Nostalgia for handmade items, worry over adulterated food, a healthy market for cookbooks … We have a lot in common with the early Victorian era, at least with regard to broad trends toward domesticity, trends that were bundled and packaged by one Isabella Beeton, author of “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” and the Martha Stewart of her day.

Like Stewart, Beeton was not the straightforward matron she appeared to be. Lytton Strachey, author of “Eminent Victorians,” the original anti-Victorian handbook, imagined her to be “a small tub-like lady in black – rather severe of aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria.” This only reveals Strachey’s own prejudices. In fact, Beeton died at the age of 28 (in 1865), having composed her book hurriedly, during a short but in tense career in journalism. Nevertheless, her book was an elegant and forceful statement of emerging middle-class values, and is remembered even today, in Great Britain, as a kind of foundational text.

Kathryn Hughes’s “The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton” (Alfred A. Knopf, 480 pages, $29.95) might be a story about how Beeton created the modern middle-class world, were Ms. Hughes convinced that Beeton “created” anything at all. Her book, Ms. Hughes states,”is emphatically not a repository of one woman’s expertise and experience in the kitchen.” Rather, like most cookbooks of the period, it was a “cut-and-paste” affair.

What Beeton did contribute to her collection of other people’s recipes was a sense of system. “What excited her,” writes Mrs. Hughes, “was the challenge of bringing order to the chaos and provisionality of the middle-class household – at least on paper.” Middle class women, no longer expected to participate in earning the family’s living, as on a farm, yet not quite as free as the upper-class Lady with her many servants, needed someone to articulate their new sense of duty. Beeton made them feel like commanders of an army. “She liked making lists, tables, rules much more than she cared about Victoria sponge or the best way to get stains out of silk.”

The target audience for Beeton’s book was therefore “aspirational.” Beeton took recipes from cookbooks intended for professional classes and the upper classes, but she democratized these recipes, giving specific measurements, where cooks-of-the-trade would leave certain essentials unexplained. She also padded her recipes with background information on ingredients, for the cooking autodidact. Here we have the ancestor of “The Joy of Cooking.”

Ms. Hughes convincingly shows that Beeton was a conduit for developments in modern cooking. Yet the beginning of this relatively long book lingers on biographical speculation. Ms. Hughes makes much of gaps in the record. She is the first Beeton biographer to have unfettered freedom and access, yet her revelations are barely newsworthy. Beetons’ husband, her publisher Sam Beeton, probably gave her syphilis. Their courtship was troubled – Sam didn’t get along with his fiancee’s parents. Ms. Hughes’ most interesting biographical point is more synthetic: Beeton created her book, and her related magazine articles, because she was a bright person who married a publisher who needed such a book. And therefore isn’t it fitting that the Victorian produced this textbook of systems, almost as a byproduct of its own larger systems.

If the chapters on Beeton’s childhood are padded, the padding is at least absorbing. We learn that groomsmen, such as Beeton’s grandfather, often left the private stables of their employers and opened the first for-hire livery services, and many of their grandchildren could be found driving the descendent omnibuses and cabs of the late 19th century. In a related note, Ms. Hughes tells how the Beeton’s, during their courtship, developed a code-word for the hot-and-bothered emotion that could only express itself, in those days, in private cab rides: Isabella reports that the twilight of one evening makes her feel “cabified and nonsensical.” In another letter, Sam apologizes: “I am getting into Cabs again – am I not, darling?”

The best parts of this generally excellent book are Ms. Hughes “Interludes,” which address specific aspects of the “Book of Household Management” itself. An invaluable chapter explains the shifting mealtimes of the period, and hence the confusion between “dinner” and “supper” that persists in many parts of our country. Elsewhere Ms. Hughes calculates that Beeton’s Victorian recipes, full of iron, Vitamins B1 and B6, and zinc, were surprisingly healthy. They only lack Vitamin C. “In short,” she writes, “the Mrs. Beeton diet was healthier than the food consumed in the average British family today.”

Beeton wrote, “A nation which knows how to dine has learned the leading lesson of progress. It imposes both will and the skill to reduce to order and surround with idealisms and graces the more material conditions of human existence.” Frank and succinct, this is a remarkable summation of a Victorian mindset, and a good argument for Beeton’s own place in history.

blytal@nysun.com