"The Present Time is Eminently Scientific": The Science of Cookery in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

In his 1869 household manual, The Reason Why: Domestic Science, editor R.K. Philp determined to provide “illustrations of scientific principles which bear upon the Housewife's duties; so that she may not only know that she should do a thing, but WHY she should do it, and, knowing why, perform it all the more effectively and willingly.”1 This article looks more closely at the nineteenth-century British middle classes' use of rationalized, scientific knowledge in their daily lives, particularly in their attitudes toward food and cookery. This interest in analysis and fact had a long history. The middling sorts had been inculcating literacy, numeracy, and rationality among their children since the early modern period,2 and this educational focus continued with the nineteenth-century middle classes, as business and industrial success demanded order, reason, and scientific knowledge. Charles Babbage, for one, argued that science was crucial to the advancement of manufactures, and he opined that manufacturers' sons would be among the next generation's greatest scientists.3 Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams even place the “invention of science” in the Age of Revolutions between about 1760 and 1848. An emergent professional middle class drew authority from intellectual, political and industrial upheavals that celebrated the same values of “genius, free enquiry, free exchange of ideas, objectivity, [and] disinterestedness” that defined science.4 One of the strongest cultural streams in this age was that of analysis and rationalization;5 it favored the reductive language of numbers and facts.