“I’d rather do without Shakespeare than Mrs Beeton”

  - preface to Mrs Beeton’s All About Cookery, 1923

Mrs Beeton had her own maxims

‘there is no work like morning work’

the good housewife and her assistants

observe neatness and regularity 

boots and knives to be cleaned before breakfast.

This is the first stanza in a poem I wrote in 2003. It was the year that everything changed for me. I had just staged my first major historical play, The Widow of Wappan and my father died two months before. He said he hoped he would live to see this five year project of mine on stage, but he never did.

My parents died within two years of each other, having just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary the year mum died. I was overwhelmed with grief and I began to write profusely. Poetry came pouring out as I unpacked my maternal lineage and the boxes of linen, recipe books and knitted garments my mother left.

I discovered this book she had in her kitchen stash and felt it summed up all of that unpaid, unacknowledged domestic work that was a hallmark of the ‘good housewife’. Mrs Beeton’s All AboutCookery was ostensibly about recipes, but really it was about domestic management, from kitchen organisation to laundry work.

The days are marked out according to task 

Mondays are for laundry work 

sorting, soaking, 

boiling, bleaching, blueing

rinsing, starching, wringing 

drying, damping, mangling

ironing and airing.

 

Tuesdays to Saturdays are for cleaning 

sweeping, scrubbing

brushing, banging rugs

polishing with brasso and old rags

hands circling in a ritual of aroma and elbow grease

‘dip the torn pair of clean cotton underpants into Marveer

rub smoothingly over the carved wooden furniture legs

and burnish to a warm glow’.

I thought of Mrs Beeton and my poem Tried and Tested when I was writing about building good habits. Mrs Beeton believed that 'housekeeping “like all other arts, …must be cultivated”. I believe that creativity, especially, needs to be cultivated so that its becomes a sustainable, good habit.

I remember my first attempt at cooking a desert (in a saucepan over the open fire). How hard could it be, I thought. It is in a can - Big Sister’s Chocolate Self Saucing Pudding. I had watched my mother cook this and it was a really special treat. So I did what she had done, put the can in a pot of boiling water over the fire.

OK you might know what is going to happen next. I certainly didn’t. The whole thing exploded from the fire with an almighty bang. There was chocolate sauce dripping from the trees, my hair, over the dogs. What an embarrassing nightmare ( I was trying to impress my boyfriend at the time with my meal making skills).

I thought I knew how to do this very simple thing. But I neglected the secret trick. I never knew about it because I was too impatient when I watched my mother cooking and wanted success fast without going through the step by step process. The trick being you have to puncture the can first so the air can escape. DUH!

So the point of the story being that creativity, like cooking can be learned. The more you do it, the better you get. You make one disaster, fine you move on and keep going. You learn the tricks and keep experimenting. Creativity is an art to be cultivated and nourished.

I’ve never forgotten that episode and it all comes back to me with that meal, that poem and Mrs Beeton. I’ve included some pics from the book with the random newspaper clippings and red Toblerone aluminium foil that were carefully preserved within its pages. Don’t you love the mechanical crockery washer!