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With Christmas approaching, we are looking towards the food we’ll share on the day itself. If you’re looking for ideas, who better to consult that Mrs Isabella Beeton herself, who authored the seminal Household Management at just 22 years old. Below is her sage advice on that classic Christmas meat, roast goose.

Ingredients:
Goose
4 large onions
10 sage-leaves
¼ lb. of bread crumbs
1 ½ oz. of butter
salt and pepper to taste
1 egg

Choosing and Trussing
Select a goose with a clean white skin, plump breast, and yellow feet: if these latter are red, the bird is old. Should the weather permit, let it hang for a few days: by so doing, the flavour will be very much improved. Pluck, singe, draw, and carefully wash and wipe the goose; cut off the neck close to the back, leaving the skin long enough to turn over; cut off the feet at the first joint, and separate the pinions at the first joint. Beat the breast-bone flat with a rolling-pin, put a skewer though the under part of each wing, and having drawn up the legs closely, put a skewer into the middle of each, and pass the same quite through the body. Insert another skewer into the small of the leg, bring it close down to the side bone, run it through, and do the same to the other side. Now cut off the end of the vent, and make a hole in the skin sufficiently large for the passage of the rump, in order to keep in the seasoning.

Mode
Make a sage-and-onion stuffing of the above ingredients; put it into the body of the goose, and secure it firmly at both ends, by passing the rump through the hole made in the skin, and the other end by tying the skin of the neck to  the back; by this means the seasoning will not escape. Put it down to a brisk fire, keep it well basted, and roast from 1 ½ to 2 hours, according to the size. Remove the skewers, and serve with a tureen of good gravy, and one of well-made apple-sauce. Should a very highly-flavoured seasoning be preferred, the onions should not be parboiled, but minced raw: of the two methods, the mild seasoning in far superior. A ragout, or pie, should be made of the giblets, or they may be stewed down to make gravy. Be careful to serve the goose before the breast falls, or its appearance will be spoiled by coming flattened to the table. As this is rather a troublesome joint to carve, a large quantity of gravy should not be poured round the goose, but sent in a tureen.

Time – A large goose, 1 ¾ hour; a moderate-sized one, 1 ¼ hour to 1 ½ hour.

Seasonable from September to March; but in perfection from Michaelmas to Christmas.

Average cost, 5s. 6d. each. Sufficient for 8 or 9 persons.

Note
A teaspoon of made mustard, a saltspoonful of salt, a few grains of cayenne, mixed with a glass of port wine, are sometimes poured into the goose by a slit made in the apron. This sauce is, by many persons, considered an improvement.

Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is a founding text of Victorian middle-class identity. It offers highly authoritative advice on subjects as diverse as fashion, child-care, animal husbandry, poisons, and the management of servants. The Oxford World’s Classics edition is an abridged version, edited by Nicola Humble, which does justice to its high status as a cookery book, while also suggesting ways of approaching this massive, hybrid text as a significant document of social and cultural history.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Image credit: Crispy grilled goose for Christmas. Photo by Chikei Yung, iStockphoto.

The post Roast Goose, the Mrs Beeton way appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Nicola Humble

BBC 2 has rediscovered Mrs Beeton, with Sophie Dahl tramping the streets of Cheapside and Epsom looking for the real woman behind Household Management. It is worth the shoe leather – Mrs Beeton’s is certainly a story well worth telling. The author of the most famous cook book ever published began work on it at the age of twenty-one and finished it at four years later. Her book was first published in volume form in 1861 and has never been out of print since. Isabella herself died seven years after its publication of puerperal fever, contracted during the birth of her fourth child. She was 28.

The crisp, authoritative tones of her book, along with its immense size and heft, and the range and assurance of its advice have all encouraged generations of readers to imagine Mrs Beeton as a stately matron, doling out the fruits of long years of domestic experience. It is a model of the author deliberately encouraged by Ward Lock, the book’s long-term publishers, who tacitly avoided all mention of the author’s untimely death. In fact the real Isabella Beeton was the polar opposite of what we would expect. She had spent much of her adolescence living with her siblings in the grandstand on Epsom race course, where her step-father was Clerk of the Course. They slept in the committee rooms and ran wild, while Isabella, the eldest, presided over the ramshackle domestic arrangements. She followed this highly unconventional upbringing by taking herself off to learn pastry-making in Germany – conduct, according to one of her sisters, that was considered ‘ultra-modern and not quite nice’. On her return she became engaged to a young entrepreneurial publisher, Sam Beeton. For the rest of their brief married life she was to work alongside him, contributing to his publications. She wrote columns on fashion and travelled to Paris with great enjoyment to report on the fashion shows, she translated French novels for serialisation, and wrote on food and household management for the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It was these that formed the basis of the book.

