“Frugality and Economy are Home Virtues”: Thrift in the Textual Space of the Nineteenth-century Recipe

ABSTRACT

In the nineteenth century, the ideology of thrift was pervasive in didactic nonfiction, which encouraged readers to engage with frugality as an economic and moral stance. Samuel Smiles’ Thrift (1875) emphasized the importance of thrift to individuals and society, positioning it within the domestic setting. To understand how thrift was enacted in the nineteenth-century home, this article examines the ideology of thrift in cookbooks and recipes. These writings sought to practically enable readers to thriftily engage with food, making the most of ingredients creatively and frugally. While scholarly attention that highlights ideological discourses within cookbooks focuses on the cultural discussions authors include around recipes, little attention has been paid to how ideologies are present within recipes themselves. This article applies a close literary and structural reading to recipes, arguing that cookery was “the handmaid of thrift” and that recipes were textual tools, enabling readers to incorporate thrift into their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Thrift
• food
• food history
• recipes
• cookbooks
• cooking
• nineteenth century
• food writing

Introduction

“Food should be used, and not abused. Much of it is now absolutely wasted – wasted for want of a little art in cooking it,” wrote Samuel Smiles in Thrift (1875), declaring that: “Health, morals, and family enjoyments are all connected with the question of cookery. Above all, it is the handmaid of Thrift.”¹ Born in 1812 and active as a writer from the 1830s onwards, Smiles tied nineteenth-century notions of self-improvement to frugality, framing cooking and domestic management as essential to the principles of social improvement that he aimed to facilitate through individual moral education.² Smiles was a prominent biographer who wrote widely on improvement. His writings, the most popular and proliferating of which sold 20,000 copies in its first year and was titled Self-Help, with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859), gave examples of successful men to inspire ordinary readers to advance themselves through hard work and learning. Thrift was one of four other texts that perpetuated the same ethos: Character (1871), Duty (1880), and Life and Labor (1887). And yet, despite counseling housewives to be thrifty, Smiles’ Thrift offered few practical instructions on how to enact thrift in the kitchen. His writings instead gave abstract advice centered on the admirable or condemnable actions of men, and what those actions might mean for society.

This article goes beyond previous writings by analyzing recipes and cookbooks alongside philosophical tracts like Smiles’ to build up a clearer picture of how thrift was understood and enacted within the nineteenth-century home. I focus on recipes from four nineteenth-century texts that instructed readers how to thriftily engage with food, by using and reusing it without waste; Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), Eliza Warren’s How I Managed My House on Two Hundred Pounds a Year (1864), Alexis Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery for the People (1854), and a recipe from Florence Stacpoole’s “Food and its Uses” column in Bow Bells magazine (1895).

These texts were released when the publishing market was densely populated with cookbooks, etiquette guides, and self-help manuals. Though printed cookbooks have a long and varied history, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards more cookbooks were published in Britain than in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.³ Earlier cookbooks from authors including Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, and Elizabeth Cleland circulated widely, but were typically aimed at the wealthy. Soyer, Beeton and Warren were amongst many successful nineteenth-century writers, including Eliza Acton and Agnes Marshall, who took advantage of the thriving market and made names for themselves by collating or writing cookbooks and household management guides. Their cookbooks, alongside similarly themed columns in periodicals, were typically aimed at the expanding middle classes, and particularly at women. Scholars of the British middle class emphasize the heterogenous nature of the group: a group that had different characteristics depending on context, time, and place.⁴ In the first half of the nineteenth century, the term “middle class” carried political connotations that centered upon men, and historians argue the values of this “middle class” were realized with the passing of the 1832 Reform Act as the vote opened to rent-paying men because of collective action.⁵ Dror Wahrman posits that it was after this that middle-class values manifested in domestic life and were therefore more linked to women and their work in the home, while Jürgen Kocka notes that later in the nineteenth century the middle classes developed a cultural cohesion dependent on an ideal of private family life.⁶ This article uses a straightforward definition of “middle class” that is taken from the source material: in the majority of domestic texts published from the middle of the nineteenth century, “middle class” was used to signify a comfortable, middling income, property ownership, and cultural values that displayed one’s position in the middle of society. “Middle class” was often used by nineteenth-century cookbook writers to identify their targeted audiences, or to indicate the aspirational lifestyle their readers could achieve if they followed their instructions. This domestic, familial manifestation of middle-class identity is what these cookbooks predominantly subscribed to, and the growing market for didactic writing saw more women than before writing for female readers who “were eager for advice that situated the home as a sphere of activity equivalent to the man’s world of work.”⁷ Indeed, Rachel Rich highlights that from the middle of the century cookbook writers often addressed the middle classes directly.⁸

While there was an institutional embrace of thrift in the nineteenth century, demonstrated by the rise of organizations like mutual savings banks and thrift societies, it was written texts that brought thrifty notions into the middle-class home. While written advice cannot be mistaken for lived reality, scholarship which investigates ideologies like thrift in the nineteenth century has long recognized that didactic nonfiction – including texts like Smiles’, cookbooks, magazines, and domestic manuals – and fiction alike established and disseminated domestic middle-class values, “produc[ing] it through their discursive practices.”⁹ As a practice and ideology, nineteenth-century thrift was linked to a classed perception of social respectability which often centered on the individual or family, positioning individual action as a means of bolstering Britain’s national prosperity.¹⁰ As such, the home was viewed as thrift’s epicenter and the use of the frugal, well-ordered home to signal respectability was largely a middle-class endeavor. Changing class structures meant that the new and established middle classes used conduct and possessions to signify social standing, and didactic texts encouraged this by linking property, conduct and respectability. Though, as we will see, nineteenth-century (middle-class) authors frequently suggested that the working classes could solve their problems with thrift, it was predominantly the middle-classes who could afford to be thrifty by using material possessions as conduits for their societal position.¹¹ Writing aimed at these audiences therefore sought to show readers the correct way to conduct themselves through their behaviors and possessions, while simultaneously conveying wider messages about respectability and social responsibility. Indeed, Christopher Clausen compares Smiles’ Self Help to Beeton’s cookbook, writing that they “reflected better than anyone else, and for a larger audience, the optimistic message that mid-Victorian England was filled with opportunities for those who were willing to learn how to take advantage of them.”¹² Texts concerned with foods and domestic life could not just record, but therefore create middle class values.

