Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Over fourteen years as a journalist, I have written more than 2,000 articles. I’ve filed book reviews, exhibition reviews, columns, features, interviews and an investigation into bubble-wrap recycling. Nothing has generated so much interest, passion and sheer steaming outrage as the piece I wrote about my love of ironing. Letters were sent to the editor of The Times, friends emailed, friends’ mothers emailed, comments poured in online, social media went mad. The world divided into those who thought I was a tragic throwback chained to an ironing board and those who, like me, felt that when life’s problems seemed insurmountable, there was comfort in a stack of handkerchiefs ironed into perfect squares.

Cora Millet-Robinet would have understood me. In her indispensable The French Country Housewife she devotes five pages to the art of ironing. She addresses the preliminaries – ‘everything that was turned inside out for washing should be turned to the right side, because it will press less well if it’s inside out and, once ironed, you cannot turn it to the right side without crumpling it’ – before moving on to the sorting of the linen, the appropriate heating of the irons, the correct temperature for the stove, the merits of different irons and their handles, the usefulness of iron-stands, the necessity of a set of smaller irons for pleats and frills, the importance of goffering, the correct wood for an ironing board (poplar with ends of oak, topped with a piece of old tapestry or a blanket covered in serge and a very clean cloth), the use of a trestle table for stretching and folding, the correct battery of small padded shapes for putting inside puffed sleeves and the right sort of ironing gloves to allow comfortable handling of the irons without burning your hands (old linen or felt covered in leather). I had dipped into The French Country Housewife before, but it was only after we moved house last year that I read it cover to cover. I had left a flat where I was mistress of all I surveyed (I could literally stand in the small hallway and see into the other four rooms) and arrived at a late Victorian terrace on three floors with a bathroom on the landing. For months we clambered over boxes, builders, plumbers, joiners, decorators, carpet-fitters and boiler-men. The sitting-room mantlepiece became a graveyard of takeaway coffee cups filled with cigarette ends. Dust lay an inch thick on every surface. If I took my eye off my daughter, then beginning to crawl, I would find her clutching a rusty nail, an old staple or a splinter of wood. Spotting The French Country Housewife at the top of one of the unpacked boxes, I took it up to the loft where my husband and I were sleeping on a mattress and our daughter in her cot. Reading by the light of my phone so as not to wake her, I opened a chapter at random. All is order and harmony at Château de la Cataudière in the commune of Availles-en-Châtellerault near Vielle in western France. ‘Château’ is a little misleading. Madame Millet-Robinet’s domain is not a grand mansion in the manner of Chambord or Chantilly, but a gentilhommière – something like a squire’s country seat – set in 100 hectares of garden, farmland and woodland. Here, Cora Robinet, married to François Millet and mother of five children, learnt to run a farm, a household and a family. La Maison Rustique des Dames, first published in Paris in 1844–5 and later reissued in twelve updated editions, was, she wrote, ‘the fruit of my experience, not just something learned from books’. Think Mrs Beeton à la française. The handsome volume I held was published by Prospect Books in 2017, translated and edited by the food historian Tom Jaine. Prospect specializes in food history and while there is plenty to be found here ‘concerning provisions’, it is the chapters on the ‘duties and responsibilities of a mistress of the house’ that most appeal. I’m a sucker for a household manual. I used to lap up the housekeeping books on my mother’s shelves. There was Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House, which took the ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decline – that if you allowed broken glass, graffiti and garbage to go unchecked it would only lead to further abuse and neglect by residents – and applied it to the sitting room and kitchen. There was Jocasta Innes’s Home Time, which acknowledged that even if one likes bohemian living, one may not like actual dirt. And there was Shirley Conran’s Superwoman, which famously argued that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. My mum, I should add, was no domestic martyr but a glass-ceiling smashing, corporate superwoman. Millet-Robinet does not stuff mushrooms, but she does cook them into a ragout with butter, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper and soft breadcrumbs. She also serves them on fried bread (‘a much-appreciated dish’) and uses them as stuffing, cooked in backfat, for a truffled turkey. Where Martha Stewart is laboured – life really is too short to decorate individual candy bags for Hallowe’en trick-or-treaters – Millet-Robinet is brisk, resourceful and tireless. If The French Country Housewife were only a recipe book or a manual of household hints, it would be dull fare. But Millet-Robinet peppers and salts, garlics and stuffs her book with advice, not just about how to make one’s home a pleasant place to live in, but about how to live pleasantly in it. Yes, there are chapters on the nitty-gritty (‘Privies and emptying cesspits’, ‘Eradication of bed bugs, fleas and lice’) but, really, it is a treatise on eating, resting, entertaining and taking pleasure and pride in one’s rooms and possessions. I direct you to entries on: ‘The characteristics of a good cellar’, ‘Artichoke bottoms’, ‘Mirabelle plum jams’, ‘Quince ratafia’, ‘A box for haberdashery – A holder for yarn’, ‘Flower vases’ and the ‘Literary library’. This is where Millet-Robinet differs from modern ‘cleanfluencers’. The dastardly Instagram algorithm, knowing I will watch videos about grout mould, feeds me reel after reel of household ‘hacks’ – what used to be known as ‘tips’ – demonstrated by women whose greatest joy appears to be scrubbing U-bends or folding knickers into rectangles so crisp they stand up on their own. Now, I like a neat knicker drawer as much as the next neurotic, but I also recognize the sheer Sisyphean tedium of cooking, cleaning, laundering and hosing the toddler down after tea. Having polished the sitting-room floorboards with one of my husband’s old socks and a pot of Cambridge beeswax, I want to sit on the sofa with a novel, occasionally looking up to admire my handiwork, not go on polishing till the end of time. Millet-Robinet understands this. In an entry on ‘the evening hours’ she writes:

