The Apsley cookery book

From the librarian's dossier · AI-generated, grounded in the scanned text

The Apsley Cookery Book (1905), attributed to Mrs. John J. Webster, is a specialized culinary guide built around the uric-acid-free diet, aimed at readers managing gout, rheumatism, and related digestive complaints. Rather than a general household manual, it is organized as a therapeutic cookbook that restricts animal proteins and condiments while promoting vegetable, nut, and grain-based dishes. The book opens with an explanation of the dietary philosophy, including discussion of albumen content in foods and detailed food value tables, before moving into hundreds of numbered recipes covering soups, pastas and rice dishes, vegetables, puddings, nut cookery, breads, salads, and sauces. With 434 anchored food records, it offers modern readers a window into Edwardian-era therapeutic cooking, where nuts are treated as a nourishing alternative to meat and careful technique (steaming, double saucepans, precise thickening) is emphasized throughout. Sample meal plans near the end show how these dishes were meant to be assembled into daily eating patterns for both warm and cold weather. Readers today will find it as much a piece of dietary science writing as a recipe collection, reflecting contemporary medical thinking about diet and disease alongside genuinely usable Edwardian vegetarian recipes.

The book begins with an introductory section (section 1) laying out the uric-acid-free dietary philosophy, cookery hints, and food value tables, followed by two sample soup recipes. It then proceeds through a long run of numbered recipes organized by category: soups (section 2), pasta and rice-based savory dishes (section 4), a large vegetable recipe collection covering roughly 60 vegetables (section 5), desserts and puddings spanning two sections (sections 6 and 7), a nut cookery section emphasizing nuts as a meat substitute (sections 8 and 9), followed by bread, batter, and pastry recipes, and finally salads, sauces, sample meal plans, an appendix, advertising, and a recipe index (sections 9 and 10). Recipes are numbered sequentially through the book (for example, recipes 260 to 318 in section 7 and 369 onward in section 9), suggesting a continuous numbering scheme across categories rather than separate numbering per chapter.