Eliza Acton (1799-1859) is the first and most plagiarised of the Victorian cookery writers. Her Modern Cookery for Private Families was published in 1845: Elizabeth David has called it ‘the greatest cookery book in our language’. Her recipes represent the taste of pre-industrial England, which was changing as she wrote (eg Bird’s custard powder appeared in 1840). & p 10, 108, 120
Ali-Bab is the pseudonym of Henry Babinski, who wrote the important Gastronomie Pratique, subtitle Etudes culinaires, published in 1928. He says in this very well-written book of over 1100 recipes that he discovered food at 25, when working as a mining engineer in ‘les pays perdus’ - or rather, he began to invent recipes and study the basic principles of cooking, because the food he was offered was so bad. Some of the conclusions he came to are similar to what the nouvelle cuisine chefs believe today. Ali-Bab says ‘C’est l’ étude des associations végétales et végéto-animales qui constitue la base des créations gastronomiques.’ He calls it ‘la science du bon’. An American edition, in the 1970s, was cut by almost half. &p 10, 42-43