In summertime, the evening will be spent in looking after the children, supervising the garden, having a walk, reading, playing music, and just doing nothing – something which is so delicious of a warm summer’s evening. In winter, needlework, reading, music and drawing should occupy any spare time.

Millet-Robinet’s ideal library for a winter’s evening includes books on agriculture, horticulture and gardening, on the fine arts, domestic economy and medicine and on history, philosophy, religion, science, travel and theatre. There should be novels, poetry and tales from French, German, English, American, Spanish, Swedish and Russian literature. Not forgetting the Arabian Thousand and One Nights. ‘Well-chosen books’, she writes,

stretch the mind, improve the soul and banish the clouds of depression. The reader is happy, during the long hours of a winter night, to trace the wandering footsteps of an intrepid traveller, to lose herself in the dreams and fantasies of a well-loved poet, or to console herself with something uplifting, imbued with sound morals. A good book is sometimes the best of friends. It is always a wise counsellor.

I can take or leave the sound morals, but on everything else she is spot on. Her lists are irresistible. The ideal desk should have ‘an oilcloth blotting pad (which costs two francs), an inkpot, pens, paper, gummed envelopes, sealing wax, a little candlestick, a diary, a pair of long scissors, a paper-knife, account books, a box file or folders for papers, each with a label denoting their contents’. At a desk so equipped, who could fail to dispatch the day’s duties efficiently? A guest should be shown to their bedroom immediately and ‘nothing should be omitted to ensure their comfort. The candlesticks should have candles, the ewer full of water, the washstand perfectly clean and provided with soap, eau de Cologne, almond paste, pincushion etc.’ There should be three or four towels, frequently replaced, also writing paper and pens, a nightlight, some matches, a sugar caster and a teaspoon. At dinner, the mistress should think of delicate people who may feel the cold and provide them with footstools, footmuffs or footwarmers filled with boiling water. ‘In winter, the dining-room must be heated in advance.’ She can be stern. On ornaments, for example, she admonishes: ‘On the walls you should hang family portraits or good prints. You must ruthlessly set your face against those awful lithographs that you often find, even in town drawing-rooms. In my view, there is nothing in worse taste.’ The modern woman, meanwhile, ‘utterly abhors artificial flowers’ which ‘cannot hold a candle to natural blooms’. She paints a pleasing picture of domestic bliss. ‘A lady’s bedroom should be a refuge from disturbance, a place of rest and recuperation respected even by the family.’ Tell that to my daughter, now 2, as she empties my laundry basket, upends my handbag and bounces on my bed. One learns a lot along the way. Dusters made with cock’s feathers are the most durable. The seed pods of nasturtiums can be pickled just as you would capers with tarragon, samphire, elderflower, cloves, peppercorns and a little garlic in the brine. A bouquet of cut flowers wrapped in cabbage leaves should stay fresh for thirty hours and arrive in perfect condition. Turk’s Turban is the best pumpkin for purées. Hot chocolate should be beaten to make it more ‘unctuous’. I am neither romantic nor nostalgic enough to want to go back to the Millet-Robinet way of doing things. Reading the elaborate instructions for heating coppers, soaking sheets and beating linen makes me glad of my trusty washing machine and tumble dryer. I am grateful that water comes from a tap and not from a river or well. I wonder if Millet-Robinet would admire my rechargeable Dyson dust-buster or see it as a shameless cheat. In truth, I will probably never make my own pigskin andouilles or cure a lapwing salami. I cannot face the thought of gutting larks (‘the gizzard harbours stones, which are most disagreeable to encounter in the mouth’) and I do not have the patience for orange flower praline (‘carefully pick over 500 grams of orange flowers, that is to say, keep only their petals’). I am not French, I do not live in the countryside, and I am a harried working mother not a serenely starched housewife. But there is pleasure to be had in reading Millet-Robinet and profit in her methods. One day, when I have the time, when the plums are in season and no deadline looms, I will get around to her tempting Mirabelle jam.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Laura Freeman 2025