Eliza Acton, the Struggling Poet Who Reinvented Cookbooks

The first modern cookbook was penned not by a chef, but by a poet. Before Eliza Acton published Modern Cookery for Private Families in 1845, she was known for crafting lush, sentimental verse. Her background is apparent in her culinary writing. In her recipe for “A Good Sponge Cake,” she instructs readers to: “Rasp on some lumps of well-refined sugar the rind of a fine sound lemon, and scrape off the part that has imbibed the essence.”

Acton’s first cookbook was praised for its striking prose when it was released in Britain. Nearly two centuries later, her impact extends far beyond her elegant turns of phrase. As one of the first authors to publish well-organized recipes aimed at the average home cook, she helped invent the cookbook as we know it today.

1. Early Cookbooks
2. Enter Eliza
3. Creating a New Kind of Cookbook
4. Beaten by Beeton
5. Eliza Acton’s Legacy

Early Cookbooks

Many cookbooks predate Modern Cookery, but they hardly resemble the volumes you keep on your shelves at home. The Yale Culinary Tablets date back as far as 1700 BCE, and they contain the earliest recorded culinary recipe ever discovered—though the term recipe may be a stretch. The Ancient Mesopotamian clay slabs are inscribed with ingredients and some instructions for what to do with them. Experts have interpreted these lists as the basis for various dishes (mostly different types of stew). They weren’t the polished recipes familiar to modern home cooks; they were likely written for royalty. 

Cookbooks written centuries later weren’t much clearer. The recipe for “Wine Sauce for Truffles” from the famous Roman recipe book De re coquinaria from the 5th century simply lists “pepper, lovage, coriander, rue, broth, honey, and a little bit oil,” with “a little bit” being the closest readers got to any sort of measurement. The Forme of Cury, which was written by the chefs of King Richard II around 1390, was only slightly more descriptive. A recipe for saffron rice instructs cooks to soak rice well in a “good broth,” leaving the definition of terms like well and good up to the cook’s interpretation.

Unclear writing aside, early recipes weren’t meant to be accessible. For centuries, cookbooks were limited to the grandest palaces, and when they weren’t getting used in royal kitchens, they were flaunted as status symbols. This is why early cookbooks contain instructions for cooking luxury items like peacock, flamingo, and other dishes that were missing from average households. It seems that the writers of these cookbooks assumed that their chef-readers already knew how to cook the dishes, so a lack of instruction wasn’t considered a problem. The books were more like memory aids for royal chefs. For non-royal upper classes, they were sort of like a window into what was en vogue with the highest echelons of society. 

Enter Eliza

Opaque recipes written for the wealthy were still the status quo when Eliza Acton was born in Sussex, England, in 1799. She was exposed to the culinary sciences at a young age, growing up in a house connected to the brewery where her father worked. But her path to writing about food professionally wasn’t straightforward. She ran boarding schools for girls before getting serious about poetry in her twenties. In 1826, she made her literary debut with a collection titled Poems. Huh. Poetic. Her examinations of themes like unrequited love were rich with images of flowers, moonlight, and other usual suspects of the medium. 

As for whether her poetry was any good, authors Mary Aylett and Olive Ordish shared their opinions on it in their 1965 culinary history book First Catch Your Hare. They described her work as “romantic, derivative and often banal. The command of the cliche which she displays in her verse, is, happily not repeated in her works on gastronomy.”

Acton’s motivation for pivoting to recipes is debated among experts. According to one story, her publisher encouraged her to write a book on cookery, which was a popular topic at the time. She published her first cookbook, Modern Cookery for Private Families, in 1845. Its full original title was Modern Cookery, In All Its Branches: Reduced to a System of Easy Practice, for the Use of Private Families. In a Series of Practical Receipts, Which Have Been Strictly Tested, And are Given with the Most Minute exactness. 

Unlike recipe compendiums of the past, Acton’s book wasn’t written with extravagant feasts in mind. It catered to middle-class home cooks making meals for their families, not private chefs cooking for their wealthy employers. Instead of feathered peacock, for example, she included a recipe for “common chicken pie.”

Creating a New Kind of Cookbook

Though food preparation was a hot subject in the mid-19th century, no one approached it like Acton did. Her cookbook was the first to list ingredients with precise measurements separate from the body of the recipe. She tested her recipes thoroughly and gave accurate cooking times for each dish. 

Modern Cookery didn’t assume its readers knew their way around the kitchen; instead, it provided a roadmap even amateurs could follow. Photography wasn’t widely used in publishing at this time; the first book illustrated with photographs was published just two years prior in 1843. In its place, Acton used clear line drawings to help cooks with tasks like selecting meat at the butcher. And on top of that, her writing was as enjoyable to read as her dishes were to eat.

Her recipes were conceived for humble kitchens, but that didn’t make them pedestrian. Later editions of the book featured many dishes that would have been considered exotic in Victorian England, such as curries and chutneys. The book also included the first English-language usage of spaghetti in print. In a list of cooking terms, she spelled it “sparghetti” and described the pasta as “Naples vermicelli.” But most recipes in the book, like her mincemeat pudding and “Fashionable Apple Dumplings,” are classic British fare.

Beaten by Beeton

Acton’s elegant, approachable cookbook was a hit with the British public. By 1853, 13 editions had been printed. So why isn’t she as well-known today as some of her peers? Her contributions to culinary history largely have been overshadowed by Isabella Beeton—the British author whose cookbook sales outpaced Acton’s in the 1860s.

Though Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management became the more popular title, it owes much of its legacy to Modern Cookery. Beeton even included many of Acton’s recipes in her book without giving her credit. Despite rampant plagiarism, Beeton remains the more celebrated of the two Victorian, female cookbook authors over a century-and-a-half later. 

Eliza Acton was never able to replicate the success of Modern Cookery for Private Families. She published The English Bread-Book for Domestic Use in 1857, which took a more serious and scholarly look at the culinary arts than her previous work. Readers were less interested in the shady adulteration practices of flour millers at the time than they were in easy-to-follow recipes, and the book wasn’t reprinted until well after her death. Acton died in 1859 at age 59.

Eliza Acton’s Legacy

Many of the practices pioneered by Eliza Acton are standard in cookbooks today. Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child became two of the most iconic cookbooks of the 20th century due in part to their accessible recipes aimed at the humble home cook. Writing recipes with measurements, cook times, and separate ingredients lists is also the norm for cookbooks today.

In recent years, there has been a push to give Eliza Acton the recognition she’s due. British author and historian Annabel Abbs published a novel based on Acton’s life in 2021 which was optioned as a miniseries by CBS. In 2022, Abbs launched a campaign to fund the restoration of her grave at Hampstead Parish Church in north London, which has fallen into disrepair. If her advocates have their way, Eliza Acton’s name will one day be as recognizable as Isabella Beeton or Julia Child. Until then, her legacy lives on every time a cook reads a recipe’s ingredients list and realizes they’re out of garlic.

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