Douglas Richardson, Magna Carta Ancestry, 2nd Edition, Vol. Elizabeth Acton married Roger de Widdrington.1,2 Elizabeth Acton was born circa 1327 at England.1.Sure, you can dress it up and take it out to fancy dinners, substituting the humble ingredients with more pretentious ones, but then you’d be making The Publisher’s Pudding instead. (It’s clear from her choice of nomenclature what Acton thought of the disparities between author and publisher, even though she herself profited nicely from her writing. And talk about ‘honest cooking’! Simple stale bread, baked with eggs, milk, sugar and cinnamon, and (in my version) a bit of dried fruit thrown in. You might better recognize it as Bread and Butter Pudding, but I love Acton’s name for it. One of my favourite of her recipes has to be The Poor Author’s Pudding. But among food writers, at least, Acton is still remembered and praised for her pioneering style. Or it could simply be that Beeton’s book was more comprehensive and therefore more useful. This might be due to Beeton’s tragic personal life, which lent itself well to books and even film, in contrast to Acton’s quiet and very private one. Beeton went on to be glorified for her tome whilst Acton was largely forgotten. Source: Google BooksĪcton also wrote for magazines, including Charles Dickens’s Household Words, and yet history has been unkind to her. Cookbooks ever since have been modeled on her template – even that so-called bible of domesticity, Beeton’s Book of Household Management which, in 1861, eclipsed Acton’s book and, allegedly, stole freely from it. Measurements were precise, as were cooking times, and her recipes were reliable. Not only was her tone approachable, often funny, but she was the first to list ingredients separately from the narritive. In 1845 her Modern Cookery for the Private Family was published and revolutionized the way cookbooks were written. She set out to be a poet, and enjoyed modest success as such, until her publisher steered her towards the more popular (and therefore lucrative) channel of cookery writing. Britain has certainly spawned her fair share of them, and if we were to frog leap back in time across the domestic divas we might jump from Nigella Lawson to Delia Smith to Elizabeth David to Isabella Beeton and finally land on Eliza Acton. While Eliza Acton only enjoyed modest success as a poet, her food writing lives on.įemale food writers today owe huge debts of gratitude to those who came before us and paved the way.
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