With the publication ofThe Tale of Mr. Tod (1912), Beatrix Potter articulated her impatience with “goody goody books about nice people” (Linder 210) and declared her intention “to make a story about two disagreeable people” (Potter, Tale of Mr. Tod 7). Yet although the subjects of the story, Tommy Brock and Mr. Tod, might be the most viciously disagreeable protagonists in Potter's children's stories, her readers were already acquainted with characters who challenged the boundaries of propriety, graciousness, and respectful deference to authority. Throughout her oeuvre, many such characters are not entirely punished for their trespasses, a pattern which often surprises modern readers who blithely assume that the daintily-illustrated books about woodland critters and barnyard creatures affirm conservative Edwardian conventions of behavior and standards of decorum. But as Humphrey Carpenter observes:

The climax of The Tale of Mr. Tod invites such questioning. It depicts the two male protagonists gripped in “a terrific battle all over the kitchen” – a space traditionally codified as feminine – flinging tea and grappling each other “amongst the broken crockery” (69). The scene reminds us that many of the most violent moments in Potter's corpus revolve around food and hints at her tendency to use scenes of eating and cooking as loci for critiques of turn-of-the-century constructions of gender and class.

Particularly in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908), Potter engages a counter-discourse, increasingly evident in late-nineteenth century periodicals and texts about gastronomy and the culinary arts, which challenged popular assumptions about the relationship between gender and authority over food and appetites.Footnote ¹ Although the kitchen was widely held to be woman's natural domain, throughout the nineteenth century the dominant authority in matters relating to cookery and consumption was masculine. In Samuel Whiskers, Potter questions the legitimacy of masculine culinary superiority as part of a larger inquiry into the validity and merits of popular constructions of gender.

Potter's critique of ideologies about gender and food opens, appropriately, in a kitchen. Tom Kitten, readers discover, has disappeared when his mother, Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit, endeavors to gather her three children and imprison them in a cupboard to keep them safe while she tends to her baking. While their anxious mother searches for her wayward son, his sisters, Moppet and Mittens, defy their mother's admonitions and escape from their cupboard. Coming out of a cupboard or closet might signal a refusal to accede to the dominion of gender normativity. Yet Moppet and Mittens, good little girl kittens that they are, “went straight to the dough which was set to rise in a pan before the fire,” and patting the dough “with their little soft paws,” contemplated making “‘dear little muffins’” (11). When a noise startles them, they likewise respond in girlish fashion by “jump[ing] . . . in . . . fright” and hiding in a flour barrel and “an empty jar” by the milk pans in the dairy (12–13).

However, the progress of the tale as an affirmation of a model of femininity characterized by nervousness, timidity, anxious maternal tears, and a predisposition towards baking is disrupted by the entrance of brazen Mrs. Ribby, who “had called to borrow some yeast” (14) – a substance which, perhaps not coincidentally, can produce radical transformations in familiar but benign ingredients such as flour and water. As Cousin Ribby commandeers weepy Tabitha and storms about brandishing her umbrella like a sword – vehemently disavowing fear of the rats that “‘get upon [poor Tabitha's] nerves’” (19), and declaring that not only will she find naughty Tom Kitten, but she intends to “‘whip him too!’” (16) – Potter stirs up the constructions of masculinity and femininity which were ubiquitous in Victorian fiction for children.

Experience with tales which, like this one, open with the phrase “Once upon a time” justifies a suspicion that Tom has bravely embarked on an adventure or quest which will provide him with the opportunity to prove his masculine mettle and return home to claim the rewards of manhood. But Tom's journey has been fueled by fear. No lofty heroic goals had “little Tom Cat.” No, simply because he “did not want to be shut up in a cupboard . . . he determined to hide” in the more spacious confines of the kitchen chimney (30). Having “unwise[ly]” gone up the chimney (29), Tom Kitten is surprised to find himself perched precariously on a ledge, “cough[ing] and chok[ing] with the smoke” (35). He is compelled to venture forth, not because he is feeling courageous or adventuresome in a boyish or heroic way, but rather because he is a bit of a dandy: “‘I cannot go back,’” he concludes. “‘If I slipped I might fall in the fire and singe my beautiful tail and my little blue jacket’” (35). His sisters Moppet and Mittens may be content to streak nude through the book unmindful of their appearance (and readers may recall that none of the kittens had fared well with fancy clothes in the episode related in The Tale of Tom Kitten [1907]). But this fashion-conscious feline is motivated by the fear of tarnishing his appearance, evoking the specter of the immaculately-attired, fin-de-siècle aesthete who had been scurrilously lambasted for his effeminacy. Unlike the hero of a traditional fairy tale, little Tom's journey through the sooty ventilation system – creeping “like a little sweep” (37) – is propelled by timorous confusion: the closest he ever comes to exhibiting a little derring-do is the plucky pose he strikes when he encounters a few gnawed mutton bones (39).

In a scene reminiscent of Alice's fall down the rabbit-hole to land “upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves” in Wonderland (Carroll 27), Tom gropes around in the hidden tunnels and recesses of the old house. “All at once he fell head over heels in the dark, down a hole, and landed on a heap of very dirty rags” (43) in a room, or a world, in which creatures and food behave in surprising ways. But whereas Carroll's emboldened heroine is delighted by the thought that “‘after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home!” (25), Tom Kitten echoes his mother's fussiness as he beseeches an “enormous rat” (43), “‘Please, sir, the chimney wants sweeping’” (44). And while Alice was soon transformed by food and beverages, poor Tom Kitten is about to be transformed into a consumable dish.

