INTRODUCTION
As for Victorian women, fictional ladies may have simpered and had frequent recourse to the smelling salts, but real life ladies could be eminently practical. Isabella Beeton sat up till midnight in her husband’s office editing her magazine; Florence Nightingale rode with Soyer round the battlefields of Sebastopol planning their new hospital kitchens, and Eliza Acton campaigned vigorously to improve the quality of food as an essential element of good health.
As a result Victorian cooking is not nearly as complex as one might imagine. Of course, there are some long, involved and labour-intensive recipes, especially from the great chefs who had endless resources of both food and manpower. But many of the dishes to be found, for example, in the works of Mrs Beeton, Eliza Acton, Dr Kitchiner or Fannie Farmer are surprisingly simple, relying on long slow cooking to achieve their really excellent flavour.

FARMING AND KITCHEN GARDENS
On a typical farm the diet often did not extend much beyond cabbages, beans and potatoes, to accompany the regular joints of bacon, beef and occasionally mutton; apples, pears and soft fruit in season and some herbs for flavour and medicinal use. Of course the farmer’s wife had also to make her own butter and cheese, look after her poultry, and bake her bread, apart from preserving her fruits, cleaning her house, making and mending most of her family’s clothes and, frequently, teaching her children, so she hardly had much time left to devote to raising exotic blooms.
In the gardens of the great estates, however, not only were all the standard fruits and vegetables grown for the use of the family, but fig, vines and melon houses were also built. Peach, plum and nectarine trees lined the protected walls of kitchen gardens, and orchids and tropical lilies were raised in heated and carefully ventilated greenhouses. Sometimes as many as fifty gardeners were employed on these estates and they produced a range of fruit and vegetables scarcely equalled until the arrival of refrigerated air-freight.