Cookery for every household

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Cookery for Every Household is a sweeping domestic cookbook first published in 1914 by Florence B. Jack, former principal of the School of Domestic Arts in Edinburgh. Written to be usable by cooks of every skill level, it moves well beyond recipes to cover the whole running of a household kitchen: choosing and laying out a kitchen, selecting and maintaining ranges, gas stoves, oil stoves and the newer electric cookers, marketing and provisioning, and larder management. The bulk of the book is organized as a vast recipe encyclopedia, with over two thousand seven hundred anchored food entries spanning stocks and soups, fish, vegetables, sauces, meat, poultry, game, eggs, pastry, puddings, cold sweets, ices, cakes, breads, sweets and confectionery, sandwiches, beverages, and invalid cookery. It closes with guidance on table service, carving, napkin folding, floral decoration, menu planning, French culinary terminology, and a lengthy alphabetical index. The book reflects the sophisticated, French-influenced but thoroughly practical style of Edwardian British household cookery, aimed at housewives and household cooks managing anything from a full domestic staff to a modest family kitchen. Modern readers will find it a rich window into period kitchen technology, service customs, and the economical use of every part of an ingredient, from offal to leftover cold meats.

The book opens with a preface and general remarks on cookery, followed by extensive practical chapters on kitchen design, equipment, cleaning, pest control, ranges and stoves, and marketing and larder management (sections 1-5). It then moves into a very large numbered recipe corpus organized by category: stock and soup making (sections 6-13), fish (sections 13-20), vegetables and salads (sections 20-28), sauces (sections 29-31), meat by type and cut including beef, veal, pork, and offal (sections 32-43), poultry and game with forcemeats and garnishes (sections 44-50), eggs and omelets (sections 51-53), pastry, meat pies, and puddings both savoury and sweet (sections 53-69), cold sweets, creams, jellies, and ices (sections 70-79), hors-d'oeuvre and savouries (sections 79-84), sandwiches (section 84), invalid cookery (sections 85-88), breads, cakes, biscuits, icings, and confectionery (sections 88-99), beverages and specialty cooking methods such as chafing-dish and paper-bag cookery (sections 99-101), herbs, spices, condiments, and preserves (sections 101-102), and finally table service, carving, menu planning, and an alphabetical index with French culinary term translations (sections 103-110). Recipes are numbered sequentially into the thousands, and many sections group dishes under a named ingredient or technique heading rather than presenting isolated single recipes.