also to affirm and maintain values related to British identity and culture.