The danger of being consumed by another creature is a frequent theme in Potter's stories, and it may reflect the human fear of being consumed or cannibalized that Harry Stone suggests in The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity (Reference Stone1994) was a pervasive topic of discourse in nineteenth-century popular and periodical publications including folk tales, picture books, chapbooks, penny weeklies, crime reports, travelogues, and theatrical productions. Indeed, in January 1906 – a few months before Potter began work on Samuel Whiskers – the Times reported a “Cannibal Rising in Northern Nigeria” in a newly explored region where it had been believed “order [had] been restored and the people [were] accepting British rule” (5). Despite their best efforts to maintain authority, the British Resident “with a handful of police was surrounded by a mob of 3000 savages.” By virtue of his “display of great tact and courage,” the Resident barely escaped a gruesome fate at the hands of the “truculent cannibal tribe.” Though lacking in “tact and courage,” Tom Kitten similarly finds himself confronting a hostile challenge to conventional authority and an aggressive adversary with alarming appetites.

As much as it may be a nod towards a cultural fascination with cannibalism, the persistent danger of being consumed that marks Potter's stories reflects her fidelity to a representation of a natural world characterized by a predatorial form of animal violence that intersects with the often antagonistic or adversarial world of human culture. In tales such as The Pie and the Patty-Pan (1905), Potter's animal characters contribute to a satirizing of the pretensions of etiquette and the practice of civility that hints that the conventions of cultivated human society are often little more than a veneer to disguise animal drives, desires, and instincts. In Potter's tales, the correspondences between the savagery of the animal world and the truculence of human behavior are evident in the frequent occasions when characters are not only in danger of being consumed by animals that in nature would be their predators, but also risk being transformed into a tasty baked good or savory dish fit for consumption by the most discerning human gastronomes. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Potter's first published children's book, Peter is cautioned by his mother against entering Mr. McGregor's garden because “Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor” (11). As Margaret Mackey observes, the accompanying illustration of Mrs. McGregor presenting a glorious pie to her family and dog (later identified as Duchess in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan) reinforces the Gothic horror of this threat (7).Footnote ²

In an earlier tale, Jemima Puddle-Duck is likewise in danger of becoming dinner when she happens upon “an elegantly dressed gentleman” with “black prick ears and sandy-coloured whiskers” (20) who proposes they “have a dinner-party all to [them]selves!” (36). That he is discovered reading a newspaper “amongst some tall fox-gloves” (20) – beautiful but poisonous flowers – and continues reading his newspaper as Jemima settles herself in “a tumble-down shed” that “was almost quite full of feathers” to a vast quantity that “was almost suffocating” (28, 31), links the danger that threatens Jemima with journalism and evokes the sensationalized reports of women lured and victimized by seemingly gallant gentlemen, which were common features of the popular periodical press. Tom Kitten in Samuel Whiskers immediately appreciates his danger as he is being expertly trussed by the cook, Anna Maria Whiskers. But Jemima Puddle-Duck, in her naivety, fails to recognize the carnivorous designs of her foxy host, the “mighty civil and handsome” gentleman (recognizable as the eponymous villainous protagonist of Potter's later Tale of Mr. Tod), as he asks her to provide “Sage and thyme, and mint and two onions, and some parsley” (36) – seasonings which, together with the oats the fox promises to provide, point to a rather tasty stuffing for roast duck and an unfortunate end to Jemima's adventures.

Tom Kitten's plight in Samuel Whiskers also represents an inversion of the customary representation of mice and other rodents as prey to predatorial cats and kittens evident in Miss Moppet's abuses of a precocious mouse she “ties . . . up in [a] duster, and tosses . . . about like a ball” in The Story of Miss Moppet (28). The familiar hierarchy of cat and mouse is similarly evoked (and likewise resolved without harm to the rodents) in The Tailor of Gloucester, in which the little lady and gentlemen mice who toil through the night to complete the embroidery on the magnificent waistcoat for the mayor's wedding are in danger of being consumed by Simpkin, the tailor's cat and housekeeper. In an ironic twist on the dangers rodents run of being consumed by cats, the hapless proprietors of the village shop in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles recognize that their profits depend on curbing their own appetites for the mice and rats that patronize their establishment: “[It] would never do to eat our own customers,” Pickles observes; “they would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchit's,” the only other shop in the village. “‘On the contrary, they could go nowhere,’ replied Ginger gloomily” (12). But in the manuscript of The Sly Old Cat, dated 21 March 1906, Potter gestures towards the subversion of the conventional cat-and-mouse hierarchy that would come to full form months later in Samuel Whiskers.Footnote ³ Here, Mr. Rat, the rodent predecessor of Samuel Whiskers, suspects that his greedy and impolite feline host at tea intends to eat him for dessert. To save his life, Mr. Rat takes the opportunity while the cat is drinking milk from a jug to “[give] the jug a pat, and it slipped down quite tight over the head of the Cat!” (24). While “the Cat banged about the kitchen with its head fast in the jug” (26), Mr. Rat “sat on the table drinking tea out of a mug” (28) and made off with a muffin in a paper bag. But unlike Samuel Whiskers – whose thievery is never thoroughly condemned by Potter – poor Mr. Rat pays the ultimate price for his appetites: “he ate the whole muffin at one sitting; so that is the end of the Rat” (32).