As thrift was focalized within the nineteenth-century home, women were expected to shoulder much of the responsibility for it. Even in his discussion of working-class men, Smiles called “the wife” a “helpmeet,” who “must not only let her husband thrive, but help him” and who was responsible “for the domestic comfort and satisfaction of the working man.”¹³ When addressing a woman’s role in saving money, Smiles noted:

A man may be disposed to save money, and lay it by for sickness or for other purposes; but he cannot do this unless his wife lets him, or helps him. A prudent, frugal, thrifty woman, is a crown of glory to her husband.¹⁴

According to Smiles, a man’s ability to better himself via thrift was dependent on the character and talents of his wife, demonstrated by her household management.¹⁵ Limited employment opportunities for women, coupled with the societal expectation that they would marry, raise children and do housework, meant they were often left to perform the unpaid labor of running a home.¹⁶ Women, either housewives and daughters who did their own cooking and chores or wealthier mistresses who oversaw servants, therefore played a crucial role in establishing thrift. Women turned wages into food, clothes, and, ideally, a comfortable home.¹⁷ They managed household accounts, used domestic skills to mend and maintain things, and oversaw the buying, preparation, cooking, and distribution of food. Even more than aspirational texts like Smiles’ Thrift, then, it is writings aimed at women that specifically provided instructions in food and cookery which can illuminate how thrift was integrated into day-to-day life.

Recently, food, cooking, and culinary writing have received increasing scholarly attention, with work from historians including Sarah Pennell, Rachel Rich, and Andrea Broomfield providing insight into how cookery and cookbooks were positioned in people’s daily lives.¹⁸ Generally, however, when considering how nineteenth-century cookbooks perpetuated ideologies like thrift, attention is limited to the discussions included in the written material (or paratexts) that surround recipes, rather than recipes themselves. Arguing that cookbooks were “taste makers,” Margaret Beetham highlights that ordering within Beeton’s Household Management extended to the ordering of society and nature:

It needs to be read also as a literary text whose structure and rhetorical strategies merit attention, and as an example of the way popular print developed through the invention and circulation of new forms of reading. All these aspects of the text should not be separated but should be understood as in dynamic relationship, for this volume brought together the gustatory, the economic, the ideological, and the practical.¹⁹

Beetham highlights the logical sequence of Beeton’s recipes and paratexts, noting that Beeton used formatting to differentiate between recipes and other information, and arguing that Beeton “enacted in the very type and layout of the book, that order which she advocated as the first principle of the kitchen.”²⁰ Even in this convincing account of Beeton’s structural and literary strategies, recipes garner little attention as textual forms in their own right. Reading a cookbook is not always a linear process. Readers may turn to the required recipe, bypassing the introduction, inventories, and other paratextual material. Recipes may be consulted independently, without being explicitly influenced by their surroundings. The individual form of the recipe thus merits attention.

Applying a linguistic reading to early modern recipes, Francisco Alonso-Almeida separates them into structural characteristics like “title” or “ingredients,” before situating them in the wider text. Working from a manuscript collection, Alonso-Almeida argues that “recipes can be removed, copied out and altered without requiring any change to any other text within the ‘colony’: cross-referencing is absent or kept to a minimum.”²¹ Methodologically, I emulate Beetham and Alonso-Almeida’s close literary and structural reading, analyzing the textual features within and around recipes. Going further than Alonso-Almeida, however, I argue that although nineteenth-century recipes may be consulted individually, they are simultaneously written to form and participate in textual networks. This occurs within the manuscript that recipes are published in and extends out into wider cultural discourses like thrift.

Accordingly, the recipes that this article focuses on have been selected because they demonstrate a preoccupation with thrift and are published in a diverse range of texts: standardized cookbooks, narrative cookbooks, and periodicals respectively. Bearing in mind the numerous ways in which domestic texts engaged with the meanings of middle-class life, and the vast quantity of nineteenth-century recipes and cookbooks, this article opts for a closer focus. Beeton, Warren, Soyer and Stacpoole use disparate recipe forms, which illuminate the diverse set of readers they appealed to, and the variety of approaches writers utilized to convey their instructions. By applying a structural and literary analysis to this sample, I demonstrate that just like Smiles’ Thrift, recipes constructed ideologies of thrift. The structural and literary strategies enlisted in thrifty recipes demonstrate how the ideology was integrated into everyday cooking and eating for the middle classes, and particularly for the women who used recipes in the home. Examining variations in the form and content of these recipes, and the ways they engaged with physical and textual spaces, elucidates that cookery was “the handmaid of thrift” and that recipes were textual tools that enabled readers to incorporate thrift into their lives.

Pretty Thrift in Isabella Beeton’s Household Management

Many thrifty recipes were concerned with making food go as far as possible, by using ingredients to get the most flavor, quantity and nutrition from them, and re-fashioning leftovers into new dishes. While the reuse of leftovers was not new to the nineteenth century, the ways in which these recipes refigured food demonstrates how middle-class cookbooks foregrounded a standard of taste – both culinary and social – aligning thrift with a demonstration of respectability. As one of the most valuable items on the nineteenth-century table, monetarily and culturally, meat was often the key ingredient in thrifty recipes. Meat in nineteenth-century Britain was cloaked in symbolism. The broiled chop, breakfast bacon, and roast joint were lauded in fictional, culinary, and social writing as representations of the eater’s position in society and history. This is demonstrated by inclusions like this verse, which comes after the “Roast Ribs of Beef” recipe in Beeton’s Household Management. The paratextual note, included in smaller font underneath the recipe, reads:

ROAST Beef has long been a national dish in England. In most of our patriotic songs it is contrasted with the fricasseed frogs, popularly supposed to be the exclusive diet of Frenchmen.

‘O the roast beef of old England,

And O the old English roast beef.’

This national chorus is appealed to whenever a song-writer wishes to account for the valour displayed by Englishmen at sea or on land.²²

While Beeton’s lighthearted inclusion under a roast beef recipe played into the nationalistic rivalry between French and English cuisine, the inclusion of a patriotic “national chorus” aligned eating meat with British national identity, tradition, masculinity, travel and imperial expansion. The progress of civilization and British literary history were also frequently evoked in relation to cooking and eating meat, and these tropes combined to reinforce the prestigious position that meat held in the nineteenth-century diet.²³ But meat was expensive, expensive enough that even the comfortable middle classes would only purchase large joints once or twice a week, with good cuts of meat remaining largely out of reach for the working classes even into the twentieth century. Keir Waddington writes that during the nineteenth century, the poor and working classes bought cheap meat like offal or adulterated sausages, because its cultural significance meant “Every attempt was therefore made to include meat in meals, or at least to give them a meat flavour.”²⁴ Given its cost and cultural value, when meat was bought it was stretched as far as possible by both the working and middle classes.

