If Julie and Julia lived in the 1800s! We are so spoiled now with all things food from the weekly drop of new fabulous cookbooks to Eater Newsletters. It takes effort to remember this abundance is very recent. Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen transports us to a time when people knew very little about preparing delicious food with spices. If you are a foodie this book is for you! A fun gift idea would be to pair with a favorite cookbook and some spices.

For as far as I got, there were two points of view in the book. One was Miss Eliza, a self-important and pretentious woman who aspires to be a poet but gets turned into the channel of writing a "cookery book" instead by the publisher with whom she's trying to get her poems published. I didn't like her character voice.

Then there's Ann, who is just woeful. In her intro chapter, we find that her mother is insane enough that she regularly takes off her clothes and runs naked through the village. Ann's father lost a leg in the war, is unemployed and an alcoholic. The family has almost nothing to eat. And their dog is old. Poor Ann is in a bad way. I liked Ann's voice but felt like I'd been dropped into a Thomas Hardy novel.

I don't wish to spend any more time with either character.

I found Miss Eliza's English Kitchen to be an interesting book. The book is loosely based on the life of Eliza Acton, a woman I had never heard of until reading this book.
Eliza Acton wrote a collection of poems and had arranged for it to be published through a publisher. At this point she had been writing poetry for a few years. The book sold well and had several reprintings. Upon writing another collection of poems this one was declined at the publisher, and she was told to write a cookery book. She took ten years to write her cookery book and it was aimed at the English middle class. The book was the first of its kind to list ingredients and a suggested cooking time.
Eliza had never cooked before but was now forced to. England has many exciting and new ingredients to use, and, in her experimentation, she was not afraid to try cooking foreign dishes with their spices and ingredients.
Ann Kirby is hired as her assistant cook and the two develop a friendship outside of the normal social class boundaries. As the two women's friendship develops, we see Ann looking up to Eliza as she is taught about not only cooking but about poetry, life skills and love. Eliza has become a real mentor to her.
When you hold someone in such high esteem and then discover something they have hidden that brings them down to a human level again you are highly disappointed, and this became the downfall of the two women's relationship.
This reminds me of an upstairs, downstairs type of book. Very interesting and informative book that I enjoyed a lot.

Pub Date 16 Nov 2021
I was given a complimentary copy of this book.
All opinions expressed are my own.

This honestly wasn't for me. It was a little too slow-paced and I didn't connect with any of the characters or root for them.

A light easy read involving cooking, friendship and hardship. Ann is a 17 year old girl living in poverty with her single legged father and mentally ill mother when the Vicar finds her a job as a scullery maid in a property rented by a family who have lost their fortune. Among the family is Eliza, an unmarried older woman with the goal of becoming a published author. Having her poems rejected, it is suggested she write a cookery book, which is what was popular at the time. Against what was expected of women in the time period, Eliza and Ann begin to explore and create new dishes, and form a friendship along the way. Secrets, however, threaten their friendship and the book they are both diligently working toward completing.
While there are some dark and dreary moments throughout the book, overall this is a light read about an unlikely friendship between two women who are trying to improve their lives on their own terms. I enjoyed how the author thought to compare recipes with emotions and other written material. The subplot was a bit surprising, too, as the author laid several possible plot lines open to be considered.
Thank you to NetGalley and to William Morrow and Custom House for the advanced digital reader copy of this book.

Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen by Annabel Abbs takes us back to London in 1837. Eliza has penned emotional poems that she hopes a renowned London publisher would put out in a book. She is disappointed when she is told poems are passe. Eliza is advised to write a cookery book. There is only one problem: Eliza has no idea how to cook. When her father makes some bad financial decisions, Eliza and her mother are forced to open a boardinghouse. Eliza decides she will take the publishers advice of writing a cookery book and she becomes the cook for their boardinghouse. She hires seventeen-year-old Ann Kirby as the scullery maid. Ann has an invalid father and a mother who has lost touch with reality. The parish priest recommended Ann for the position. Eliza soon learns that Ann has amazing taste buds. The two work together cooking for the boarders and developing recipes. A friendship develops between the pair while they explore their love of food and cooking. The story is told from Eliza Acton and Ann Kirby’s point-of-view in alternating chapters (sometimes it switches POV in the same chapter). I struggled to get through this book. I struggled with the writing style. The writing was formal which does not make for fun reading. I like the premise of the story. It is interesting how Eliza Acton changed the world of cookbooks. I just wish the author had made it more interesting. I thought the author captured the time period especially the attitudes of people. We get to see how women are treated as well as those with mental issues. It is terrible how people with mental health problems were treated (asylums were a terrible place). The detailed food descriptions will appeal to foodies. There is a scene in twelfth chapter that I found off-putting. A man with roving hands who displays something (“his sausage and chestnuts”) that should never be seen in a boardinghouse dining room. Unfortunately, there are more of these type of scenes in the book. The story unfolds in an expected manner. I found myself skimming to get through Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen. It failed to hold my interest (it is helpful if you suffer from insomnia). There were several loose ends that were not tied up. Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen captured the time period, the setting, and the attitudes of the people. But I felt that the characters were lacking. While Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen was not my cup of tea, many readers enjoyed it. I suggest you download a sample of Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen to see if it suits you. Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is a story of food, recipes, secrets, and friendship.