By the time Potter introduces Tom Kitten's tumble into the world governed by Samuel Whiskers, readers have already been shown the rat's wife, Anna Maria, scurrying with a dish of Tabitha Twitchit's freshly-made dough. And they have observed Samuel himself bounding up stairs carrying a pat of butter on a plate as the corresponding text reveals that Tabitha's rolling-pin may have gone in the same direction as the butter missing from her pantry. Food literally runs through a narrative about cats and rats who struggle to exert independence and authority in a world where traditional hierarchies, roles, and relations are being disrupted: Tom, Moppet, and Mittens rebel against parental authority; stalwart Cousin Ribby embodies a rejection of conventional feminine passivity and meekness; the Whiskers's assault on Tom inverts the customary roles of predators and prey; and, as Potter subverts the expectation that a children's tale will celebrate virtuous behavior and punish naughtiness, she valorizes the spirit of rebellion figured by Samuel and, perhaps even more so, by Anna Maria Whiskers. As these two crafty rats orchestrate Tom's transfiguration from puss to pudding, they enact negotiations for authority over culinary and gastronomic matters that had been percolating in popular culture during the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Anna Maria's prompt obedience to her husband's command that she “make [him] a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding for [his] dinner” (46) appears to conform to familiar distributions of authority and domestic labor between men and women. Samuel Whiskers sits in his fancy waistcoat cavalierly taking snuff and barking orders while his wife does all the work, savagely grappling their dinner to the ground, stripping Tom of his precious blue coat, and binding the terrified kitten in string. But Anna Maria refuses to defer to Samuel's authority when he dictates instructions for preparing his dinner. The importance of the dispute is evident in the physical layout of the page, which balances unusually short passages with sparse images:

The rats evidently agree to follow Anna Maria's recipe, and stealthily proceed to gather butter and dough.

In his efforts to impose his culinary preferences on his wife, Potter's portly, obstreperous, misogynistic, and appetite-driven rat, Samuel Whiskers, evokes an earlier Samuel, Dr. Johnson, whose pronouncement in 1747 that “Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery” anticipated the disparagement of female cooks that prevailed throughout the nineteenth century (Figures 12 and 13). Although domestic cookery was considered to be one of women's primary responsibilities, popular culture perniciously discredited the feminine aptitude for the culinary arts: “the womanly subject of cookery [is] an art which is popularly imagined to belong exclusively to the gentle sex,” intoned a writer in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1854. “If there has ever been a female cook of sufficient importance to be known beyond the purlieus of the kitchen in which she worked,” he continued, “we must confess ourselves ignorant of her name and achievements” (“Editorial” 110). A contributor to the Saturday Review in 1868 complained that women were “[b]orn for the most part with very feebly developed gustativeness,” adding, “For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do not” (“What Is Woman's Work?” 285). Writing in 1884, Mrs. Lincoln of the Boston Cooking School strove to redress the “surprising” culinary “ignorance” of women who characteristically “do not know what the simplest things in our daily food are; cannot tell when water boils, or the difference between lamb and veal, lard and drippings. They cannot give the names of kitchen utensils; do not know anything about a stove, or how to pare a potato” (vii–viii). As French gastronome Châtillon-Plessis asserted, reinforcing a gendered hierarchy of cookery, “It is certain that the female cook can never give to an important table the fundamental charm and style which the male cook can bring to it. The profession demands tiring labors which man alone can face, and elements of ingenuity which woman could never bring to bear on it” (91).Footnote ⁴

Figure 12.

Cover illustration from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter. Copyright (c) Frederick Warne & Co., Reference Potter1908, 2002. Courtesy of Frederick Warne & Co. © Frederick Warne & Co., 2008. Copyright protected in online edition by virtual watermark.

Figure 13.

Engraving after Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, c. 1772. Courtesy of Corbis. © Bettman/Corbis.

Through Anna Maria's victory over Samuel Whiskers's proclamations about the proper way to make “a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding,” Potter participates in a trajectory of resistance to masculine dominion over culinary matters which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and which was apparent in the tension between the primarily male authors of gastronomic treatises and the female writers of the staid, serious, and eminently practical descendants of such noble tomes. These included Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (Reference Glasse1747) and Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (Reference Beeton1861), which were dedicated to explicating the elements of cookery as a fundamental component of domestic management. Taking their cue from early nineteenth-century gastronomes such as Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de la Reynière, later French and English gourmets such as Alexandre Dumas père, Châtillon-Plessis, Dr. William Kitchiner, Abraham Hayward, and Dr. Gustave Strauss, wrote treatises which celebrated eating as much as they glorified cookery and defined the standards of fine cuisine and refined culinary arts. Even when they provided recipes, these were presented eloquently in descriptive narratives as elegant, artistic processes of creation, very much unlike the prescriptive instructions offered by more prosaic female cookery-book writers. Consumed by the quotidian demands of household labor, a woman was assumed not to have the leisure, or the cultivation, to genuinely appreciate the finer points of the arts of fine dining and elegant eating, and accordingly, “her receipts cannot inspire that degree of confidence, which the brilliant and profound instructions of a Soyer might” (“Editorial Note” 111). So Samuel Whiskers's accession to his wife's decision that a “kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding” should be made with “butter and dough,” not breadcrumbs, represents a small triumph for women in the culinary battle of the sexes.