Mrs Beeton gets rediscovered every generation: there was a huge stir in the 1930s when her son, Sir Mayson Beeton, presented a picture of his mother to the National Portrait Gallery and people tried to reconcile the fashionable young girl of the picture with the mature woman of their imaginings. In the 1970s, when traditional English food enjoyed a renaissance, there was again a new surge of interest in Beeton and her book. And in the last decade there have been flurries of media enthusiasm in reponse to Kathryn Hughes’s 2005 biography (The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton) and to my own edition of her work for Oxford World’s Classics. When the latter appeared in 2000 I was astonished by the degree of interest the book received on national and local radio, in broadsheets and tabloids alike. It was even the subject of a Mark Rowson cartoon in The Independent. The curiosity was two-fold: it was news-worthy because a highly respected literary series was allowing a cook book to join the hallowed ranks of serious literature, but there was also a lot of interest in the book and its author: in the oddities of Isabella’s story and in the anomolous cultural status the book possesses, as something both immensely famous and largely unread.

So why is it worth us reading Beeton’s book today? For one thing, it is a record of a society caught at a crucial moment of transi

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

First published in 1888, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, by Flora Annie Steele and Grace Gardiner, is the Mrs Beeton of British India. It sought to provide practical advice to young memsahibs in India. Ostensibly a manual of household management, it opens a fascinating window on to the day-to-day life of the British in India. In the abridged excerpt below, Steele and Gardiner offer some handy hints on camp life for those women who were wives of Civil Service employees. Read on to find out how to make an oven for the ‘cook-room’, how to make a tent comfortable, and how to make sure that country turnips ‘lose nearly all their paint-like taste’.

First, in regard to tents.

Whether these are supplied by Government or not, it is equally necessary to make them comfortable. The ordinary single pole tent is twice as convenient if it is divided down the centre with a pole and curtains so as to screen off the beds; while, if the inner kunnât on the side used as a drawing-room is divided just at the central door and thrown back to the outer kunnât (like a bow window), the stove can be placed in the tent, and will thoroughly warm it, whilst in the daytime the bow makes a charming, light place for writing or working. All that is wanted to make it perfect, beyond unpicking the join at the door, is a small durri to fit the bow, and a roof to match the inner fly of the tent. This is made to lace on with eyelet holes. By having two strips of kunnât with perpendicular bamboos, the two bits of verandah on either side can be turned into safe places for the khitmutgâr’s table, as by a simple arrangement of tapes and ties no dog can get in. In the same way capital bathrooms can be made on the other side, by closing the verandah in with permanent tight-fitting kunnâts on the side nearest the sitting-room, and having curtains on poles and rings at the other. How some people can go on for years and years with the makeshift purdah — hung by a string — that jams its horizontal bamboo into the sides of the tent when you desire to pass, and invariably refuses to fill up the space when you desire it to do so, is a mystery. In fact, the first axiom for camp is not to do without comfort, if it does not entail discomfort by increasing the trouble. A comfortable tent is no heavier than an uncomfortable one, and furniture suited to camp life is generally lighter than ordinary furniture. Charming folding tables of bamboo and deodar can be made for Rs. 2 each, and folding scissors or lazy-jane clothes-racks are to be bought anywhere for a rupee. Add two iron hooks to hang them over the kunnât, and you are possessed of hat or clothes pegs. A plain wooden cover for the bath, with three screw-legs to pack inside, gives you an excellent hold-all for boots, &c., and a far better washhand-stand than the usual dreadful gallows construction, which leaves you in doubt whether to put your soap in your pocket or allow it to melt in the basin…

To begin, however, systematically. The mistress will find it convenient to have