History – The original domestic goddess

It’s astonishing how fast the internet has become the first place we turn to for everyday life hacks. In fact, it’s hard to imagine being without Google providing an instant source of information on just about everything. So where did our forebears turn when they needed advice, particularly on domestic matters when the preparation of food and the running of households was much more labour intensive, requiring things to be made from scratch, with great care and attention given to a ‘waste not want not’ approach?

For almost half a century, the star of the show was the weighty Mrs Beeton’s Guide to Household Management. In 1856, Isabella Beeton married her publisher husband and started writing articles for his monthly publication – The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, on topics including housekeeping tips, cookery items, and fashion. The popularity of the articles led to her first book, Beeton’s Guide to Household Management, published in 1861. It sold 60,000 copies in its first year and turned Mrs Beeton into the original ‘domestic goddess’.

The guide was published during a time when newly-wed middle-class women were often separated from their mothers by great distance. As the new mistress of a house, and in need of direction, droves of ladies called on her guide for help and advice. It covered everything from hospitality, ‘good temper’ and dress to fashion, wages of servants and parties. It was part culinary reference book, part encyclopaedia and part bible.

While Mrs Beeton was undoubtedly a key source of information for so many, there were other books that people found equally useful.

For instance, when Charles Thomson arrived in Warkworth, from Scotland in the 1850s, along with his three brothers, he brought Frangatella’s Modern Cookbook. Family papers record that Charles was a baker on the troopships, transporting soldiers to the Crimean War. Two of Warkworth’s oldest surviving buildings were built by Charles, around 1870. Located in the lower end of Neville Street, they were formally the Thomson home and housed a bakery and Temperance Hotel. No wonder visitors to the hotel were well pleased with the fare as the Frangatella Modern Cookbook contained recipes such as saddle of lamb a la Macedoine and scallops of partridge.

Other well-thumbed reference books in the Warkworth Museum’s archives include a Ladies Guide in Health and Disease, The High-Class Cookery Book, Housewifery and Laundry Work, and intriguingly,

What a Woman of 45 Ought to Know. These books must have been a valued source of information, as they contain a high level of detail, some illustrations and surprisingly frank and explicit answers.

In the High-Class Cookery Book, for instance, the functions of the mistress of the house are said to “resemble those of the general of an army or the manager of a great business concern. Her spirit will be seen in the whole establishment, and if she performs her duties well and intelligently, her domestics will usually follow her path.”

Copies of these books can be viewed at Warkworth Museum’s archive department by prior arrangement.