The tension between masculine and feminine authority over food is evident in Tabitha Tickletooth's Reference Tickletooth1860 manual, The Dinner Question, in which the masculine genre of the gastronomic treatise is merged with the household manual customarily written by women. For the most part, the book adheres to the format of the domestic manual genre and features practical instruction for managing the household, explication of fundamental cooking techniques, and abundant recipes. But interspersed with the commonsense advice are essays on subjects not customarily explored in domestic cookery books, such as “‘Punch's Dinners for Snobs,” the “Pleasures of the Table, “Cooking in the Crimea,” and the “Philosophy of Cookery.” As its subtitles promise, The Dinner Question is a compendium of information about food, “Combining the Rudiments of Cookery with Useful Hints on Dinner Giving and Serving, and Other Household Words of Advice.” It is extraordinary among domestic manuals for being “Garnished with Anecdotes of Eminent Cooks and Epicures, as Well as Wise Saws in Gastronomy from the Great Masters.”

Sections devoted to “Count D'Orsay on Paris Restaurants,” “English and French Restaurateurs Compared,” and “London Dining Houses” seem particularly anomalous in a work which poses as a manual for a housekeeper or the mistress of a household, who at this period would not have been venturing into public eating facilities very much. But the well-informed Tabitha Tickletooth (part of whose name she shares with Tom Kitten's mother, Tabitha Twitchit and whose dress and mien are curiously mirrored in Potter's depiction of Mrs. Ribby) is in reality the English actor and dramatist Charles Selby (c. 1802–1863) (Davidson viii) (Figure 14). Posing, literally, as both experienced housewife and knowledgeable epicure, Selby mocks both the tedious pragmatism of female domestic cookery-book writers who are desperate to establish their credibility by demonstrating their serious commitment to the needs of the household and the self-congratulatory pomposity and posturing of male gastronomes whose highly-wrought tastes were swallowed as gospel by fast and fashionable readers (Figure 15).

Figure 14.

Beatrix Potter, “Mrs. Ribby.” Illustration from Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (London: Frederick Warne & Co., Reference Potter1908, 2002). Courtesy of Frederick Warne & Co. © Frederick Warne & Co. Copyright protected in online edition by virtual watermark.

Figure 15.

Frontispiece from The Dinner Question, or How to Dine well & Economically by Tabitha Tickletooth (pseud. Charles Selby) (1860) (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 1983). Courtesy of Prospect Books.

In many ways, Alexis Soyer's seminal manual of cookery, The Gastronomic Regenerator (Reference Soyer1846), anticipates The Dinner Question since both volumes are ostensibly directed towards non-professional cooks and mistresses of the home, and both purport to introduce gastronomy to readers who were traditionally excluded from cultivated epicureanism. But where Tabitha Tickletooth locates the pleasures of the table within the demands of domesticity and provides advice about household matters beyond the kitchen and dining room (such as laundering, shopping for furniture, and etiquette), The Gastronomic Regenerator focuses exclusively on the “correct” preparation and consumption of food, kitchen designs based on the kitchens at the Reform Club and in Soyer's own home, the construction of a proper bill of fare, and other epicurean matters. Yet as Natalie Kapetanios Meir points out, “the majority of Victorians could neither afford such handbooks nor the utensils and foods they touted” (134). Moreover, at nearly eight hundred and fifty pages in length, Soyer's manual of his “simplified and entirely new system of cookery” – combining “nearly two thousand practical receipts” with culinary advice suitable for kitchens “from the kitchen of the royal palace to that of the humble cottage” (as the work's subtitle states) – would have been inaccessible to most households.Footnote ⁵

The kinds of gastronomic treatises invoked by Selby and exemplified by Soyer ultimately imply that women were bereft of the necessary intellectual and sensual gifts to be gourmets in the kitchen or at table. Yet these implications were not uncontested. “Preparatory School for Young Ladies” – a mid-century cartoon reproduced in 1875 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Leech 516) – hints at a fomenting feminine resistance to the idea that women lacked these capacities (Figure 16). Much like Anna Maria Whiskers as she dismisses her husband's culinary admonishments, the defiant young woman in the cartoon asserts her knowledge about plum pudding. She literally confronts an oppressive mass of masculine authority figured by the overbearing male chef or instructor, who brandishes a copy of The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846) as a symbol of his faith in his entitlement to deference from female cookery students.

Figure 16.

John Leech, “Preparatory School for Young Ladies” (Reference Leech1852). Reprinted in James Parton, “Recent English Caricature,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 51 (Reference Leech1875): 516. Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection, http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/.

