Food for Thought by Annie Gray

Author:Annie Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

ELIZA ACTON

1799–1859

Eliza Acton worked as a teacher and poet before writing, at the behest of her publishers, ‘something practical’. She published Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845 and it remains one of the finest recipe books published in English. It was immensely influential, for it had a clarity and exactness rare in books of the time. She followed this up with the English Bread Book, which was part recipe book, part polemic, together with a detailed examination of the conditions under which bread was produced.

This extract explains her approach in typically down-to-earth prose. Later she goes on to explore the insanitary and miserable conditions of Victorian bakers, who often worked throughout the night in dank, rat-infested cellars, locked in by unscrupulous master-bakers. Consumers refused to pay more for their bread, and corners were inevitably cut. Analysis of bread in London in the 1850s revealed that not one loaf was unadulterated, be it with alum, plaster of Paris or simply inferior ground grains.

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