'An Experienced Cook'

Every Family's Cookery Book

Halifax, William Nicholson & Sons, 1868.
Second-hand hardcover

'An Experienced Cook'. Every Family's Cookery Book. William Nicholson & Sons: Halifax, 1868. 8vo (150x90mm) green buckram, gilt spine, 416pp, 10 engraved plates. Recased, new eps, some offset toning, sm rep tear to pps1-5;

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'An Experienced Cook'

Every Family's Cookery Book; or, plain and practical directions for properly preparing, cooking, and serving-up all sorts of provisions, comprising meats, poultry, fish, game, and vegetable food.  Also, soups, gravies, sauces, pies, puddings, pastry, sweet dishes, sweetmeats, cakes, bread, wines, ale, beer, porter, pickles, &c., &c., &c. Directions for carving.  The choosing and buying of fish, flesh and fowl. 

Halifax : William Nicholson & Sons and London : S D Ewins Jr & Co, 1868.  Second impression¹, first published 1864.

Octavo (150x90mm) green buckram boards, gilt lettered and decorated spine, new end-papers, 416pp : [A]⁸, B-Z⁸. Engraved frontispiece and title page, ten in-text engraved plates of carving; numerous in-text wood block engraved vignettes.  Professionally and sympathetically recased; mid-twentieth century; bookseller ticket "John Lyle, Bookseller Harpford, Sidmouth, Devon" to front pastedown; edges trifle dusty and faintly age-toned; a few folded corners; small closed 1cm edge tear to pps 1-5; pps 31, 152 and 207 lightly offset toned from a laid-in newspaper clipping; faint occasional foxing not affecting the text.

There is a chapter on eels, one for savoury pies, and a goodly number of receipts for black and white puddings and other economical British pork charcuterie,   Contemporaneous with the first edition of Isabella Beeton's The Book of Household Management, but more reflective of Northern British and country cooking.

A good copy of a very scarce mid-Victorian cookery book for the moderate middle-class kitchens of West Yorkshire.

§  This edition unrecorded; OCLC records one holding, 1864 edition, University of Leeds

¹ Presumably.  The text of the University of Leeds digital copy is exactly the same, save the imprint/publisher statement at the foot of the title page is different.

Item #10557

Price: $250.00 AUD