My brother is an amazing cook and dinner at his house is always a culinary delight. As we both live in London we’ve shared many Christmas dinners with our respective family and friends. I remember one Christmas dinner when we were finishing our meal with a traditional Christmas pudding which he had made and I relayed a story of the first Christmas pudding I made.
It was in my first year in secondary school. I gave the pudding to my sister and her family as a Christmas gift but when she opened it, she found it had gone mouldy! My brother relayed a similar story about Mrs Beeton, who secured an order for her Christmas puddings from Fortnum and Mason – the wonderful British Food Emporium who for three centuries have been committed to bringing the world’s best food to Piccadilly. (In their own words) Now unfortunately for Mrs Beeton the Christmas puddings she made which were distributed in their Christmas hampers to their elite clients suffered a similar fate to mine – they were mouldy. Ooops!
This lead the conversation to Mrs Beeton, who perhaps was the Martha Stewart of her day. I originally thought she was a woman who had many years experience as a cook but the truth is she set out to develop her cooking ability at the age of 21 when she undertook a writing assignment to write a guide to all aspects of running a household in Victorian Britain, the book contained over 900 recipes and also gained the name ‘Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook’.
Mrs Beeton was an accomplished pianist, having studied music in Heidelberg, however she established her career in writing when she married her husband who was a publisher of books and magazines and she began to write articles on cooking and household management for his publications. The rest as they say is history.
I expect Mrs Beeton would have developed her career even further or indeed developed a new career as I’m sure you’ll agree she was a woman of many talents but sadly she died aged 28. Similarly to Mrs Beeton we all have the potential to develop new skills that will allow us to perform in the career of our choice and in line with the demands of the role, I also believe we all have the capacity and capability to have a number of careers in our lifetime and the proof of that I guess in the pudding – or maybe not!
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