The Cook & Housewife's Manual
Edinburgh, Oliver & Boyd, 1864. Dods, Margaret. The Cook & Housewife's Manual. (11th Ed) Oliver & Boyd: Edinburgh, 1864. 12mo (190x115mm) recased, burgundy cloth, gilt lettered bds 624pp.
Second-hand hardcover
DODS, Mistress Margaret (pseud) [JOHNSTONE, Christian Isobel (1781 - 1857)]
The Cook and Housewife's Manual: a practical system of modern domestic cookery and family management; containing a compendium of French cookery, and of fashionable confectionary, preparations for invalids and convalescents, a selection of cheap dishes, and numerous useful miscellaneous receipts in the various branches of domestic economy.
Edinburgh : Oliver and Boyd, 1864. Eleventh edition, revised, second impression. First published 1826. Printed by Oliver and Boyd.
Duodecimo (190x115mm) professionally recased, full burgundy cloth boards, gilt title to spine, new endpapers, 624pp : [A]¹², B - 2C¹². All edges lightly agetoned and faintly soiled; pages some browning, light occasional foxing, not affecting the text; ink note to margin p.221; else crisp and clean.
¶ Johnstone, novelist, journalist, editor, and one of the leading literary figures of early nineteenth-century Scotland, founded the Inverness Courier with her husband in 1817. Responsible for much of the paper's domestic and editorial content, she subsequently reworked this material into The Cook and Housewife's Manual. A close associate of Sir Walter Scott, she concealed her authorship beneath the pseudonym "Margaret (Meg) Dods", adopting the name of the formidable landlady of St Ronan's Inn in Scott's St Ronan's Well (1823).
The work is among the most original cookery books of the nineteenth century. This edition contains 1,254 numbered and indexed household receipts, the greater part devoted to cookery, with a substantial body of traditional Scottish dishes. The recipes are introduced and punctuated throughout by the proceedings of the fictional "Cleikum, or St Ronan's Culinary Club", a convivial society of self-appointed gastronomes whose members—including characters borrowed from Scott's fiction—provide a running satirical commentary in a series of extensive footnotes. The result is an unusual synthesis of practical cookery, literary invention, and social observation, in which discussions of national identity, domestic economy, taste, and contemporary manners are woven into a remarkably accomplished household manual.
Johnstone wrote for an increasingly prosperous middle-class readership, advocating careful, economical cookery founded upon seasonal ingredients and precise technique while maintaining a distinctly Scottish culinary identity. More than a domestic manual, The Cook and Housewife's Manual is an important document in the history of Scottish foodways and one of the foundational texts of Scottish gastronomic literature. Its influence was acknowledged by later authorities including F. Marian McNeill, Jane Grigson, and Alan Davidson, while modern scholarship has increasingly recognised the work as a sophisticated blend of culinary instruction, literary satire, and cultural nationalism.
A particularly attractive later edition of one of the classics of Scottish cookery, uncommon in such well-preserved condition.
Item #11308
Price: $350.00 AUD