Had you arrived at the Old Rectory at a time when the housekeeper, Miss Worm, and her assistant, a nineteen-year-old village girl named Martha Seely, were baking or cooking, you may well have found them doing something that until recently had not been done at all—carefully measuring out ingredients. Until almost the middle of the century instructions in cookbooks were always wonderfully imprecise, calling merely for “some flour” or “enough milk.” What changed all that was a revolutionary book by a shy, sweet-natured poet in Kent named Eliza Acton. Because Miss Acton’s poems weren’t selling,
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