First of all - you’ve written a biography of Mrs Beeton. Why choose her?

When I was 28 I was doing a PhD thesis and I came across her and the fact that she’d died at the age I was (which seemed extraordinary); and then the other thing was that she’d been a women’s magazine journalist – her husband published The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, and Queen, part of Harpers & Queen – and for three very unhappy years I had been a women’s magazine journalist. I had often been bullied into writing the cookery copy when I knew absolutely bugger all about cookery, and I would just cobble it together from Delia Smith and stuff like that – and that’s exactly what Mrs Beeton does! She knew nothing about cookery, but their cookery writer had gone AWOL, and so it was kind of "Oh, you’ll have to do it…"; so she just got six other books… And so in that very narcissistic way I was so intrigued, I thought, "Yes, I know, I could see how that would happen…" I felt people who haven’t worked in that context would think, "That’s plagiarism!", the idea that cookery recipes in particular have a very unique provenance – and of course they don’t, they are fragments of culture that get passed around and added to, either orally or written.
At that point I tried to find out whether anybody had ever written about her, and I found out that nobody had because the family kept all the records and weren’t going to let anybody see them – they were very, very protective. So I had to wait about ten years until the last descendent died, and then the material started to become available in slightly odd ways – bits of things were sold off at Sotheby’s… And I started acquiring it – all anonymously then – and then it became possible to do it.

With many of our icons we find that people have always heard of them, but don’t really know much about them, or have important misconceptions – is that the case with Mrs Beeton and her Book Of Household Management?

In the last week of 1932 her portrait went on display in the National Portrait Gallery, and if you look at the press coverage for that week, lots and lots of the major national newspapers had assumed that she was actually a made-up person – as Betty Crocker is in the States. So a lot of the interest has always been about "Is she real or not?". And even when I was writing the book, people would say, "Sorry, I’m not quite sure – was she a real person?"
The other thing people would say was, "I’m really sorry, I’m not quite sure – was she Edwardian?" Or "That was the 1930s, wasn’t it?" And I was intrigued – we live in a time when these sort of images become so detached from their point of reference, the idea that this image of Mrs Beeton could sort of float around in our culture unanchored, vaguely something to do with Britishness, but not – and did she actually exist? I thought that was fascinating.
And people always assumed she’s older, that she’s 55. They often think she must have run a house (for 30 years), but they’re never quite sure whether she ran the house as the lady of the house or as the cook, they’re never quite sure which side of the green baize door she is. And of course the reality is that she was a girl from a lower middle class background, and she lived in a brand new semi in Pinner, and there was no green baize door, there was one maid-of-all-work; so in fact she was neither very experienced – she started writing the book when she was 21, cobbled it together from other books going back to the Restoration (there’s 2000 recipes and I’ve only found one that you can say hand-on-heart is originally hers). People imagined that all that expertise was literally embodied in her, and that her body would therefore be that of a 55-year-old woman who was, you know, almost swollen with the knowledge, incorporating the knowledge. The idea that it’s a slip of a girl comes as a bit of a shock.

How has this book survived? And why?

When people talk about The Book Of Household Management, often they’re very confused because first of all it wasn’t a book to start off with, it was a partwork, it came out in 24 parts. So what we think of as this mammoth material object actually wasn’t, it was these little buff instalments. It came out in book form in 1861, and almost from the get-go was constantly modified, spun off into various different forms – so there was immediately a cheaper version with just the recipes, with a few illustrations, costing two-and-six; and then there was the sort of servants’ version, with no pictures, that cost sixpence. So what we think of as The Book Of Household Management is incredibly protean, unstable.
Just 18 months after publishing it they immediately did a new version with different illustrations. By 1866, the year after her death, there’s an entirely new version written by her husband and his mistress, with a new chapter on ice creams, for instance. And there’s a new edition in… I could go on and on. It’s constantly being updated. And also it’s always entirely right for the moment, so by the time we get to the Edwardian period it’s this huge swollen monument of fancy Edwardian recipes, telling you how to fold your table-napkin in the shape of a deckchair… And then by the 1930s it is all quite belt-tightening; so whatever you need at the moment Mrs Beeton provides.
But what’s interesting is, her name becomes more and more prominent; so what started as The Book Of Household Management, by 1866 is Mrs Beeton’s Book Of Household Management, even though Mrs Beeton herself is six feet under. There’s a paradox that as the book becomes less and less anything to do with her, her brand becomes more and more fixed, and more and more the brand around which you sell the book. And that’s why in 1932 people are so shocked to discover that she did actually exist.
So it’s this odd mixture of a very protean book and a dead author whose brand nonetheless grows and grows, becomes the one fixed point in this very, very fluid book. And they go on producing her original Preface 30 years after she’s died without making clear that she’s dead…

Where should we look for equivalents today – celebrity chefs? Aspirational lifestyle magazines?

Virtually nobody read the book all the way through, it’s always used for dipping in to. So its heartland is 2000 very good recipes that work. So you think, "I want to cook beef tonight," there’s a very good index, you go to "Beef"…
And then there are these dollops of aspirational text which are kind of sweeteners, which tell you how to make sure your butler is not watering down the wine, make sure your second housemaid isn’t getting saucy – and neither Mrs Beeton nor her readers are ever going to be bothered by their problems.
So it’s a clever mixture of a core text that really delivers, with all this fancy stuff round the outside. So I suspect the heartland is Delia Smith, and some of the outer circle of material is a bit more Nigella, it’s a bit more "If I cook this recipe I might live in Notting Hill…" So it’s a kind of grafting of the two. But basically the recipes have got to work, otherwise the product is never going to sell.

And finally – what is your icon of England?

I’d say the original unrevised Cranmer prayer-book. I don’t practise any religion now, but just because I grew up with it, every Sunday. I know this is a very hackneyed answer, but the cadences of the languages, the Benedicite, everyone praising the Lord and this fabulous string of Old Testament names all praising the Lord… And I used to just love it, I just loved the poetry.