I recommended this book before reading it myself and hope the library patron enjoyed it more than I did. Great premise but it moved a little too slowly for me.

The author’s love of old cookbooks has inspired a delightful imagining of the origins of the first truly famous English recipe book, Modern Cookery, published in 1845. Eliza Acton and her assistant, Ann Kirby, were real people; while Eliza’s status as a published poet, playwright, and gentlewoman left ample evidence about her life, Ann was known only by a brief mention. Abbs chooses the brilliant tactic of giving both Eliza and Ann equal time as point-of-view characters in this novel; because their voices are so distinct, and because they occupy such different classes, we get a portrait of Victorian domestic life that is both encompassing and finely detailed.

Acton’s life carried hints of scandal in spite of the cozy domesticity of her most famous work, and Abbs captures the character of a woman who channels her intense sensuality into the socially acceptable context of cookery. Ann is an equally capable cook whose hero-worship of Eliza is thoughtfully tempered by her clear-eyed understanding of the harm caused by the willful blindness of the privileged class to the suffering of the poor. Through her, we learn about the desperation of the mentally and physically disabled, and the hypocrisy of the wealthy who hid them—and their needs—away. Because Ann is a bright and satirical observer, these somber details don’t overshadow the entertaining portrait of the growing friendship between these two talented women. Recipe-loving readers will appreciate the detailed descriptions of Victorian dishes like Apple Hedgehog and Buttered Celery on Toast; fans of women’s history will find plenty to admire in the way Ann and Eliza inspire one another to be true to themselves in a culture that has little use for intelligent single women.

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen by Annabel Abbs is the story of Eliza Acton. At first when Eliza's publisher tells her to write a cook book instead of usual poetry she refuses until she realizes that she has to financially. Eliza hires Ann Kirby to assist her, and together they develop a friendship while writing new recipes until a secret from Eliza's past emerges. This well-written novel will have you from the first page of the book all the way until the end.

I loved the idea of a historical fiction novel about the first English cookbook. I loved the story. My biggest problem was how abruptly it ended. It made no sense to me to end it when the author did. That is why I marked it down so much. I just wish the ending would have worked better,

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.

3.5 out of 5 stars

What a lovely novel! It tells the story of Eliza Acron's recipe book, told in alternating chapters in the voices of Acton and her assistant/maid, Ann. i raced through the book and loved every minute of it.

I stepped away from this book for the time being. The premise was great, but I found myself frustrated with the focus on behavior of the hotel guest. I wish this was not a part of the story, and the focus remained on the women's developing friendship. It felt somewhat unnecessary, though I may return to the book in the future.

Miss Eliza's English Kitchen is a fictional biography based on the lives of Eliza Acton and Ann Kirby. Eliza is born into a comfortable family that is later disgraced. Shunning a marriage offer she's not interested in, Eliza works in her family's kitchen when her mother takes in boarders. Ann, from a poor family with many challenges, happily works alongside Eliza in the kitchen. Together they collect and refine recipes and create a cookbook which was widely published and changed the way home cooks prepared food.

I enjoyed the atmospheric setting and the friendship between Eliza and Ann. Both characters had secrets in their lives and struggled through the challenges and societal expectations of Victorian life. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

England 1835. When Eliza Action is ordered by her publisher to write a cookbook instead of her usual poetry, she is less than interested. After all, she does not know how to cook! She hires an assistant, impoverished Ann Kirby, to help her, and together they write recipes. Along the way, Eliza finds a passion for culinary arts, and they both find a friend. Will a secret from Eliza's past change everything?