Potter herself supported neither women's suffrage nor the contemporary women's rights movements (Lear 179, 233, 491 nt19), and she declared she held “‘an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman's life’” (qtd. in Lear 90). In her own life and work, however, she demonstrated the spirit of resistance and subverted the authority of convention and the constructions of gender prevalent in late nineteenth-century food writing by women. Literature, including fiction, helped pave the road for women to expand the breadth of their food knowledge beyond the rudiments required to produce an ordinary family meal and to participate (although often only vicariously) in the more exotic culture of gastronomy. Observing that the “bitter outcry on the subject” of the decline of English cookery was frequently “neatly wrapped up in an article on the fallacy of the Higher Education of women” (72), Ethel Earl hinted to the female readership of the Englishwoman that women would be doing a service to their country, and contributing to the advancement of the women's movement, by studiously expanding their knowledge of food beyond the practical details necessary to operate a domestic kitchen, as well as by refining their understanding of “the theory of the dinner as a meal, its parts and sequence” (74). Such knowledge, Earl advises, cannot be gleaned from the common, woman-authored cookery books with which housekeepers are familiar. Of course, “the classical [instructional] works of [male chefs such as] Ude, Carême and Soyer contain much of the philosophy of dining as well as the science and mechanics of the art,” which, she implies, would contribute greatly to a woman's ability to advance her appreciation of food and cookery (74). However, Earl encourages women to look to literature which celebrates food and refined dining for gastronomic enlightenment. In particular, she recommends the fiction and essays of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose “collected papers are . . . more suggestive if less complete than Brillât Savarin's treatise,” the Physiologie du gout (1826), although she does promote this classic work as required reading for any “housekeeper . . . who wishes to justify her name” (74). Such works, like the explorations of gastronomy by Thomas Walker and Abraham Hayward – authors of The Original (1835) and The Art of Dining (Reference Hayward1852) – “have a bracing effect, and enlighten [a woman's] mind as to the tastes and desires of men” (75). The consumption of literature which celebrated the pleasures of tasteful eating expanded women's epicurean sensibilities and offered a means by which women might earn the respect of men. Potter's tales depict the procurement of food and ingredients (The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck); marketing (The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan); the notorious poor quality and indigestibility of “ready-made” food (The Tale of Two Bad Mice); tea-table etiquette; the value of elegant dishes – “a pie-dish with a pink rim,” for instance – and the debatable merits of introducing “tin articles” such as patty-pans into puddings and pies (The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan); gracious entertaining (The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse); and the engaged debate between male and female characters about the proper way to prepare the favorite dish that is at the heart of Samuel Whiskers. Through her tales, Potter introduces young readers – both boys and girls – to epicurean themes and concerns that were features of contemporary adult literature.

Towards the end of the century, as women began to assert authority over their education, property, employment, and rights of representation, they also began to articulate knowledge about eating and cooking in texts designed to be consumed as literature. In texts for adult readers, women such as Agnes Repplier challenged the sentiment “that gluttony is a vice – or a virtue – for man only, and that woman's part in the programme is purely that of a ministering angel” (362). Repplier protested against the popular distinction that “Adam was made to eat, and Eve to cook for him, although even in this humble sphere she and her daughters have been doomed to rank second in command” (462). These women gastronomes projected a feminine epicureanism through a variety of literary genres, including cookery novels, such as Catherine Owen's Gentle Breadwinners: The Story of One of Them (Reference Owen1888) and Emily Waters's The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste (1901); gastronomic treatises such as Elizabeth Robins Pennell's The Feasts of Autolycus (Reference Pennell1896); reminiscences such as Ouida's “Apropos of a Dinner” (1889); and learned essays such as Mary Ellen Meredith's “Gastronomy and Civilization” (Reference Meredith1851), Lady Mary Jeune's “Dinners and Diners” (Reference Jeune1894), and Mrs. Fenwick Miller's “French and English at Table” (Reference Miller1897). Expanding the boundaries of feminine food writing beyond the instructional household cookery book, these fin-de-siècle epicures embodied the spirit of the women's movement as they demonstrated an informed authority about food, validated women's appetites, and encouraged women to enjoy the pleasures of the palate.

Gradually, if begrudgingly, women began to be acknowledged as guardians of valuable culinary knowledge: “We have Dr. Johnson's authority for saying that no woman can write a good book on cookery,” remarked a reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly in 1879, “but we have the experience of many refutations of this rash statement. Women, he said, could spin, but they could not write good cook-books; now that spinning is a lost art, perhaps they have acquired the power of directing how food should be prepared” (“Recent Literature” 684). Much of this validation came from an implicit, and often explicit, acknowledgment of a causal relation between well-crafted cookery advice writing and high-quality fiction writing. “It will be a safe prophecy that the Shakespeare of cook-books will yet be written by George Eliot,” the reviewer mused (“Recent Literature” 684). Marion Harland's success as a culinary authority was frequently attributed to her having “established a wide reputation for herself as a novelist when she entered the well-trodden field of cookery-book literature” (“Marion Harland's ‘Loitering’” 475). The moderate, if begrudging, praise which was applied to women's food writing, both gastronomic and didactic, bespoke a gradual acknowledgment of women's potential to participate in and contribute to masculine fields and enterprises. Gastronomic texts often intersected with, but were also outside the purview of the “cult of domesticity” (Flint 71); they expanded the pertinence of knowledge about food beyond the domestic confines, and they offered more (or other) information than was directly applicable to a woman's roles as wife and mother. The food and food knowledge investigated by this new feminine food writing forged a bridge or a channel between the domestic interior and the masculine public domains of art, culture, commerce, and science. Change and acceptance were slow to arrive (if they can be said ever to have arrived), but women writers were gradually (if gently) expanding the parameters of women's experiences with food.

