This is not the Woman of the Day post but I thought you might like to know that OTD in 1861, Isabella Beeton’s The Book of Household Management was published. Isabella, born in 1836 in Marylebone, started working on her book in monthly instalments at the age of 21. Her aim was to help others to tackle the many demands of domestic management but she confessed she’d never have started it if she’d realised it would be so much work. Her half-sister Lucy Smiles said, “No recipe went into the book without a successful trial, and the home at Pinner was the scene of many experiments and some failures. I remember Isabella coming out of the kitchen one day, 'This won't do at all,' she said, and gave me the cake that had turned out like a biscuit. I thought it very good. It had currants in it.” Some of her cookery tips were so odd that it would be a brave person who would swear by them these days. Mrs Beeton, like many others at the time, was sceptical about unfamiliar food. Mangoes allegedly tasted like turpentine, lobsters were indigestible, garlic was offensive, potatoes were "suspicious; a great many are narcotic, and many are deleterious". Carrots should be boiled for two hours but parsnips for only 90 minutes. Cheese could only be consumed by sedentary people, and tomatoes were either good or bad, depending on which bit of the book you read. Pasta, she declared with conviction, should be boiled for one and three-quarter hours. I like to think that Mrs Beeton would have thoroughly approved when avocados were first introduced to the UK in 1968. They were marketed as avocado pears and people served them as a dessert. With custard. Even so, Isabella Beeton qualifies as the country’s first domestic goddess and as an accidental social diarist for putting together the first comprehensive encyclopaedia of household management (her cleaning tips used natural products well ahead of their time) and providing us with a fascinating glimpse into Victorian life.