Designing information for the kitchen

Eliza Acton, Modern cookery, for private families, reduced to a system of easy practice in a series of carefully tested receipts, in which the principles of Baron Liebig and other eminent writers have been as much as possible applied and explained. (1845, London: Longman Brown Green and Longman). These illustrations are from the ‘newly revised & much enlarged edition’ of 1875, London: Longmans, Green, and Co; printed by Woodfall & Kinder, Milford Lane, Strand

Cookery books may of course be read at leisure rather than at work like technical manuals, so reading recipes is not always reading for action. But it helps most readers if they are set out in a way that supports the work of planning and implementing.

In the 1960s Elizabeth David, doyenne of English cookery and food writers, described Eliza Acton as ‘the first English writer to use the concise and uniform system of setting recipes out which was later adopted by Mrs Beeton’. She praised Acton’s ‘admirable system of setting out the ingredients, the quantities, and the timing of the recipes in a uniform and concise manner’. These opinions were later endorsed by Elizabeth Ray, for whom Acton’s innovation was ‘her original plan of listing, very exactly, the ingredients, the time taken, and possible pitfalls for the inexperienced cook.’ Wikipedia has since echoed those insights everywhere.

The source was Eliza Acton’s Modern cookery for private families of 1845. In her preface to its 1855 edition she observed that of the many works which she had consulted, none contained ‘directions so practical, clear, and simple, as to be at once understood, and easily followed, by those who had no previous knowledge of the subject’. To answer this need she had taken care to supply ‘such thoroughly explicit and minute instructions as may, we trust, be readily comprehended and carried out by any class of learners’. Her book also has a good index: see for example its tour d’horizon of puddings.

Acton dedicated her book ‘to the young housekeepers of England’, meaning those housewives who managed the middle-class domestic economy. She corrected the ‘popular error’ that good cookery is ‘beyond the reach of those who are not affluent’. The abundant kitchens of the wealthy were not her concern, but it was ‘of the utmost consequence that the food which is served at the more simply supplied tables of the middle classes should all be well and skilfully prepared’.

And she confessed to being hurt by ‘the unscrupulous manner in which large portions of my volume have been appropriated by contemporary authors, without the slightest acknowledgement ... I am suffering at present too severe a penalty for the over-exertion entailed on me by the plan which I adopted for the work, longer to see with perfect composure strangers coolly taking the credit and the profits of my toil’.