RECIPES for SUCCESS

From Eliza Acton to Elizabeth David, some of the UK’s most influential food heroes have made their home in Sussex

- Louise Peskett

This has been a good year for home cooking. Thanks to the lockdown in spring and the enduring popularity of TV shows such as Bake Off and MasterChef, many of us have been dusting down our recipes and rediscovering the joys of homecooked fare like never before.

In Sussex creativity in the kitchen is nothing new. Through history our county has been home to a number of inventive women whose ideas about food have shaped the nation’s eating habits.

Take Eliza Acton, for example. Born in Battle in 1799, this innovative woman gave us the modern cookery book as we know it. Her Modern Cookery for Private Families, published in 1845, might not have been the only collection of recipes in the English language but it was the first to separate the ingredients and cooking times from the method, an idea so ingenious that it set the template for every cookbook that followed.

Acton’s book was also novel in that it targeted the amateur home cook rather than professionals. The burgeoning Victorian middle class, who could afford to put on a lavish dinner party but not the staff to cook it, lapped up Acton’s well-illustrated instructions for simple, hearty fare such as salmon pudding, creambaked sole, and “good mutton pie”. Modern Cookery gave us the first recorded recipes for mulligatawny soup and chutney, and was the first to feature spaghetti and Brussels sprouts (though not in the same dish).

Delia Smith once called Acton, who had a side career as a poet, “the best writer of recipes in the English language”.