This is a really well-written and true-to-the-period tale of two women who were thrown together, became friends, and did something extraordinary. The characters are engaging and well written, and the story is beautifully told. I would recommend this to anyone interested in culinary history and historical fiction about strong women.

I received a free copy of this book from the publishers. My review is voluntary and my opinions are my own.

Very interesting historical novel based on a real person, Eliza Acton, a poet. It takes place in 1835, when she finds she has an aptitude for the culinary arts. She and her assistant worked together to write the first British cookbook. It's also a story about friendship and a struggle for independence.

Thanks to William Morrow for an advanced copy of Miss Eliza's English Kitchen.

This 19th century historical fiction is based on the real-life story of Eliza Acton and her assistant Ann Kirby as they revolutionized British cooking and cookbooks around the world.

Eliza Acton dreams of being a poet and when told by her publisher to write a cookery book, she refuses until her father bankrupts the family, forcing him to flee the country. Eliza and her mother move away from the scandal and open a boarding house, where Eliza learns how to cook and develops a passion for cooking. Eliza hires a young woman Ann Kirby to help. Ann comes from a poverty stricken family but she knows how to read and write. Through their time together in the kitchen they develop a friendship breaking the boundaries of class.

This is a book about friendship, female independence and cooking. The writing is an almost poetry like as well, and there are so many descriptions of the food. While I enjoyed this book, it was a little too long for me and it went into too much detail. I felt like they repeated themselves a lot.

If you're a fan of 19th century British historical fiction or books about cooking you'll enjoy this!

My Thoughts:

Both women take turns being the narrator. I read the word “I” often. “I must”, “I stand”, “I loathe”, I want to be”, “I rise, and dress myself.” This is my least favorite form of writing in a story. I don’t like this point of view. Further, I don’t want to be told the minutiae details of the characters. Those two reasons are the only tidbits I dislike.

What I like about Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen:

1. I love cooking and baking. I love recipes and cookbooks.
2. I love the story taking on a different type of love: friendship. If you read other reviews I write, you will remember I enjoy reading about other types of relationships and not just romantic type love.
3. Eliza’s mother is selfish and annoying. She causes strong internal and external conflicts in the story. Eliza does not have a loving bond with her mother. Her mother is not a person she can depend on to have the best intentions for Eliza. Her mother is about her own life and their financial situation. Her mother is a person who waits for others “to do something for her.”
4. I love the plot. And I love the form or structure of the story that advances towards the plot’s conclusion.
5. Eliza and Ann are of different ages. They are from different socio-economic backgrounds. They are two people who shouldn’t be friends. Yet, a love of a common interest creates and bonds their precious friendship.
6. The story is mainly chronological. At the start of the story, there is a future date where the character remembers the past and how the events brought about the gift of today.
7. I love Eliza’s bold personality. She draws a line in the sand so to speak. She will tolerate only so much and then that’s it! She speaks plain. I love this in a personality.
8. I love Ann’s kind personality. She has a sad background with what has happened to her mother. In this era people who had a mental illness were not taken care of well. They were often abused. They were often cast aside and forgotten. Ann has not forgotten her mother. She does not understand all the details with her mother’s illness, but she loves her. Ann is kind. I wish there had been more about this in the storyline. I understand there is only so much room in a book for the whole of a story, but I think about the importance of this subject.

Themes in the story:

Friendship, cooking, perseverance, honesty, acceptance, kindness, sacrifice, hospitality, judgment, injustice, dreams, grief, charity, and tolerance.

Format: E-book.
Source: I received a complimentary e-book from NetGalley. I am not required to write a positive review.
Audience: Readers of historical fiction.
Rating: Good to very good.

Miss Eliza’s English Kitchen is an historical novel based on the life of Eliza Acton. Eliza was a poet whose family fell on very hard times. When a publisher, who did not want to publish her poems, offered to pay her to write a cookbook, she at first refused. Luckily for cooks and readers, Eliza changed her mind. She goes on to find poetry in her cooking and cookery writing.

The second important character in the story is Ann. Ann’s incredibly difficult life is portrayed vividly and readers will feel for her bleak home life. It is transformative for Ann to begin to work for “Miss Eliza.”

Life for Eliza and her mother involves taking in short term boarders. Readers will meet one particularly lascivious and loathsome one. He is an early guest at the house. His presence also impacts Ann.

Throughout the story, Eliza and Ann work together to create recipes that are different from those that came before. For example, they used accurate measurements.

Eliza and Ann become very close. What will the nature of their relationship be as it evolves?

