Eliza Acton

17^th April 1799 — 13^th February 1859

Elizabeth Acton was born on the 17^th April 1799 in Battle, Sussex, the eldest of the five children of Elizabeth Mercer and John Acton, a brewer. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Ipswich in Suffolk, where she was raised.

At the age of seventeen, she and a friend opened a school for girls in Claydon, near Ipswich which remained open for four years. Her health was always precarious, and it seems that at the school's closure she travelled to France. She may have travelled for her health and there may have been an unhappy love-affair when she was in France (which is hinted at in her poetry).

By 1826 she returned to England, moving to Tonbridge in Kent (No. 1 Bordyke [now The Priory]), where she lived with her siblings and her mother (who took in lodgers to earn an income). Though no image of Eliza Acton is known, the house where she lived in Tonbridge still stands and is shown in the image above. In 1826 she published her volume of poetry, entitled Poems. There followed two volumes of long poems: The Chronicles of Castel Framlingham (1838) and The Voice of the North (1842). Her first book of poems enjoyed some small success. It is said that around 1835 she went to her publisher (Longmans) to propose a second volume of poems, but he advised her to write a cookery book to increase her income (cookery books were becoming very popular at the time).

She seems to have spent the next ten years testing and improving on various recipes, both traditional and modern. It may have been that her servant Ann Kirby tested many of the recipes (by 1841 she was living alone in the house in Tonbridge), but from the nature of her writings, Eliza must have cooked many of them herself.

The family moved from heir house in Hatch End in the autumn of 1861. In December of the same year their son was taken ill with scarlet fever while on holiday in Brighton. He died on New Year's Eve. Mrs. Beeton gave birth to two other sons, Orchart (on New Year's Eve in 1863) and Mayson Moss (in January 1865). However, it was the day after the birth of her fourth child, in January 1865, Isabella contracted puerperal fever. She died a week later, aged 28. Her widower lived for another twelve years and died of tuberculosis in June 1877 at the age of 46.

Like many literary women of the age, she also wrote for periodicals. Namely, The Ladies Companion and Charles Dickens' Household Words (she actually named a recipe for one of his characters from Martin Chuzzelwit — 'Ruth Pinch's Beefsteak Puddings, á la Dickens' and wrote to tell him so in 1845).

In 1845 her cookery book, Modern Cookery for Private Families was published by Longmans and she became the first modern cookery author. Through its lifetime, the book sold over 60 000 copies over 40 editions, with the final edition being published in 1914 (facsimile editions are still available). The book brought Eliza Acton £900 (about £70 000 in today's money) and she used the income to move to London, to Hampsted in fact.

In 1857 she published her final book The English Bread Book which covered the history and practice of bread making.

Eliza Acton died on the 13^th February 1859 and is buried in Hampstead, London.

Eliza Acton was a pioneer in cookery writing and developed a new style, intended for ordinary people, that we still use today. Her writing is full of humour and she presents a mix of traditional, homely and more adventurous dishes that would please a broad audience. Though many of the dishes might seem old fashioned to us, others are truly traditional and some appear modern even today. What is more her recipes work. This is why so many cooks and chefs reference her work (or simply adapt it) even today.

This is probably why the woman who came to symbolize Victorian cookery, Mrs Beeton includes 150 of Eliza Acton's recipes wholesale in her own Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

In many ways, Eliza Acton is the Victorian period's ignored culinary heroine. Which may be why a large number of contemporary cookery writers have turned to Elizabeth Acton's recipes for inspiration. Staring with Mrs Beeton, Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Delia Smith, to name but a few.

Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families

Though its full title of the volume was: 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 the volume quickly became know more succinctly as: Modern Cookery, For Private Families. This was the first time that a recipe book of tested recipes had been written specifically for the ordinary household, rather than being written by chefs for other chefs. It also had the innovation of separating the list of ingredients from the actual cooking technique (something that recipes do even today). She also added exact measures and timings, ensuring that if you followed her instructions the dish would turn out every-time.

The book comprises 643 pages and 1021 recipes divided into 23 chapters. It took over 10 years for all the recipes to be collated, and tested before the volume was published in 1845.

Eliza Acton's recipes were so simple and so well presented that, almost as soon as the first volume came out, plagiarism became a major concern (she was dead by the time Mrs Beeton copies her recipes for her own volume), but even by the 1858 edition of her book she wrote:.

At the risk of appearing extremely egotistic, I have appended 'Author's Receipt' and 'Author's Original Receipt' to many of the contents of the following pages: but I have done it solely in self-defence, in consequence of the unscrupulous manner in which large portions of my volume have been appropriated by contemporary authors, without the slightest acknowledgement of the source from which they have been derived?. 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.

A large number of Eliza Acton's recipes are true classics and cannot be bettered, even today. Indeed, her recipe for Eliza Acton's Christmas Pudding is claimed by many chefs and cookery writers to be beyond compare and is the recipe on which they base their own Christmas puddings.

As well as being an excellent writer, with a sly and rather wry humour, Eliza Acton actually tested and tried the recipes in her book. But, more than that she was also interested in the science and the techniques of cookery. Her book is peppered with references to the best sources for ingredients and utensils (as well as the best utensils to use). She also read widely about the science of cookery and refers frequently to the best authorities of her age. Not only was she the first domestic goddess, she was also the prototype molecular gastronomer.

Eliza Acton's humour is often buried in her writing. A classic example lies in three pudding recipes that she gives (these are spread across two chapters). We have the The Publisher's Pudding (which 'can scarcely be made too rich'), The Printer's Pudding and The Poor Author's Pudding. Here we see the publishing industry and the relative positions of publisher, printer and author are given by the lavishness of the dessert. The publisher's pudding is rich and full of fruit and is the richest of the three in composition, the printers' pudding is still rich, but a little more frugal than the publisher's pudding, whilst the 'poor author's pudding' is the most meagre of the three, being a very frugal version of a bread and butter pudding with a single layer of buttered bread baked in a thin custard base..

It's this site's aim to provide the original text of all the Eliza Acton recipes and to provide the modern cook with a current redaction of the recipe. You can also find more recipes from the Victorian period in this site's Victorian recipes page.