The Unsung Hero of Modern Cooking

Miss Acton has long been set up as the saint to Mrs Beeton's sinner. Where Isabella Beeton (pictured) is Victorian in a stodgy, over-boiling the veg, old biddyish kind of way, Eliza Acton is an Austenish heroine: a stylish Regency spinster, a poet rather than a journalist, a committed cookery writer rather than an opportunistic hack. Elizabeth David, herself a patron saint of food writing, enshrined Acton's superiority to Beeton in a couple of important revisionist articles that appeared in the 1960s. Jane Grigson, also generally agreed to be on the side of the cookery angels, further hymned Acton's greatness as the true founder of modern recipe making. So, too, does Delia Smith in her foreword to this new biography. In short, anyone who wants to be in the kitchen cool gang knows that the name to drop is Acton's.