Before Betty Crocker there was Mrs. Beeton

important official at the track. Destined for finer things, she studied in Heidelberg, where she learned German and French. After marrying at 19, she set up house in a new London suburb, and in many respects shared the life that her readers either lived or hoped to live.

The biographical record is thin. (Lack of material caused Strachey to abandon his proposed biography of Mrs. Beeton.) The record has also been muddled by partisan biographers and meddling descendants unable to separate fact from myth. Most of them despised Sam Beeton, whom they accused of working his wife to death at 28, soon after she gave birth to her second child.

Hughes, who has taken advantage of newly discovered family papers, expends a good deal of energy revisiting old controv-ersies that will mean little or nothing to American readers. She sometimes overinterprets the sparse material at hand. At the same time, her searching social eye does wonders with the small cache of letters between Isabella and Sam, written during their courtship. Annotating each line, she constructs a detailed picture of fashions and social customs at the high-water mark of the Victorian age. For readers of Dickens and Trollope, this section of the book is pure gold.

Carefully unraveling the histor-ical record, Hughes makes a

compelling circumstantial case that Sam Beeton contracted syphilis in his bachelor days, passing the disease on to his wife and eventually dying of it at 46, after years of increasingly erratic behavior. At The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine he created a scandal by encouraging a long-running discussion, in the letters column, of sadomasochistic practices involving corsets and whips.

It was only after her death that Mrs. Beeton's career truly took off, as her masterwork spun off dozens of smaller titles (including, in recent years, Microwaving With Mrs. Beeton). Like Betty Crocker, she lived on as a shrewdly marketed symbol. Her name, attached to meat pies and fruit tarts, still carries weight in the marketplace, evoking wholesome English cooking and bedrock national values. In the end, the Victorian tub turned out to have an astoundingly long shelf life.