MB Civic

A newly released archive in Edinburgh reveals the fiery side of a Victorian domestic goddess who made a fortune for her publisher.
Elizabeth Grice reports

She didn’t have Nigella’s sexual frisson, or Delia’s uncomplicated kitchen manners, but Maria Rundell, the 19th century’s cookbook publishing sensation, could have given both contemporary cooks a run for their money.

Rundell’s book ran to 65 editions. It included everything from calves’ feet broth to hosting the perfect dinner party

At 61, she was too old to act the pouting goddess to sell her New System of Domestic Cookery but sell it did, in vast numbers, as a lifeline to cash-strapped middle-class English households that were desperate to keep up appearances but were having trouble with the staff.

Compared with the illustrious Eliza Acton – who could write better – and the ubiquitous Mrs Beeton – who died young – Mrs Rundell has unfairly slipped from view.

In her day she was more celebrated, more commercially successful and certainly more self-opinionated than either of them. Her book ran to 65 editions between 1805 and 1841, by which time it had sold half a million copies, wowed America and been translated into German.

Nothing was beyond her remit – from how to make calves’ feet broth, to how to combine dinner party guests and feed them within a budget. And she could teach modern authors a thing or two about handling lazy publishers and sloppy proof-readers.

“He has made some dreadful blunders,” she complained about one editor, “such as directing rice pudding seeds to be kept in a keg of lime water, which latter was mentioned to preserve eggs in.”

She takes her publisher to task for allowing “strange expressions” to creep into a new edition. “In sober English,” my good friend, she chastises, “the 2nd edition of DC has been miserably prepared for the press.”

Her battles with her publisher, John Murray, are part of a lively, argumentative archive that goes on public display this week at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

The John Murray Archive, compiled by seven generations of Murrays, includes papers relating to Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Darwin and Jane Austen, as well as from the feisty woman on whose cookbook profits his publishing empire was built.

Maria Eliza Rundell (1745-1828) was the widow of a surgeon from Bath. She began collecting recipes and household tips for her three daughters and sent them to an old friend of the family, John Murray, as a favour, expecting no remuneration.

Murray instantly saw the potential: it was 60 years since Hannah Glasse (The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy) had appealed to the hard-pressed bourgeoisie and 40 years since Elizabeth Raffald (The Experienced English Housekeeper) produced her tempting tarts, cakes and pies.

But neither of those floury women offered what Mrs Rundell also had in abundance – medicinal remedies which, if efficacious, could spare women the embarrassment of submitting to a male doctor.

She had advice on everything from making a paste for chapped hands (lard, rose water, egg yolk and honey) to curing baldness, plus some sententious reflections on the proper upbringing of young ladies who should beware “the delusive scenes of pleasure presented by the theatre and other dissipations”.

It was the role of a wife to create a well-regulated home that was “the sweet refuge of a husband fatigued by intercourse with a jarring world”. In a section reflecting that “the passion for dinner parties may almost be termed a mania”, she suggested ways of getting a lively mix of guests, as well as how to feed them.

But it was her instructions on how to cook well according to “principles of economy” that made the book one of Murray’s most valuable properties. The lease on his premises at 50 Albermarle Street, Mayfair, was funded from it.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes A New System of Domestic Cookery, known only to be “by a Lady”, as “the earliest manual of household management with any pretentions to completeness”.

But in The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson is not quite so gushing. “It did not include many novel features,” he sniffs, “although it did have one of the first English recipes for tomato sauce.”

By 1807, Mrs Rundell was losing patience with Murray and their correspondence became increasingly quarrelsome. In 1814 relations broke down: she accused him of neglecting the book and hindering its sale.

In 1821, she offered an improved version to a rival, Longmans. Injunctions flew back and forth until the Lord Chancellor intervened, ordering them to settle privately. In February 1823, a legal agreement records that Murray paid her off, to the tune of “two thousand and one hundred pounds of good and lawful money”.

After Mrs Rundell’s death in 1828, aged 83, her authorship was revealed – and Murray continued to delight in exposing her cussedness.

When the book underwent one of its many changes and was bulked out with Anglo-Indian recipes in 1841 by Emma Roberts, it still carried Mrs Rundell’s advertisement explaining that she would “receive no emolument” for it.

Murray couldn’t resist adding the sardonic footnote: “The authoress, Mrs Rundell, sister of the eminent jeweller on Ludgate-hill, was afterward induced to accept the sum of Two Thousand Guineas from the Publisher.” Touché.

Mrs Rundell was a long, peripatetic and merry widow, who seems to have thrived on their spats. She died in Lausanne, Switzerland, leaving a handsome £9,000 in her will. Her book remained in print into the 1880s, bravely but hopelessly arguing that the female mind is not constrained by domesticity.

Times had changed.

EXTRACT

From Maria Rundell’s ‘A New System of Domestic Cookery’

Miscellaneous Observations for the use of the Mistress of a Family

“In every rank, those deserve the greatest praise, who best acquit themselves of the duties which their station requires. Indeed, this line of conduct is a matter of necessity, if we would maintain the dignity of our character as rational beings.

“In the variety of female acquirements, though domestic occupations stand not so high in esteem as they formerly did, yet, when neglected, they produce much human misery. To attend to the nursing, and at least early instruction of children, and rear a healthy progeny in the ways of piety and usefulness: to preside over the family, and regulate the income allotted to its maintenance: to make home the sweet refuge of a husband fatigued by intercourse with a jarring world: to be his enlightened companion and the chosen friend of his heart: these, these, are woman’s duties!

And delightful ones they are, if haply she be married to a man whose soul can duly estimate her worth. Of such a woman, one may truly say, “Happy the man who can call her his wife. Blessed are the children who call her mother.”

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