I found this book to be somewhat slow moving and yet it was interesting. It described a time, place, way of life and the people who lived it.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions are my own.

Note that there is an article in the December U.S. issue of Good Housekeeping that references this title. The book was also chosen for a morning tv show’s book club.

Thank you to Netgalley and William Morrow and Custom House for access to this arc.

Until I began reading the book and doing a little research about Eliza Acton, I have to confess that I’d never heard of her but it sounds as if I should have. Mrs. Beeton’s name was drifting around in the back of my mind but Eliza Acton? Nope. Well, now I know it and I feel a need to track down and read some of the recipes she and her assistant painstakingly tested and perfected. As so little is known about her life, I was ready for whatever you might have devised to embellish and add spice and depth to her story.

The book is wonderfully descriptive and filled with little details that make it and the time period come alive. I was with Eliza as she trudged down a stinking London street, sweating through her silk dress to meet the publisher who would both dash her hopes as well as give her a new direction to pursue. Where things really took off was when she and her beleaguered mother came to rest at the rented house where they will reside now that her father has fled his creditors and gone to Calais. It was here that Eliza found her calling as she began to test, perfect, and write down recipes she knew, ones she’d been sent, and ones she read from older cookbooks that did such a lousy job of presenting a usable recipe for those who had no knowledge of them.

Eliza couldn’t and didn’t do all this on her own – in real life or in the story. Ann, a downtrodden daughter of a madwoman and a soldier grievously wounded fighting Napoleon, was found a position with the Actons by a clergyman who (reluctantly) does many things for the family even though he never seemed thrilled about it. There is a reason presented later in the book that dovetails with what would probably be the impetus for his actions.

Ann turned out to be my favorite character. She was the most honest person as well as the hardest working. Eliza might treat Ann fairly well, actually very well for a servant, but Eliza’s head was often off in a cloud as she mentally reviewed the best herb to use and which cooking technique to employ. It was Ann who was actually cleaning out the stove, schelping in the heavy buckets of water, plucking the birds, skinning the eels, and scrubbing the grease stains off the floor.

There was a good reason that Ann’s mother knew how to read and thus could teach Ann. I was surprised that Ann had spot on instincts and the innate ability to describe how seasonings she’s never tasted taste to her and also improvise ways to use these herself. Reading the ways Eliza and Ann prepare the scrumptious sounding food certainly made me hungry. Getting an up close view of the kitchen they worked in was at first a bit off putting – that is until a filthy London kitchen is described that would have had me returning any food that came out of it. Ugh.

The backstories given to Eliza and Ann served to highlight the immense distance that we’ve come in terms of gender equality – unequal though that still is today. It helped me understand the importance of the reason behind why Eliza was so determined to forge ahead with not only her dreams of writing and publishing her poetry but also the cookbook. Her sense of self identity and self worth were more crucial to her than things that other women of her time valued and saw as their path to security. Being insulted by a French chef also didn’t damp down Eliza’s fire to bring quality cooking and food to her fellow English either.

Watching Ann was like seeing a parched plant finally being watered, put out in sunlight, and allowed to thrive. Eliza showed her privilege in most everything she did and though she had a clearer understanding of the poor than when she first met Ann, there were times I still wanted to smack her. Ann’s growth as a person was lovely to see though I waited sadly for her to learn the truth about something. The poor at this time were not only downtrodden and cheated but, just because they had no money, had to accept decisions and actions imposed on them by their “betters.” When Ann finally made the choice to confront someone about this, even though I didn’t see it, I smiled.

Some choices are made by both women that readers might quibble over and be disappointed in. I would have liked to have seen their entire relationship, or at least got to see why they ended up going separate ways. But I think that Eliza and Ann’s characters have by this point been detailed and illuminated for us so that what they do makes sense. Eliza realizes something about herself that allows her to choose wisely for the future of someone else while pragmatic Ann still must navigate a world skewed towards those who have rather than those who have not. Still she manages to get what she desires in the end. B

I enjoyed the first eleven chapters of this book very much. Those chapters were in keeping with the book's being a novel of Victorian cooking and friendship as the latter part of the title indicates. Chapter twelve included a rather perverted sexual scene. A quick flip through the book let me know that it was not an isolated event, so I chose to not read further. I would have given the book two stars for content, but gave it three factoring in the quality of the wordsmithing. I am grateful to have received a complimentary copy of this book from William Morrow without obligation. All opinions expressed here are my own.