Food & drink · People & lives

She set out to publish poems and ended up inventing the recipe

Before Eliza Acton, an English recipe was a paragraph of prose you had to reverse-engineer while cooking. She was the one who put the ingredients in a list at the top and told you how long the thing should take innovations so total that they now look like they were always there. Then the woman who copied her outsold her: Mrs Beeton lifted recipes from Acton's book, and Acton's own went out of print in 1918 and wasn't fully reissued until 1994. Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and Delia Smith all traced their debt back to her.

Acton's 1845 book contains the first recipes in English for Brussels sprouts and for spaghetti and the first time the words "Christmas pudding" were attached to a recipe for the dish.

Read the whole of Eliza Acton on Wikipedia

The article comes from Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The introduction above is our own.