January’s no time for avoiding food or drink. Who cares if you’re fat? It’s not like you have to take your clothes off for anything.

Also, the weather’s so depressing that hitting the cakes and ale is the only way to cope. Every cell in my body is crying out for comfort food and I’m not going to disappoint them with lettuce and limejuice. It’s time to hunker down in the kitchen with a few new recipes – and maybe an old cookbook or two. Like all good books this week’s contains a few suprises as the nineteenth century’s Nigella was not what she seemed.

This gorgeous copy is from the early thirties and irresistible at a fiver

Mrs Beeton was not a venerable old lady passing on her wisdom to young householders, she was a shrewd 21 year old who had realised that there was a gap in the market for a book to help housewives. She lived in a new semi in Pinner, commuted to the city every day and was part of a new and burgeoning middle class who couldn’t afford a platoon of servants. Like her curtain-twitching neighbours she still had to keep up the standards but she had a huge advantage over them when it came to efficient and practical cookery, cleaning and housekeeping: she was the eldest of 21 children and had picked up a fair amount of know-how whilst tending the brood.

So much so, in fact, that it took her four years to edit the material for The Book Of Household Management which appeared first in the form of countless magazine articles.  At 1,112 pages long the book ended up about half the size of the internet and was first published in 1861 to immediate acclaim. It’s one of a very select band of non-fiction works which has been in print ever since. Her publisher husband kept very quiet about her early death, at 28, and went on issuing reprints and revised editions.

Cookery books have always been popular with collectors and there are so many editions of Beeton they would make a collection of their own. As the full title suggests there was a lot more to the original book than cookery but this is the part that has survived, reheated for successive generations and spiced up so many times the original text is unrecognisable. There’s even a book about the book.

As you may expect the hardest edition to find is the first in its unassuming brown cloth binding. Book lore has it that as copies spent so much time in the kitchen they were besmirched with raw ingredients, worn out from daily consultation and eventually thrown away and replaced. Even copies from the turn of the century cost three figures, partly because posh people buy it for each other as wedding presents and this pushes up the prices. Dealers love Beetons.

This book that showed them how: the rare and valuable first edition from 1861.

Well, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I recommended piling into them. My advice would be to leave those expensive copies where they are and to spend your money on something a bit tastier. If you want to build up a collection of cook books go for a niche like vegetarianism or for far more recent and relevant books from the seventies or eighties.

I wrote recently about new ideas for collecting in Book and Magazine Collector and said then that seventies cook books are under valued. There’s still time to enter their competition with your own suggestion of a new collecting area – just follow the link above. 

 You can find out more about Mrs Beeton here.

Root around and you can find a copy of the first one illustrated here.

There are no copies of the first edition in the original binding for sale anywhere in the world but there are some rebinds here. 

Image for the first edition taken from The Collector’s Book of Books, Eric Quarle, Studio Vista, 1971.

My copy bought in 2009 for £5 from Wax Factor, Brighton.