As central as food, cooking, and dining are to Potter's tales, Samuel Whiskers is distinctive for offering a veritable recipe, including step-by-step instructions and illustrations for creating “a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding” (46). Potter guides the reader through the process by which Tom Kitten is transformed from mise en place to an assembled dish needing only steaming to be served at table alongside Mrs. McGregor's rabbit pie. In so doing, she offers a cookery lesson reminiscent of the hands-on lessons and culinary demonstrations through which girls and women learned to cook. These lessons and demonstrations took place under the tutelage of their mothers at home or of their teachers at the cookery schools that proliferated in the final decades of the nineteenth century as an antidote to the problem of women's notorious lack of culinary skills. Women's newspapers and magazines such as the Woman's Herald, the Woman's Signal, and Woman's World applauded these new schools, many of which were designed to redress the infamous problem of incompetent and unreliable servants by educating and training young women destined for domestic service, while others were committed to preparing girls and young women for marriage and motherhood. As Dorothea Roberts remarks in Woman's World, “the establishment of a ‘Kitchen College’ where girls of the working class might graduate and obtain honours, not only in the science of cookery, but in all branches of house-work” was

Although they affirmed women's domain as the home, these schools were often celebrated as the means by which women of all classes might be empowered and even emancipated. Some institutions, such as the Training School of Cookery, which opened on the grounds of Lambeth Palace in 1893, were designed “to train well-educated women for the work of teaching cookery in elementary schools; [and] to give opportunities for improvement to those already engaged in teaching cookery” (“A New College for Cooks” 261). Others, such as the National Training School of Cookery, Buckingham Palace Road, were open to young women already employed in domestic service, to whom the London County Council might grant cookery scholarships (“News of the Week”). All were designed to address culinary problems “of great importance” that affected “girls of all classes” (“Domestic Training”). The sheer plenitude of such institutions highlights the importance attributed to such training and educational facilities. The extensive 1899 edition of the Directory of Schools and Teachers of Cookery and Domestic Subjects, “compiled in response to a demand for information that has been constantly addressed to the publishers of ‘The Epicure’ since the first establishment of the paper in 1893,” is prefaced with an acknowledgement that such a directory “has not been . . . easy . . . to prepare, as cookery and domestic training generally are now carried on all over the country by so many different bodies, and under such varying conditions, that the difficulty of finding out what is being done in the remoter parts of the kingdom has in some cases been very considerable” (preface n.p.).

While we cannot presume that Anna Maria Whiskers is necessarily a beneficiary of the cookery school system, she embodies the spirit of competency and confidence of the well-informed and educated cook. In her readiness to take advantage of a surprise source of fresh meat when Tom Kitten tumbles into her territory and her determination to carry off mutton bones and “half a smoked ham hidden in the chimney” (61), Anna Maria demonstrates the principles of economical cookery that constituted a primary component of a fin-de-siècle education in the culinary arts and domestic science. By salvaging the dumpling pastry after Tom Kitten's rescue, and making it into a bag pudding (65), Mrs. Ribby and Tabitha Twitchit similarly exhibit good economical cookery practice. As at least one contemporary writer advised, one should “[m]ake use of every material possible for food, remembering that there are chemical affinities and properties by which nutriment may be extracted from almost every organic substance, the greatest art being in proper cooking” (qtd. in Simmonds 9). But John Joiner, the carpenter's, quizzical expression in Potter's illustration of Mrs. Ribby presenting her smutty culinary creation – and his polite excuse that “he regretted that he had not time to stay to dinner, because he had just finished making a wheelbarrow for Miss Potter” (a rare occasion when Potter introduces herself into the text of her work) – offers a subtle reminder that domestic cookery might have been economical, but its products did not always achieve the delectable gastronomic heights of fine cuisine.

From a practical perspective, a woman armed with advanced culinary knowledge had access to more personal, professional, and financial independence than was typically available to women educated under the “old” system. “Making pickles and sauces, canning fruit and putting up jelly are . . . well-tried and familiar means of earning a living,” suggested the Woman's Signal (“Some Chances” 42). A woman who could cook well was mistress of specialized skills and knowledge which were equally valuable and useful when applied to professions or forms of employment outside the domestic sphere. The “achievements of wise, of economical cooking” would shine through and would enhance “scientific training,” so that a woman doctor who has first learned to cook before entering medical school, for example, brings to the health profession an intimate and applied knowledge of diet and nutrition, of the “scientific basis of feeding [which] will in the near future become more and more part of the true physician's art” (“Ought All Women” 4). “Who is this little new woman – / This end of the century one?” asked Emma Player Seabury in the New England Magazine: “She cooks your meals to perfection, / For she goes to a cooking school” (Seabury 641). The verse is a reminder of the shifting of the parameters of women's housework as newly-established public educational institutions granted women opportunities both to apply the expertise they gleaned in the domestic context to occupations in the public sphere and to enrich their household activities with knowledge obtained through formal, public channels. The rapid expansion of networks of cookery training facilities offered the modern woman new employment opportunities (Morten 77). Yet as Honnor Morten acknowledged, cookery instruction was “hard work and poor pay,” except for those cookery teachers who were successful enough to “get the chance of rising to be superintendents, or even inspectors,” in which case they might look forward to a salary as high as £120 per year (80). But “[c]ookery teachers, . . . must certainly come under the heading of ‘New Women,’” asserted one writer in the Woman's Signal (“More” 118), as these meticulously-trained authorities in domestic sciences provided younger generations of girls with the skills to earn respectable salaries and to support themselves with healthy minds and bodies. Even the conservative Ida Cameron argued for the marketability of cookery skills: “For a girl who can cook,” she wrote, “one has only to open any paper any day to see a hundred situations, and a competent cook can demand nowadays any reasonable wage and accommodation. What good reason is there, therefore, for women to remain unemployed, seeing that even an indifferent cook is a most independent person who never lacks employment, and is seldom without money?” (Cameron 14).

