Amazing Accomplishments of 19th Century Female Entrepreneur

Agnes Bertha Marshall was born in 1855. Not much is known of her early life, aside from the fact that she grew up in a British middle class family. In 1883, when she was 28 years old, she moved to London where she started the Marshall’s School of Cookery.

On opening day, no one showed up.

Instead of giving up, she changed her tactics, and took out ads in newspapers. She advertised that she would teach domestic cooks how to do “high class” cookery. At the time, this meant an emphasis on French dishes.

These ads were targeted towards middle-class British families who aspired to imitate the upper-classes.

Her marketing campaign was so successful, she was teaching up to 40 students a day, 5–6 days a week. This kept her really busy, but she realized there was a ceiling on how much she could earn doing this.

And Mrs. Marshall was ambitious.

She also had a passion for ice-cream, but this was an expensive and labor intensive product to make. Ice had to be brought in from places like Norway, which made it pricey. Then it needed to be hand-cranked for 30–40 minutes in order to produce a pint of ice-cream.

Agnes Marshall showed her genius by inventing, and patenting, a device that used less ice and only took 3 minutes.

She featured the device in the beginning of her first cookbook, The Book of Ices.

She realized quickly that while book sales would bring in some money, it was the sale of her patented device that was really profitable.

And if one product could make her money — 600 products would really make her money.

She patented an ice-crusher and an “ice cave”, as well as selling non-patented products such as her own brand of ice box and freezing salts. All the products sold were embossed with her name. These included pots, pans, stoves — you name it, if it belonged in the kitchen, she sold it.

This included over 1,000 types of specialty ice-cream and gelatin molds.

She also sold ingredients such as her own brands of flavoring ingredients and safe food colorings. The latter was important since many of the food colorings available at the time were toxic, but hers were made only with edible plants.

She hired a team to design “Marshal brand kitchens” stocked with her appliances. They traveled around England to install these kitchens.

In 1886, she launched a magazine, The Table. It was published bi-monthly and featured recipes, menus, food buying guides… as well as articles on things such as the low quality of British butter.

Then she wrote a second cookbook and cleverly referred to recipes from her first cookbook to entice people to buy it as well if they didn’t already own a copy. She also told people if they had questions, they could attend one of the classes in her cooking school. She started a placement agency for her students to help them find good jobs.

After publishing a third cookbook, she started giving presentations to audiences in auditoriums all around England. These were so popular she decided to do a tour of America — which did not go over so well.

However, she used her time in the U.S. to gather up regional recipes for her next cookbook, which featured things like Chicago-style donuts, Saratoga potato chips, and corn-on-the-cob.

She was often ahead of her time.

Ten years before the waffle cone, one of her cookbooks featured a recipe for a cone-shaped “ice-cream holder” that was flavored with orange-water. And in 1901, she suggested the use of liquid oxygen so guests at the dinner table could make their own ice-cream.

While she never put this idea into practice, about a century later, Michelin Star Chef Heston Blumenthal started using liquid nitrogen to create ice-cream at his restaurant.

Unfortunately Agnes Marshall died before she turned 50, in 1905, due to injuries from a riding accident. Who knows what this forward-thinking entrepreneur might have come up with if she had lived longer?

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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