Indeed, nineteenth-century cookbooks are replete with recipes for “cold-meat cookery,” or the reusing of leftover meat.²⁵ Beeton’s Household Management was aimed at households across the middle-class spectrum. Some of Beeton’s recipes highlighted economy, but the book also contained elaborate dinner-party plans and instructions for managing multiple servants: a task reserved for the upper-middle-class mistress. Beeton’s canonical cookbook was a comprehensive guide to household management and combined recipes with menu plans, advice on accounts and shopping, and encyclopedic entries on food science and history. Structurally, Beeton’s recipes were relatively unusual for the nineteenth century. Instead of following the typical nineteenth-century form – one or more paragraphs integrating timings, ingredients and methods – Beeton separated recipes into sections that addressed ingredients, mode, time, average cost, sufficiency (how many people a dish would serve) and seasonality.²⁶ Beeton’s often unaccredited cut-and-paste collation of recipes and information from a variety of texts has been noted by scholars like Kathryn Hughes, and the organization and standardization of recipes from disparate sources was arguably Beeton’s most impressive textual innovation.²⁷ Beeton’s cookbook never mentioned thrift, but her introductory section on “The Mistress” shows her integrating the middle-class values of thrift, respectability, and management into her text. She wrote that “Frugality and Economy are Home Virtues, without which no household can prosper,” centering these concepts in the home just like Smiles.²⁸ This is reflected in the famous opening line, “As with the Commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so is it with the mistress of a house,” making the home a locus of functionality and precision where the woman is responsible for upholding order.²⁹ The introductory material of Beeton’s cookbook foregrounded thrift by enlisting familiar middle-class narratives, but by turning to Beeton’s treatment of meat in Household Management’s recipes, we can see how her textual composition wove thrift into middle-class menus.

At the rear of Household Management is a series of seasonal, weekly dinner plans for “plain family dinners.” Despite Beeton’s “plain” label, the audience who could follow these plans needed a comfortable income, as different meats featured an average of six times per week as part of Beeton’s two or three course dinners. That was a significant amount of meat to buy. Nevertheless, the repurposing of leftovers can be traced through Beeton’s plans. The “liquor that the calf’s head was boiled in” on Sunday became the base of Tuesday’s mock turtle soup, while the main course of “Hashed mutton” used meat from Monday’s “Roast shoulder of mutton and onion sauce,” and so on. Throughout the chapters featuring meat Beeton included eighty-seven recipes that focused on turning cold meats, gravy, and bones (largely beef, mutton, veal, and chicken or fowl) into pies, hashes, curries, soups, collops, and various other dishes. Though Beeton’s recipes followed the aforementioned standardized form, inclusions in their structure and content show how the recipes merged thrift with middle-class values. Under the title of the “Minced Veal and Macaroni” recipe, for example, is a small parenthetical note which reads “(A pretty side or corner dish),” and the use of parentheses and italics visually represented the presentation Beeton emphasized by telling the reader where to position the dish on the table. Then follows a “Mode” paragraph which opens with the instruction “Cut some nice slices from a cold fillet of veal,” and these mentions of prettiness and niceness show that Beeton was not simply interested in reusing the “3/4 lb. of minced cold roast veal,” but in refashioning it into a new dish that had a place on a pretty table where food displayed nicety. In the “Miroton of Beef” recipe, slices of cold roast beef are reheated with browned onions, butter, gravy, salt and pepper; the recipe ends with the note that “This dish is excellent and economical,” linking quality and economy once more.³⁰

In her “Ragout of Cold Veal” recipe Beeton offered flexibility, writing that “any part of veal will make this dish” and giving variations depending on what vegetables the reader had in reserve. Again, economy and extravagance are finely balanced in the recipe. Beeton wrote that hot water could be used in the place of gravy, but called for mace, ketchup, sherry and lemon-juice, which were extraneous items unlikely to be owned by cash-strapped housewives. Beeton instructed the reader to cut their veal into “nice-looking pieces” and garnish it with “forcemeat balls and fried rashers of bacon,” bringing more meat into its presentation. This, in addition to the numerous seasonings, showed Beeton walking the line between thrift and performative display. The majority of Beeton’s “(Cold Meat Cookery)” recipes, however, contain a note in the cost section that highlights where readers could save money and create frugal dishes. Beeton wrote “Average cost, exclusive of the cold meat” before listing the price of the other ingredients. The exclusion of meat removed the bulk of the expense, which along with the lack of waste, was part of the dishes’ appeal. But the combination of saving with numerous dish ideas, presentation tips and menu plans demonstrates that Beeton’s recipes were not simply engaged in the reuse of ingredients. In her recipes and menu plans Beeton gave her reader everything they would need to mold their thrifty behavior into meals that upheld standards of respectability. Inclusions in the structure, appearance, and word choice of Beeton’s recipes facilitated the resourceful and economic refashioning of leftover meat into pretty dishes that correlated with performative middle-class values. Even in the short forms of her recipes, Beeton’s tendency toward thrift served her middle-classed agenda, and the structural repetition that governed her recipes became a textual representation of the thrifty, ordered household she envisioned.³¹

Friendly Thrift in Eliza Warren’s How I Managed My House

Other cookbooks took a different tack when emphasizing thrift in the nineteenth-century home. How I Managed My House on Two Hundred Pounds a Year is a domestic guide by Eliza Warren, who published a multitude of cookbooks and was active in the periodical press.³² Warren was the editor of the Ladies Treasury (1857–1895), a periodical aimed at middle-class women. She launched a magazine in 1851 called Time-thrift; or All Hours turned to Good Account which ran for six issues. My House was initially serialized in the Ladies Treasury before being published in book form. It was aimed at lower-middle class women, whose husbands had a moderate income that ensured comfortable living – if managed efficiently. Warren addressed the budget stipulated in her title in the preface of her book, writing:

This sum is large by comparison with thousands of incomes, which are much less. But, to make the most of any working man’s or clerk’s income, a girl, if she be the wife of either, must be educated to cook, wash, make, and mend, if she would have peace, comfort, and respectability.³³

Warren demonstrated the want for respectability on lower incomes, complaining that the “lamentable ignorance of household matters are to be greatly deplored” because “thriftless” girls were not marriage material.³⁴ Like Smiles, Warren believed a wife’s domestic knowledge was key to respectability and thrift, even on low wages. She decried thriftlessness and carelessness in the home as a female character flaw that stemmed from lack of education. The way Warren structured her text, however, conveyed her guidance into the space of the reader’s home in an intimate, encouraging way. Unlike Beeton’s standardized collection of recipes, Warren’s cookbook was narrated by Milly, a “newly married” fictional housewife who struggled to run her home. Aside from the preface, which was penned in Warren’s voice, the chapters were Milly’s account of her life. Recipes and advice on keeping dinners warm, mending clothes, and managing servants (could readers afford them) were integrated into Milly’s autobiography.

Warren’s recipes were woven into a narrative that relied upon intimacy and enacted thrift. The first chapter opened with a distressed Milly “burst[ing] into a flood of tears” upon telling her husband, Fred, that she could not pay a servant’s wages because she had mishandled his income.³⁵ He tells her that she must manage the accounts or they will have to sell their furniture, lamenting that they cannot pay tradesmen: “We are not only careless, but sinful: we are dishonest.”³⁶ From the outset of the text, thrift was not an abstract maxim but something performed for the reader through characterization and plot. This use of fictionalization elicited affect, creating a scene that would theoretically play upon the reader’s fears of property and status loss. Fred’s accusation of sin highlighted the moral consequences of wastefulness in a marital exchange. Indeed, this conversation was similar to one in Smiles’s Thrift, where “a husband” asked his wife “Is that dress paid for? […] Then you are allowing yourself to be clothed at another man’s expense!”³⁷ But Smiles’s use of dialogue was an abstract device that let him segue into directly addressing the reader, where he made observations like, “[by] allowing your wife to run into debt, you give another person power over your liberty.”³⁸ Smiles’s tone flitted between forewarning and chastisement. In contrast, Warren’s characters established empathy by keeping thrift centered on figures the reader connected with. As I show, Warren’s fictional structure enabled readers to learn alongside Milly.

Warren’s text established a network of pedagogic female advice as Milly learnt about household management via a series of female advisors: her friend Bertha and the cook, Bridget. In the third chapter, the experienced Bertha visits Milly, showing her how “we could make a dinner of what appeared bare bones.” In keeping with the narrative form of Warren’s book, the recipes Bertha uses to transform leftovers are integrated into Milly’s first-person account. Milly retroactively asks Bertha for the method, having enjoyed “a dish of what looked very like rissoles, only they were egg-shaped.” Bertha’s instructions are not separated from the narrative prose, and “meat eggs” are only referred to twice, though in each instance Warren uses italics to draw the reader’s attention to the recipe’s location in larger paragraphs. In a dialogue spanning two and a half pages, Milly and Bertha converse about the cost and composition of the “meat eggs,” as Milly asks “But, Bertha, about the nice dinner to-day; how did you manage it? The cost was certainly more than a shilling?” prompting Bertha to outline her cost-cutting practices. As the reader discovers, thriftiness runs through all of Bertha’s habits: she saved sixpence by buying fish from a street vendor rather than the fishmonger, and “the meat came off the bone you so despised yesterday.” Milly admits that “the composition” of the meat eggs “was a mystery” to her, to which Bertha replies: “Listen. Every scrap of meat was taken off and chopped very fine” and outlines the recipe, which is formed of two long paragraphs. Though there are no separate sections regarding ingredients, timings or method, Bertha includes all the necessary information as she talks Milly through her preparation of the dish:

I then measured it in a basin and took the same quantity of bread-crumbs and a tablespoonful of flour, a little allspice, salt, and half an onion chopped very fine indeed mixed the breadcrumbs, flour, and spice together first, then mixed the meat well with it, then sprinkled the onion over.

For Warren’s reader, the knowledge needed to turn their “despised” bone of meat into a new dinner was included in Bertha’s instructions, and the dialogic form of this recipe allowed Warren to answer potential questions. Milly asks “‘A saucepan of dripping!’ I exclaimed: ‘why not have them fried in a frying pan?’” and Bertha replies, “For two reasons,” before explaining that Milly did not have enough dripping to fill a frying pan, so the smaller pan allowed for the efficient use of less materials. By writing her text in the form of a dialogue between two women, Warren provided additional layers of information in response to the questions that readers might have had: she anticipated questions through Milly, and allowed Bertha to answer them, thereby avoiding reader-misunderstanding.³⁹

Setting the text within the daily rhythms of Milly’s home allowed Warren to imbue not just the recipe with thrift, but also the actions around it. After the instruction to use a smaller pan to prevent evaporation, Bertha notes that “after the meat eggs were all fried, I threw the fat into a basin of hot water […] to-morrow morning this will be settled in a cake on top of the water,” ready for reuse.⁴⁰ These tips showed that it was not just leftovers that could be approached with thrift, but other ingredients, cooking practices, implements and fuel. Unlike Beeton, Warren was not overly concerned with presentation, but focused on demonstrating the opportunities for frugality within the home. The narrative structure of Warren’s text mirrored its content. The space of Milly’s home was not one of precision, order and neatness, but of encouragement and learning through trial and error. The recipes were not neatly ordered structures that followed a repetitive pattern but were instead embedded in the prose – woven around lived experience. By integrating recipes and instructions in a narrative frame that utilized multiple female voices, Warren presented thrift as a dialogic enterprise whereby women helped other women. This fictional structure emulated the oral transitioning of recipes by recreating it through dialogue, and cooking is figured as a communal enterprise. Moreover, Milly’s ignorance ensured readers were not alienated: instead of being berated for their thriftlessness this text created a community of learning. Warren thus challenged the idea of the home as a private, secluded space that was reserved for the singular, middle-class family. Multiple women – mistress, friend, servant – came together to maximize the quantity of thrifty lessons for the reader. The home, and the cooking and conversation within it, were textually evoked in the structure of Warren’s text to encourage thrift by exemplifying it to women across the spectrum in terms of income and experience.