In her story of Samuel and Anna Maria Whiskers, Potter tapped in to this movement to validate women's culinary and gastronomic expertise as she championed individuals who refused to be bound in a web of string like Tom Kitten and subdued by hegemonic conventions and values. Anna Maria's Latinate name evokes both the anarchism and bohemian restaurants popularly associated with Italians in London, which are evident in other contemporary fiction, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and The Secret Agent (1907; inspired by an event in 1894) and in journalism relating to several attacks and murders by Italian anarchists in England, Europe, and Australia in the 1890s (e.g., Nitti 607; “Anglo-Italian”; “The Real Anarchist”). Yet Anna Maria proves herself to be an expert on the intricacies of baking a quintessentially English dish, one which is specifically codified as a masculine food. Although recipes vary (notably in the variable use of sweet jams or sausage meats to fill it), a roly-poly pudding is characterized by its “bolster” shape and is made with a suet-based pastry. Perhaps not insignificantly, at least one fin-de-siècle cookery-book contributor described a sweet bolster pastry made with butter and seasoned with lemon as an “Italian Roll” (Shuman 149). Butter – which Anna Maria smears over Tom before sheathing him in pastry – is unusual, but when it is called for, it is more commonly applied as a sealant to the outside of the pudding before steaming or boiling than used to adhere the pastry to the filling, as in Anna Maria's version. By featuring butter in the dish, Potter may have been nodding to Mrs. Beeton, whose cookery book had been instrumental in what Potter “described in a letter as ‘a large and arduous campaign of cookery’” embarked upon in her first year of marriage (Paston-Williams 9). Potter reported that her husband, William Heelis, “took a turn at pastry à la Mrs Beeton,” but declared herself to have been “of the opinion [that Beeton] recommends the use – or misuse – of more butter than is justified by results” (Paston-Williams 9). Anna Maria's buttery kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding would have seemed an extravagance.Footnote ⁶

Consistent with the youth of the tale's target audience, many cookery books claim that roly-polies are especially favored by children: the early 1880 s edition of Cassell's Household Guide remarks that a single “large sausage-dumpling . . . does not produce half the fun nor half the enjoyment as when each child has a dumpling to itself, full of savoury, steaming gravy” (28). More particularly, these stout, cylindrical pastries are appreciated by boys: Tabitha Tickletooth identifies the dish as a “schoolboy's luxury, familiarly called ‘a dog in a blanket’” (Selby 122), a reasonable variation on which might be a kitten in a blanket. Indeed, the masculinity of the dish survives in modern recipes: in a small 1998 collection entitled Favourite Pudding Recipes: Traditional Ways to a Man's Heart, the Raisin Roly-Poly is described as a “traditional boiled suet roll, beloved by men and best served with plenty of thick custard” (7).Footnote ⁷

But what of breadcrumbs, which Samuel Whiskers insists are required to “make . . . properly” his kitten dumpling (48)? These appear in recipes for plum puddings and other basin and ball-shaped puddings, including (perhaps not coincidentally) Beeton's sweet “Bachelor's Pudding”: Tabitha Twitchit might very well have used crumbs in the “bag pudding” she made of the pastry which was “peeled off Tom Kitten” after his rescue, to which she had resourcefully added “currants . . . to hide the smuts” (65), consistent with Beeton's directions for this dish. But I have not yet unearthed a Victorian or Edwardian recipe for a roly-poly or bolster pudding which would validate Samuel Whiskers' demand. Evidently not a man to accept defeat easily, however, Samuel continues to undermine his wife's culinary authority by challenging her use of string to constrain their squirming, mewing pudding filling; by complaining about the quantity of pastry she had stolen; and by pronouncing that “[he does] not think it will be a good pudding” (59). He continues grumbling even as the pair bundle “half a smoked ham” and “mutton bones in a counterpane” (61) and flee for their lives when John Joiner arrives to rescue the doughy, if not doughty kitten (62).

Despite the foreignness of Anna Maria's name and the grotesqueness of their murderous plot that evokes the cannibalism associated with faraway cultures, Samuel and Anna Maria Whiskers are typical of Potter's characters for the Britishness of their diet. Throughout her tales, as Potter's characters imbibe cups and pots of tea, they enjoy traditional British dishes such as rabbit pie (The Tale of Peter Rabbit 11, The Tale of Mr. Tod 10); porridge (The Tale of Pigling Bland 43); bread, milk, and sausages (The Tailor of Gloucester 16); veal and ham pie (The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan 10), spinach and gammon pie (44), bread and jam (52), muffins, butter, and marmalade (12, 18), plum pudding (41); toffee, and peppermints (The Tale of Ginger and Pickles 19), biscuits and dried haddocks (21), sponge-cake and butter-buns (44), and the especial favorites of Anna Maria and Samuel Whiskers: bacon (24) and cream crackers (26), purloined from Ginger and Pickles's shop. In Samuel Whiskers, the mutton bones Tom Kitten discovers on his journey through the chimney – which, as Ruth MacDonald justifiably notes, foreshadow his skeletal remains if the rats are successful in their culinary enterprise (105) – are remnants of a meat that virtually epitomizes the diet of the nineteenth-century British male. Thackeray's description of the urban male reader of Fraser's Magazine in his 1841 essay “Memorials of Gormandizing” makes this point clear: “You are a family man, let us presume, and you live in that metropolis for half a century. You have on Sunday, say, a leg of mutton and potatoes for dinner. On Monday you have cold mutton and potatoes. On Tuesday, hashed mutton and potatoes; the hashed mutton being flavoured with little damp triangular pieces of toast, which always surround that charming dish” (318). That Thackeray, in the guise of M. A. Titmarsh, envisions the dinners for the remainder of the week to revolve around an equally predictable evolution of beef does little to negate the impression of the ubiquity of mutton dishes on English tables.

