Modern cookery, in all its branches

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

This is a dossier for Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches by Eliza Acton, a 19th-century catalog record dating the edition to 1884. The book is a comprehensive household cookery manual organized around meats, fish, soups, sauces, pastry, puddings, preserves, cakes, beverages, bread, and a closing chapter of foreign and Jewish cookery. Its preface positions the work as a corrective to careless domestic cooking, promising precise ingredient summaries and cooking times aimed at inexperienced cooks. Readers will find over a thousand anchored food entries across chapters devoted to trussing and carving, soup stocks, fish selection and cookery, sauces and forcemeats, roasting and stewing fundamentals, and the full range of meats, poultry, and game, followed by vegetables, pastry, puddings, sweet dishes, preserves, cakes, confectionery, and drinks. A vocabulary of French culinary terms accompanies the recipes throughout, reflecting the book's blend of English domestic tradition and French technique. The final chapters extend into curries, potted meats, and dishes described as Jewish, Indian, German, and other foreign cookery, closing with an index and period publisher advertisements. This dossier draws only from the catalog metadata and the book's own section summaries, offering modern readers a guide to the text's structure, era-specific practices, and points of caution before approaching the original recipes.

The book proceeds in numbered chapters that the section summaries trace in order: an opening preface and French culinary vocabulary (section 1), followed by a lengthy table of contents (sections 1-2), trussing and carving instruction (section 3), and then soups (sections 3-8), fish (sections 8-11), shellfish (section 11), gravies and sauces (sections 11-15), store sauces and condiments (section 16), forcemeats (sections 16-17), fundamental cooking methods such as boiling, roasting, steaming, and braising (sections 17-18), and then extended chapters on beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork (sections 19-25), poultry and game (sections 25-28), curries and potted meats (sections 28-29), vegetables (sections 29-31), pastry and pies (sections 32-34), omelets and fritters (sections 34-35), maccaroni and puddings (sections 35-40), sweet dishes and jellies (sections 40-43), preserves, jams, and pickles (sections 45-47), cakes and gingerbread (sections 48-49), confectionery and ices (sections 50), cordials, wines, punches, and coffee (sections 51-52), bread-making (sections 52-53), and a final chapter of foreign and Jewish cookery (sections 53-54). The book closes with an index and unrelated publisher advertisements for other Longmans, Green & Co. titles (sections 56-57).