Various Modes of “Cooking” in the nineteenth Century: a comparative study of Mrs Beeton and Artusi’s cookbooks

This paper sets out to provide a comparative study of two apparently unrelated cookbooks as the British Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (Beeton, 1861) and the Italian La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene (Artusi, 1891) by Pellegrino Artusi, a food writer virtually contemporary of Mrs Isabella Beeton. Both are founding texts of the food writing tradition that they helped shape in their respective home country and have been extremely influential beyond their time and space. In the case of Mrs Beeton, the book became a famous Victorian cookbook with numerous editions and a vast readership of English speaking readers all over the world; a direct consequence of a world-wide British empire. In the case of the Italian cookbook, its global success stemmed from its translation into multiple languages. The juxtaposition of these two publishing stories, I will argue, is particularly revealing of the societies these two books came to embody abroad over centuries. According to Floyd and Forster (2003:1-2) the recipe constitutes a textual form which is not exclusively concerned with the production of daily meals, but it also discloses information on the cultural world in which it appears. A cookbook can hence shed light on habits, expectations, fears and fantasies related to food and fashionable lifestyle in a given period and geographical area. Drawing on Floyd and Forster’s assumptions, the present paper aims to explore how Mrs Beeton and Artusi’s cookbooks are embedded in the cultural context in which they were produced and to what extent they represent parallel stories of nineteenth century Europe’s knowledge, fantasies and fears associated with foods.