Toast Water? Really? Or more accurately ‘Toast-and-Water’, as Isabella Beeton put it. Like coddled egg, it’s one of those slightly fragile Victorian recipes intended, presumably, for invalids and back in the dark days of Queen Victoria’s reign, there were plenty of those, including, ultimately poor old Mrs. Beeton herself.
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| (From Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 1861) |
To MAKE TOAST-AND-WATER
Ingredients: A slice of bread, 1 quart of boiling water.
Mode: Cut a slice from a stale loaf (a piece of hard crust is better than anything else for the purpose), toast it of a nice brown on every side, but do not allow it to burn or blacken. Put it into a jug, pour the boiling water over it, cover it closely and let it remain until cold. When strained, it will be ready for use. Toast-and-water should always be made a short time before it is required, to enable it to get cold: if drunk in a tepid or lukewarm state, it is an exceedingly disagreeable beverage. If, as is sometimes the case, this drink is wanted in a hurry, put the toasted bread into a jug, and only just cover it with the boiling water; when this is cool, cold water may be added in proportion required- the toast-and-water strained; it will then be ready for use, and is more expeditiously prepared than by the above method.
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| Isabella Beeton in 1860 |
Isabella Mary Beeton (1836–1865), known as Mrs Beeton, was an English journalist, editor and writer. Her name is particularly associated with her first book, the 1861 work Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. She was born in London and, after schooling in Islington, north London, and Heidelberg, Germany, she married Samuel Orchart Beeton, an ambitious publisher and magazine editor.
In 1857, less than a year after the wedding, Beeton began writing for one of her husband’s publications, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. She translated French fiction and wrote the cookery column, though all the recipes were plagiarized from other works or sent in by the magazine’s readers. In 1859 the Beetons launched a series of 48-page monthly supplements to The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine; the 24 instalments were published in one volume as Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management in October 1861, which sold 60,000 copies in the first year. Beeton was working on an abridged version of her book, which was to be titled The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery, when she died of puerperal fever in February 1865 at the age of 28. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy, and had several miscarriages. Two of her biographers, Nancy Spain and Kathryn Hughes, posit the theory that Samuel had unknowingly contracted syphilis in a premarital liaison with a prostitute, and had unwittingly passed the disease on to his wife.
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| Title page of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1861 |
The Book of Household Management has been edited, revised and enlarged several times since Beeton’s death and is still in print as at 2016. Food writers have stated that the subsequent editions of the work were far removed from and inferior to the original version. Several cookery writers, including Elizabeth David and Clarissa Dickson Wright, have criticized Beeton’s work, particularly her use of other people’s recipes. Others, such as the food writer Bee Wilson, consider the censure overstated, and that Beeton and her work should be thought extraordinary and admirable. Her name has become associated with knowledge and authority on Victorian cooking and home management, and the Oxford English Dictionary states that by 1891 the term Mrs Beeton had become used as a generic name for a domestic authority. She is also considered a strong influence in the building or shaping of a middle-class identity of the Victorian era.
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