“Rice puddings made without milk”: Mother Seacole reforms “home habits” in the Crimea

In her autobiographical narrative Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857), Mary Seacole both claims and reforms the idea of the British home fit for its Empire, with herself as mother. Analysing Seacole’s text and the press dispatches of the war reporters who helped make her fame, this chapter focuses on Seacole’s ability to provide a taste of home, but also exposes the weakness of British troops on the front line. In describing her own particular culinary and medical skills, with which she had tended to British soldiers and support staff in the Crimean War, she implicitly criticises the tacitly white British domestic ideal and the fighting men it had produced.