Material Thrift in Alexis Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery

As Bertha’s reference to the frying pan elucidates, thrift was not just applicable to ingredients but also to cooking methods. Material thrift, that is the frugal, economic use of kitchen implements and fuels, was foregrounded in Alexis Soyer’s A Shilling Cookery for the People. This was a cookbook for the “industrious classes” and so the recipes were less focused on the middle-class values exemplified by Beeton and Warren.⁴¹ Soyer was a famous French chef and chef de cuisine at the Reform Club between 1837 and 1850. Having helped the architect Charles Barry design the innovative kitchens of the Reform Club and patenting several implements like Soyer’s Magic Stove, Soyer had extensive knowledge of kitchen design and culinary implements.⁴² Shilling Cookery was one of two cookbooks alongside The Modern Housewife, or, Ménagère (1849) that Soyer wrote as epistolary exchanges between two fictional, middle-class housewives: Hortense and Eloise. Given his established reputation and popularity, Soyer could forgo adopting another voice in his cookbooks, but like Warren he used female correspondence to establish a textual network of friendly advice. The recipes in Soyer’s fictionalized cookbooks were interspersed with letters and notes between Hortense and Eloise. Thus, Soyer foregrounded a gendered approach that appealed to female readers and suited the domain of the home. This created a sense of feminine companionship in the work of a famous male chef, whose professional experience was distinctly masculine: only men could be professional chefs in the mid-nineteenth century, and the Reform Club did not allow female members, though they could dine as guests.

That Soyer framed middle-class housewives as the authors of his recipes highlights the middle-class desire to help the working classes incorporate thrift into their lives. Soyer took great interest in feeding the poor and hungry, setting up soup kitchens in London and Dublin and traveling to help feed soldiers in The Crimea.⁴³ In this text, however, it was Hortense and Eloise who wished to “ameliorat[e] the conditions of these classes.”⁴⁴ This suited the middle-class preoccupation with charity as a means of proving morality. When discussing Beeton’s inclusion of a recipe for “The Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes,” Beetham writes that it “acted as a marker simultaneously of class, in that the giver is not ‘poor,’ and also of moral superiority. Both were folded into the concept of good domestic management.” Working-class women, however, did not always appreciate such gestures, and Beetham notes that working-class organizations like the Co-operative Women’s Guild “refused to accept that middle-class women had anything to teach them about ‘the cooking art.’”⁴⁵ The structure of Soyer’s text represented a complicated relationship between middle-class charity and working-class reality, perhaps making it an attractive text for middle-class readers who wished to boost their benevolent knowledge. Throughout Shilling Cookery, however, was a focus on material thrift, and Hortense and Eloise took a back seat in the recipes themselves. Soyer presented “a series of receipts peculiarly adapted for such humble utensils as the gridiron, frying pan, iron pan, and black pot.”⁴⁶ These were inexpensive utensils which resided in most basic nineteenth-century kitchens and could be used on an open hearth should the homeowner be unable to afford an enclosed range.

Though “thrift” was never explicitly mentioned in Shilling Cookery, the structure of the cookbook and the form of the recipes within it reflected its preoccupation with material thrift. The chapters followed a pattern defined by food-types, beginning with soups and ending with beverages. Within those categories were distinct sections based on utensils: “Soups in Iron Saucepan or Stewpan,” “Fish in Tin-pan in Oven,” “Introduction to Frying-pan,” and so on. This text was explicitly structured to aid working-class readers make the most of a limited inventory, and so expansiveness and adaptability were at the forefront of recipes centered on utensils. At the beginning of the cookbook, before Hortense takes charge of the narrative, Soyer claims that the recipes in Shilling Cookery go beyond the typical format: they are not just recipes, but lessons.

Many of the receipts may appear to you rather lengthy, but I want to draw your attention to the fact, that they are more than receipts—indeed, I may call them plain lessons, some containing a number of receipts in one.

While short recipes had “the appearance of simplicity,” they were “found totally impracticable” by the “uninitiated,” according to Soyer. In Shilling Cookery, he rejected the short, concise recipe in favor of longer, explanatory recipes that allowed readers to “read and prepare the contents of two or three lines at a time, so that when they get to the end of a lesson, their dish will be found well-seasoned and properly cooked.” We can see how Soyer’s recipes were structured as lessons throughout the utensil-oriented chapters.⁴⁷

In the “Introduction to Frying-pan” chapter, Soyer presents a recipe entitled “161. Fritters of Meat, Poultry, Fish, and Fruits.” It opens with the declaration that “The following is thirty receipts in one,” before outlining the process of making fitters from “any kind of boiled or roasted meat,” fried and served “plain, or with any sharp or any other sauce you fancy.” Embedded in the cooking instructions is a direction to “fry (as No. 72) a nice yellow colour,” referring the reader back to an earlier recipe for further detail. The next numbered paragraph is not a recipe but reads “162. Innumerable are the receipts that can be made in this way; in fact, from everything that is eatable,” while the next widens the fritters recipe to include desserts: “163. The same can be done with chopped dry fruits, and preserved fruits.” Though these recipes were separated on the cookbook’s pages into numbered paragraphs, they did not follow the layout codified by books like Beeton’s as they were not individual, self-contained units that told the reader how to cook different dishes. Instead, they formed a textual network where advice was layered to tell the reader everything they needed to know about using a frying-pan and adapting recipes to ingredients. Shilling Cookery functioned best when the numbered recipes were read sequentially, allowing readers to build a skillset based around utensils and techniques. The expansive adaptability that was factored into the recipes gave the reader multiple culinary outlets, and that flexibility meant they were not constrained by the foods they could afford. Once more, the form of the recipe spoke to its purpose. Rather than providing definitive instructions, Soyer’s adaptable “lessons” mirrored the aims of his empathetic housewives and emphasized the skillset needed to make the most of material thrift and the changeable foods found within the working-class home.⁴⁸

Bodily Thrift in Florence Stacpoole’s “Food and Economy”

The recipes analyzed so far have focused on the thrifty reuse and refashioning of meat. But as Soyer’s note on fritters (made from “everything that is eatable”) implies, sometimes households lacked even the scraps of meat necessary to bind with breadcrumbs and make fritters.⁴⁹ When working- or lower-middle-class families could not afford meat, they had to source cheap food that would be filling and nutritious. In the March 1895 edition of Bow Bells (1862–1897), Florence Stacpoole addressed this, giving readers a “savoury haricot stew” recipe within the “XIII. – Food and Economy” article that was part of her recurring “Food and its Uses” column.⁵⁰ Bow Bells was a literary magazine targeted at women. It contained serialized stories and features on the home and fashion and was cheap and affordable at 1d per issue. The fact that Stacpoole addressed economic food in her column speaks to the pervasiveness of culinary thrift even at this late point in the nineteenth century and, like Soyer’s cookbook and Smiles’s Thrift, illuminates how middle-class commentators projected ideologies like thrift onto working-class bodies.

