Didn't know until this week that she was twenty-five. Isabella Beeton, a thousand-odd pages of how to run a house, and she wasn't thirty. I'd just about learned to keep a sourdough alive at twenty-five.

Anyway. The reason her name sticks is the structure. Before her, a recipe was a paragraph of chat instructions, ingredients, somebody's aunt's opinion, all in one breath. Beeton gives you the list first, then the method, then how long and roughly what it costs. That's the shape every cookbook you own still uses. It ran in monthly parts from 1859 and came out as a book in 1861, sixty thousand copies in the first year, and the title page is this green-and-black engraving crowded with game birds and a stag and fish and cabbages, like the whole larder queued up to be announced.

And then she tells you to boil the macaroni for an hour and three quarters. An hour and three quarters! I read it twice. Now, in fairness to her, the pasta coming into Britain then was dried hard as kindling and nobody had told the English that it should fight back a bit, so she wasn't inventing the cruelty, she was reporting it. Still. Picture that pot. Picture the kitchen at four, the steam, the water going cloudy, somebody standing there for the best part of two hours over a pan of surrender. I've burnt plenty, but I've never cooked anything that long on purpose.