Cookbook Writers and Recipe Readers: Georgiana Hill, Isabella Beeton and Victorian domesticity

This article examines female-authored cookbooks in the 1860s, focusing in particular on the little-known work of Georgiana Hill, and the famous life of Isabella Beeton and her Book of Household Management. Looking at the state of cookbook publishing in the 1860s, and considering both the tone and content of these publications, the author argues that taking Hill’s authorial voice into account can enhance our understanding of how women operated in the highly competitive cookbook market. Hill’s and Beeton’s work, alongside that of Eliza Acton and numerous lesser-known cookery writers, suggests ways in which authors were conscious of addressing multiple audiences, including mistresses and servants, and both confident and incompetent cooks. At the same time, the frequent appearance of both European and Indian recipes suggests that the middle-class cookbook market made assumptions about the sophistication and cosmopolitanism of the domestic dinner table. The article goes on to investigate Hill’s biography, and her navigation of the publishing industry, analysing in particular the archives of George Routledge and Co., in order to argue that even while it offered female cookery writers the opportunity to capitalize on their expertise, this was still an industry in which it was difficult for a woman to be fairly rewarded for her work.