Stacpoole preceded the stew recipe with a consideration of economy, which closely echoed Smiles’s Thrift. She opened with a quote from Samuel Johnson, stating: “without economy, none can be rich, and with it few can be poor.”⁵¹ Smiles used this exact quote, and the intertextual link illustrates the way in which dominant economic discourses were projected onto food. But Stacpoole also brought the popular topics of nutrition and culinary science into her article:

we must not consider that we have done our duty when we have bought the cheapest food, unless we are assured that from that cheap food we shall gain the amount of nutriment necessary for the proper nourishment of our bodies.⁵²

Cheap food was useless if it did not sustain the eater. Throughout her article, Stacpoole referred to four famous physicians who had interests in food and digestion to provide credibility to this argument: Dr T. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Thompson, Dr Burney Yeo and Sir William Roberts.⁵³ These allusions placed Stacpoole’s writing in a network of clinical authority which accentuated bodily thrift: the efficient maintenance of the body’s resources and health on limited funds. By alluding to physicians and situating her discussion around the body, Stacpoole participated in the discourses surrounding health, science and cookery that were well established by the century’s end. As the feeders of their family, middle-class women in particular showed an increasing interest in science, and Caroline Lieffers demonstrates how scientific knowledge was quantified in nineteenth-century cookbooks.⁵⁴ Moreover, Stacpoole’s combination of notions of thrift with nutrition and health demonstrated that food was a conduit for numerous middle-class values. Stacpoole quoted Chambers on this dual focus, writing: “It were an unthrifty thrift indeed which imperilled vigour of mind and body to effect a pecuniary saving, for there is no investment so remunerative as high health.”⁵⁵ It was not just food that was framed in economic, thrifty terms here, but the human body. Stacpoole compared inadequately feeding the body to building houses with “poor, rubbishy materials” which only benefitted the builder: “with the ill-built body, denied proper nourishment in process of construction, even this miserable profit cannot be made.”⁵⁶ By comparing the explicitly working-class body to buildings and man-made materials Stacpoole commodified it, implying that the healthy working-class body was just as integral to the industrial nature of nineteenth-century life as the buildings that cemented towns and cities. The body became a space in which thrift ensured efficiency. The “profit” of eating well did not just benefit the individual then, but society as a whole, returning to Smiles’ argument that individualist thrift worked to the nations’ advantage: “every thrifty person may be regarded as a public benefactor.”⁵⁷

While bodily thrift was the focus of Stacpoole’s writing, she recognized that nutritious but bland food did not appeal. Centering her discussion around the working man, home “from a hard day’s work in the City,” Stacpoole wrote that he would be unlikely to enjoy porridge for dinner despite the fact it provided “everything that can make flesh,” given its lack of “aesthetic comfort.” Rather than porridge, the man should be greeted with “savoury haricot stew” from which “he would obtain as much nourishment in a more appetizing form for the same money.” Taste, health and economy were of equal importance, and Stacpoole’s recipe outlined soaking dried haricot beans, simmering them, and frying them in a pan with dripping and onions for a “delicious savoury dish, the cost is trifling.” Like Warren’s recipe, Stacpoole’s was not separated from the text by title or spacing but was embedded, signaled by the phrase “The stew should be made as follows.” Formed of two paragraphs, with a third offering a variation, the recipe was conversational, told in the same narrative manner as the article. A scientific approach to cookery can be traced through the ingredients, as Stacpoole suggested that beans were best cooked in soft water, and if the water was hard the reader should add “a bit of soda the size of a pea into the water.” Moreover, like Soyer’s recipes which were also aimed at working-class readers, Stacpoole’s recipe contained conditionals and clarifications (“that is to say”; “if this can’t be had”), giving the reader choice and flexibility.⁵⁸

Directly after the recipe, however, Stacpoole turns her discussion away from the reader, supposedly cooking within the home: “we owe this recipe to Sir Henry Thompson, than whom ‘no one has done more,’ observes Dr. Burney Yeo, ‘to disseminate correct views as to the relative value of animal and vegetable food.’”⁵⁹ The friendly, versatile tone of the recipe Stacpoole adapted was offset by the opinions of professional physicians, and the recipe which was aimed at the women who fed working men was embedded in an exchange between middle- and upper-class male professionals. Indeed, by including Burney Yeo’s opinion on Thompson, Stacpoole created the impression that they had shared a conversation. Like Warren and Soyer, Stacpoole used the recipe form to establish a textual network, but hers was not one of friendly female advice. Instead, Stacpoole used intertextual allusions to integrate herself and her reader into a masculine network of conversation about food, thrift and nutrition that was dominated by gastronomically inclined physicians.

Despite Stacpoole’s focus on economy and flexibility then, and even her friendly tone, this article’s treatment of culinary thrift was not centered upon women or the space of the home. Instead, Stacpoole focused on three spaces: the city, which relied upon healthy, working-class men to function; the bodies of those men; and the institutions and men that were at the forefront of clinical thought. While Stacpoole subscribed to the idea that cookery done by women – given the intended audience of the magazine – should have its roots in scientific practice, she did not present this as a particularly domestic endeavor as her article was dominated by male opinion. Where Lieffers argues that Eliza Acton “combined masculine authority with feminine accessibility,” Stacpoole took a different tact. Her recipe and article certainly consolidated that “the knowledge, diligence, and rationality that guaranteed men’s and the nation’s progress in business and industry had to be grounded in and mirrored by the home.”⁶⁰ By quoting the recipes and arguments of men so extensively in her column, however, Stacpoole situated her female reader in what she presented as a first-hand discussion. The reader, male or female, was positioned as a participant who shared the interests of the quoted parties, and Stacpoole actively demonstrated how notions of thrift allowed the reader to participate in far wider cultural discussions regarding health, class, science, and the foundations of society. Even the simple act of cooking beans took on new resonances in her intertextual discussion of nutrition and economy, which put the female author and reader in direct dialogue with the male professionals Stacpoole wove throughout her text. The form of her recipe, integrated into a conversation rather than separated within the text, thereby reflected Stacpoole’s notion that the act of preparing food was an activity that engaged readers in the popular debates of the time.

