Mrs Beeton and Mrs Marshall

Book excerpt: The name Mrs Beeton has endured for well over a century, synonymous with all things reassuringly culinary, while her contemporary Agnes Bertha Marshall remains somewhat of an enigma. Both Isabella Beeton and Agnes Bertha Marshall lived within a short distance of each other in Pinner, worked in London, wrote about, and shared a passion for food, all just a couple of decades apart. While Isabella Beeton compiled one successful book of collected recipes, Agnes built a cookery empire, including a training school, the development of innovative kitchen equipment, a range of cooking ingredients, an employment agency and a successful weekly journal, as well as writing three incredibly popular recipe books. Mrs Beeton and Mrs Marshall: A Tale Of Two Victorian Cooks intrudes on the private lives of both these women, whose careers eclipsed two very different halves of the Victorian era. While there are similarities between the two, their narratives explore class and background, highlight the social and economic contrasts of the nineteenth century, the ascension of the cookery industry in general and the burgeoning power of suffragism.