An American by birth, ERP lived in London and travelled widely in Europe, generally by bicycle, and championed cycling and cooking as good for the soul as well as the body – especially for women. Not for her the languid drawing-room beauty eating a small soft boiled egg. She wanted women to work up an appetite. To be greedy.

Greedy is not the same as self-stuffed, which is just as bad as self-starved. You have to love food in all its glory to be greedy. And that means some days you might not eat at all if what is on offer is horrible. I have travelled and preferred to go hungry for a day, knowing I could get home and sleep a short night in the certainty of a home-cooked breakfast of my own eggs, and bacon from a pig I used to know.

Gluttony, not greed, is one of the seven deadly sins. Greed can be forgiven because it has, at its heart – or maybe its stomach – a roué’s search for the beauty of the season. Wild salmon. Truffles. Grouse. Chanterelles. English pears with skin as green and firm as a pond-frog. Sprouts after the first night of frost.

ERP deplores the robbery of the female by the male – that man reserves for himself the best of everything and by a sleight of hand convinces woman that it is her nature not to want to eat. Yet ERP was not a feminist or even a Suffragist. The year after her Guide was published in 1896, Millicent Fawcett founded The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. ERP did not join. Instead she believed women are better off attending to their own world than bothering too much with what men have to offer. Exalting the making and eating of food as a daily work of art was right and true, but she ignored the miseries of women allowed nothing other than domestic matters, or those having to manage with a pound of mince.

But when I read her, loving food, cooking food, eating food – I remember Virginia Woolf in A Room Of One’s Own (1929) lamenting the terrible dinner served to women students at Cambridge compared to the luxurious fare offered to the men. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

KITCHEN POLITICS

ERP would have agreed with that simple statement – although she would have ignored the complex economic relationship between what a woman can earn and what she may eat. Now, women have much of the financial independence (if not the parity) that Woolf was writing about. Yet – whether we are too fat or too thin – food is still a feminist issue.

ERP was radical in her belief that women should enjoy cooking. She was writing for a class of women who could afford a cook – not nearly as expensive in real terms as it would be today – but for whom it was a matter of class politics and snobbery not to cook DIY. To campaign for eating as the natural result of cooking repairs a badly damaged link in the female psyche – one that goes on needing to be repaired.

Now, while celebrity chefs do their best to seduce us into cooking, the pinging microwave and the ready-meal chops up the sensual connection between preparation, anticipation, and the well-earned leisure of sitting down to a lovely meal you have made. Which is why reading ERP on food is absurd and uplifting; she returns to cooking and eating the one ingredient that is more expensive than truffles or caviar: time. We have foodstuffs everywhere, more than at any other moment in history, yet no time to cook well or to eat well.

Time – even tiny amounts of it, can be enjoyed in food preparation. The sandwich is ERP’s fast-food – and her descriptions of wrapped paper packages and snow-chilled Alsace transform the office lunch into an encounter with the infinite. “Between slices of good bread place thick uncompromising pieces of beef or mutton… lettuce, celery, watercress, radishes, not one may you not test to your own higher happiness… and your art may be measured by your success in proving the onion to be the poetic soul of the sandwich.”

Sandwiches have souls. Who knew? What could be better than sitting down to read a food classic, like this one, with a glass of cold prosecco and a sardine sandwich on thin brown bread with wafers of pink radish peeping out? Food and love; food and books. Read all you like; love all you can. Cook extravagantly. Eat with pleasure.

Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s book, A Guide For The Greedy By A Greedy Woman, can be bought second-hand via amazon.co.uk and abebooks.co.uk

Words: Jeanette Winterson Art: Tracey Emin

Greedy women