Conclusion

The recipes analyzed in this article enlisted different spaces and voices to engage with thrift, most notably the space of the home and the housewife who reigned within it as emphasized by Beeton, Warren and Soyer. But even between these cookbooks, thrift was approached differently through the varying structures and textual networks that were established within the recipes. Beeton’s precise, standardized recipes with their internal stylization reflected the exacting middle-class home she depicted in Household Management, and her esthetic repurposing of leftovers suited the culture of finesse and nicety that ruled there. The friendly, emerging, lower-middle-class home depicted by Warren was also established by the structure of her recipes, which were characterized by adaptable, comprehensive advice exchanged between friends. The recipes and advice within Warren’s text created a network of female pedagogy reminiscent of oral tradition. The linear network of adaptable instructions created by Soyer’s numbered recipes, on the other hand, established a catalog of accumulating advice centered on the thrifty kitchen inventory. Soyer’s fictional housewives again emphasized communal learning, but also framed the working-class home as a space for middle class benevolence, while his recipes approached the working-class kitchen in terms of the strategic use of materials. In contrast, Stacpoole embedded her thrifty recipe within a discussion of nutrition and economy, a technique that allowed her to refer outwards to a network of professional men, situating her culinary discussion in popular debates around food and the body while simultaneously commodifying the working classes.

This article has revealed that authors used thrift in the nineteenth century not just as an approach to food, but as a way to ruminate on class relations. While written instructions were not necessarily followed to the letter, the imagined audiences for recipes, and the techniques used to address these audiences, signify a complex relationship between food, thrift, and a reader’s place in nineteenth-century society. Paying close attention to the structure and presentation of individual recipes is instructive. Yet neither the middle classes nor the working classes were cohesive groups, and circumstances demanded flexibility when it came to domestic instruction – flexibility which is reflected in the adaptations and variations given by Beeton, Warren, Soyer and Stacpoole. The diverse ways in which these recipes tackled the classed perceptions of thrift and home cooking, and the different audiences they addressed, speaks to the nuanced nature of class in nineteenth-century Britain.

The structural and literary analysis of these recipes shows how recipe writers embedded cultural ideologies like thrift into the minutiae of both texts and domestic life. It was not just in expansive texts like Smiles’ Thrift or in the wider discussions within cookbooks that social and cultural ideas were engendered: they infiltrated recipes themselves. Moreover, structural differences in the form of these recipes, and how those differences extended into wider discourses, illustrates how the recipes adapted thrift to suit different audiences and spaces. Beeton, Warren, Soyer, and Stacpoole used narratives and structural features within their recipes to create texts that were not just individual units of information, but that reached outwards – be that within the surrounding text, into the reader’s home, or into timely discussions. But by outlining a functional approach to thrift, these recipes constructed and disseminated it more actively than philosophical writings. Rather than just asserting the moral significance of thrift, recipes gave readers the instructions and tools necessary to live thriftily by using their space, utensils and foods in certain ways. By closely analyzing recipes, we glean an insight into the structural and literary nature of the recipe as a textual form, and also into how nineteenth-century readers might actually integrate thrift into their daily lives, not just as an ideology, but as a practice.

Employing an interdisciplinary approach in the analysis and understanding of nonfiction texts like recipes therefore has broader implications for the ways in which historians can interpret the past. Recipes, advertisements, and individual items within sales catalogs, were not just functional texts, but were put together via a series of esthetic and literary decisions which are worthy of close consideration. Analyzing these components reveals the nuanced and imaginative ways in which authors wrote about things like food, creating pieces of writing that are enlivened by a close literary reading. Furthermore, delineating the shape, structure, and literary techniques utilized in individual texts illuminates not just the genre and publishing conventions of a time, but also how wider cultural ideologies infiltrated and were constructed within texts, even on a minute scale. Abstract ideas surrounding issues like class, society and culture made their way into texts like cookbooks, where they were then diffused further into individual recipe texts. This speaks to how cultural values operated on multiple levels within written texts and in daily life. Even readers who flipped to individual recipes engaged with writing which participated in such discourses, and it was perhaps in these acts of everyday reading where ideologies became transmuted into common-sense and practice. The value of such an approach can transform the way we appreciate both the literary nature of nonfiction, instructional texts, and the ways in which we understand how ideologies such as thrift were written about, understood, and perhaps even enacted in the past.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Lindsay Middleton

Lindsay Middleton is a fourth year PhD researcher across the University of Aberdeen and the University of Glasgow. Her interdisciplinary SGSAH-funded project, “The Technical Recipe: A Formal Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Food Writing,” straddles English Literature and the History of Technology. Using a structural analysis of the recipe genre, Lindsay investigates how food writers in the nineteenth century used material food technologies as a way of situating themselves in culinary histories. She has written and presented on food adulteration, narrative cookbooks, the ideology of food and thrift, and tinned foods. Lindsay has presented and published at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium on the tinned foods as a disruptive technology, the Oxford Food Symposium about broiling and culinary imagination, and has a publication in progress addressing food adulteration in the 1820s. She is also currently engaged in internship work with the National Trust for Scotland that reimagines the way food features in historical properties.  

Notes

1. Smiles, Thrift, 350.

2. For an account of the longer history of thrift, and how Smiles’ focus on the individual featured within that, see Hulme, A Brief History of Thrift, particularly chapter three: “Individualist thrift: Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles, and Victorian moralism,” 35–53.

3. On the growing cookbook market from the mid-nineteenth century see: Rich, “Cookbook Writers and Recipe Readers: Georgiana Hill, Isabella Beeton, and Victorian Domesticity,” 412. Discussions on the emergence of cookbook characteristics in the nineteenth-century and beyond can also be found in Beetham, “Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs Beeton and her Cultural Consequences,” 15–30, and Notaker, “Printed Cookbooks: Food History, Book History, and Literature,” 135–136.

4. On the history of the British middle classes: Morris, Class, Sect, and Party; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class; Gunn and Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Fall; Gunn, “Class, Identity, and the Urban”; Kocka, “The Middle Classes in Europe.”

5. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, 381–382; Gunn and Bell, Middle Classes, 14–15.

6. Wahrman, 406; Kocka, 18.

7. Rich, “Cookbook Writers and Recipe Readers,” 411.

8. Ibid., 412.

9. On the dissemination of middle-class values in domestic writings, fiction and magazines see: Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914; Austin-Bolt, “Sarah Ellis’s The Women of England”; Langland, Nobody’s Angels, 24; Boardman, “The Ideology of Domesticity”; Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives; Weller, “Puffery and Practicality.”

10. Smiles’s Thrift epitomized the dual focus on individual behavior for society’s benefit, as he wrote maxims and biographical examples that encouraged readers to “elevate his social state, and to secure his independence,” concluding that “It is the savings of individuals which compose the wealth in other words, the well-being of every nation. […] every thrifty person may be regarded as a public benefactor.” vi, 2.

11. On thrift and class: Gorham notes in The Victorian Girl that “The virtues of thrift, order, punctuality, all buttressed by evangelical Protestantism, were offered by the self-confident voice of the Victorian middle class as the prescription for individual and collective wellbeing,” 3. In Of Victorians and Vegetarians, Gregory writes that “Though thrift was a necessity for middle-class families keen to display their respectability, discourse on thrift was directed especially at the poor by their betters, in sermon, lecture, tract, newspaper article and visitation.” Addressing middle-class values, Gregory writes: “Amongst the virtues retrospectively seen as characteristically ‘Victorian’, thrift has been given prominence, though it was not confined to British culture. Part of the ‘hard way’ along with ‘character’, punctuality and duty, thrift helped fuel the Victorian engine of self-help.” 16–17.

12. Clausen, “How to Join the Middle Classes,” 404–405.

13. Smiles, Thrift, 144–145.

14. Ibid., 164–165.

15. The notion that it was a wife’s duty to help her husband and that an efficient wife was to be idolized, was demonstrative of what scholars like Boardman and Gorham have called the cult or ideology of domesticity. Pervasive in nineteenth-century didactic writing, the idea that women had the power to “save” men from going astray was widespread. The cult of domesticity used Christian values of morality to suggest that efficient domestic management was the best means of doing so, demonstrated well by writings like Stickney Ellis’ The Women of England, their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839). See: Gorham, The Victorian Girl and Boardman, “The Ideology of Domesticity,” 150–164.

16. On women’s labor in the home: Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Gorham, The Victorian Girl; Perkin, Women and Marriage; Folbre “The Unproductive Housewife’”; Whittle “Housewives and Servants”; Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle-class Housewife; and Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Women in Twentieth-century Britain; Griffin, Breadwinner.

17. On the perception of women’s work within the home, and acknowledgment that many women were also engaged in paid employment, see Davidoff & Hall, Family Fortunes, 388; Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife,” 469; Whittle, “Housewives and Servants,” 53; Draznin, Victorian London’s Middle-class Housewife, 47.

18. On the historiography of cooking and cookbooks: Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850; Rich, “‘If you desire to enjoy life, avoid unpunctual people’: Women, Timetabling and Domestic Advice, 1850–1910”; Rich, “Cookbook Writers and Recipe Readers”; Worth, Digesting Recipes: The Art of Culinary Notation; Broomfield, Food and Cooking; Broomfield, “Rushing Dinner to the Table.”

19. Beetham, “Good Taste and Sweet Ordering,” 395.

20. Ibid,, 398.

21. Alonso-Almeida, “Genre conventions in English recipes,” 84–85.

22. Beeton, Household Management, 307.

23. On meat and British identity: Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol, 16; Twigg, “Vegetarianism and the Meanings of Meat,” 25–26; Rogers, Beef and Liberty, 19–24; Durbach, “Roast Beef,” 968; Durbach, Many Mouths, 27–30.

24. Waddington, “The Dangerous Sausage,” 55.

25. Cookbooks published before and after the nineteenth century also contained numerous recipes for the reuse of meat but given the cultural status of meat in the nineteenth century, its reuse was emphasized in most cookbooks.

26. On Beeton’s recipe form: Beetham “Good Taste and Sweet Ordering,” 398.

27. For information on Beeton’s assemblage of Household Management see Hughes, The Short Life.

28. Beeton, Household Management, 2.

29. Ibid., 1.

30. Ibid., 913, 921, 424, 424, 296.

31. Ibid., 423, 423, 423.

32. Isabella Beeton was in charge of the household sections of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a periodical edited and published by her husband, Samuel Orchart Beeton.

33. Warren, My House, vi.

34. Ibid., v.

35. Ibid., 9.

36. Ibid., 11.

37. Smiles, Thrift, 241.

38. Ibid., 241.

39. Warren, My House. 42, 42, 43, 43, 43, 43, 43.

40. Ibid., 44.

41. Soyer, Shilling Cookery, 4.

42. For biographies of Soyer: Brandon, The People’s Chef; Cowen, Relish.

43. Cowen, Relish, 3–4.

44. Soyer, Shilling Cookery, 2.

45. Beetham, “‘Meeting Mrs Beeton,” 196.

46. Soyer, Shilling Cookery, 3.

47. Ibid., ix, x, x, x.

48. Ibid., 67. 67.

49. Ibid.

50. Stacpoole, “Food and its Uses,” 295–296.

51. Ibid., 295.

52. Ibid.

53. Thomas King Chambers (1817–1889) was a fellow at the Royal College of Physicians who published lectures on digestive health and was physician to the Prince of Wales. Sir Henry Thompson (1820–1904) was a distinguished surgeon, one of the founders of University College London, and member of the Royal College of Physicians, who wrote on food and vegetarianism. Dr Isaac Burney Yeo (1835–1914) was consulting physician at King’s College Hospital and published on food, health and disease. Sir William Roberts (1830–1899) was a physician and member of the Royal College of Surgeons, whose writings focused on dietetics and dyspepsia. All of the men Stacpoole alludes to were prolific medical professionals with interests in food and links to institutions.

54. Lieffers, “‘The Present Time is Eminently Scientific,’” 951–952.

55. Stacpoole, “Food and its Uses,” 295.

56. Ibid., 295.

57. Smiles, Thrift, 2.

58. Stacpoole, “Food and its Uses,” 295.

59. Ibid., 296.