While Samuel Whiskers favors popular British dishes such as mutton chops, smoked ham, and roly-poly pudding, in her representation of a dish made of a live cat that “wriggled and squirmed until he was quite exhausted” (54), Potter also engages both the nineteenth-century's growing interest in exotic and novel foods and Western proscriptions against eating carnivorous animals. With increasing travel and exploration into foreign lands throughout the nineteenth century, the British public was gradually introduced to an expanding array of foods and dishes that challenged the relatively narrow parameters of the British diet. In Why Not Eat Insects? (1885), Vincent M. Holt propounds the virtues of insects as food, a dietary model that anticipates the unconventional tastes of characters such as Tommy Brock the badger, Mr. Tod's nemesis, who “ate wasp nests and frogs and worms” (The Tale of Mr. Tod 9); old Mr. Brown the owl, who is presented with “six fat beetles, which were as good as plums in plum-pudding” (The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin 32); and Jeremy Fisher, who enjoys a “butterfly sandwich” for lunch (24) and “roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce” for dinner with his friends, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise (The Tale of Jeremy Fisher 57).

Further defending a revision to the British diet, Peter Lund Simmonds reminds readers in The Curiosities of Food, or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom (1859) that the English naturalist, explorer, and anthropologist Alfred Russel Wallace was inspired by his travels up the Amazon in 1848 to remark:

But Holt explains the horror that might be inspired by the prospect of eating the kind of meat embodied by Tom Kitten: “Carnivorous animals, such as the dog, cat, fox, etc., are held unworthy of the questionable dignity of being edible by civilized man” (11). Despite the efforts of broad-minded writers such as Holt and Simmonds to expand the culinary repertoire of the British, and although, as Simmonds acknowledges, the Englishman “has gradually adventured upon, and now appreciates, a few select foreign delicacies” such as “lively turtle and caviar, reindeer tongue, an imitation Indian curry, and such like,” for the most part, “[it] is almost impossible to get people to adventure, or to experimentalize upon a new kind of food.” “There is a great want of courage and enterprise on this head among Englishmen,” he adds. “John Bull is resolved to eat, drink, and do only what he has been accustomed to” (Simmonds 6). Just as the narrator of The Tale of Jeremy Fisher is unequivocal in her rejection of Jeremy Fisher's gastronomic experimentation – declaring that while some might “consider [roasted grasshopper] a beautiful treat; . . . I think it must have been nasty!” (57) – and just as the drama depicted in The Pie and the Patty-Pan is the product of Duchess the Pomeranian's dreadful fear that she may be served mouse pie (10), the conclusion of Samuel Whiskers belies the nascent enthusiasm for carnivores and rodentia as food fit for the British table that Wallace and Simmonds evoke. While Potter's readers may have been willing to dabble in new gendered relationships with food, culinary tastes in her fiction remain staunchly true to British tradition.

The final pages of Samuel Whiskers resist excusing Anna Maria's self-assured boldness in the face of a domineering patriarch as simply the legacy of what the book's dedication page describes as a “persecuted (but irrepressible) race.” As in many of Potter's children's stories, the naughty, thieving, rapacious protagonists are not punished for their crimes and misdemeanors. In fact, they move on to become the progenitors of countless “children and grand-children and great great grand-children,” who enthusiastically uphold the Whiskers's family tradition of vandalism and stealing food (71). But conventional constructions of gender are markedly upended by Moppet and Mittens. Having deserted the kitchen and the baking of “‘dear little muffins’” (11), Moppet and Mittens “have grown up into very good rat-catchers,” who “find plenty of employment” in the village, and who, “by charg[ing] so much a dozen, . . . earn their living very comfortably” (72). The girl cats' occupation recalls Simmonds's report in The Curiosities of Food that “a professional rat-catcher [is] employed on each sugar plantation” in the West Indies, “and he is paid so much a dozen for the tails he brings in to the overseer” (Simmonds 65). These mercenary feminist felines, Moppet and Mittens, are so far removed from the model of femininity figured by their mother that “They hang up the rats' tails in a row on the barn door, to show how many they have caught – dozens and dozens of them” (74). Yet their unfortunate brother Tom, stripped of both his coat and all vestiges of manly courage, exhibits a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, as he “never durst face anything that is bigger than – A Mouse” (75–76). Through this juxtaposition of the sister and brother cats, Potter scores another hit in her attack on conventional Victorian constructions of gender.