The White Woman’s Burden: Ruling over the Victorian Kitchen

Abstract

Victorian cookbooks reveal the essentials of everyday life, betray attitudes and personalities, and reflect the evolution of the sense of national identity. As a gendered genre of minor writing, these volumes operate on the motherly or sisterly mode, prescribing the dos and don’ts of almost everything a young woman should know. Victorian values, convictions and prejudices suffuse the advice, recipes and illustrations contained in books of household management and cookbooks, contributing to the definition of a national set of references and preferences. By addressing a British as well as a colonial readership, the women authors of household manuals and cookbooks combined to naturalise and spread Victorian values and prejudices.