The new century cookery book

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

The New Century Cookery Book (1901) by Charles Herman Senn is a monumental professional cookery manual that bridges Victorian and Edwardian culinary practice. Senn, an experienced chef, presents this as an expanded update of his earlier work 'Practical Gastronomy,' combining scientific explanation of nutrition with exhaustive practical instruction for both professional kitchens and ambitious households. The book opens with the chemistry of food and digestion, moves through kitchen design, fuel, and equipment, and then proceeds methodically through stocks, soups, sauces, and seasonings before launching into an enormous sequence of courses: hors d'oeuvre, fish, meat and poultry entrees, game, vegetables, farinaceous dishes, salads, sweets, ices, savouries, eggs and cheese, and pastries. It closes with menu theory, specimen menus from many nations and eras, table service and wine guidance, a glossary of French culinary terms, and a detailed index. With over 1,400 anchored recipes, the text is dominated by elaborate French haute cuisine terminology and technique, reflecting the fine dining standards of grand hotels and formal households at the turn of the twentieth century. It is less a book for casual home cooking than a comprehensive professional reference, valuable today as a window into the ambitions, vocabulary, and material culture of Edwardian-era formal dining.

The book is organized into numbered chapters that progress from foundational science and kitchen management (sections 1 to 5) through stocks, soups, and sauces (sections 5 to 15), garnishes and forcemeats (section 16), then an extremely long sequence of course-based recipe chapters covering fish (sections 18 to 21), hot meat entrees by type of meat (sections 22 to 27), poultry and game entrees both hot and cold (sections 27 to 35), roasts and carving (sections 36 to 37), vegetables (sections 37 to 41), farinaceous dishes and salads (sections 42 to 43), sweet entremets, puddings, cold creams, jellies, cakes, and ices (sections 43 to 50), savouries, eggs, and cheese dishes (sections 50 to 52), and pastries and biscuits (section 54). The book concludes with an extensive treatise on menu composition and specimen menus from many countries and historical periods (sections 55 to 56), guidance on table service and wine (sections 57 to 58), a verse epitome of gastronomy, a glossary of French culinary terms, and a substantial alphabetical index with advertisements (sections 60 to 61). Numbered recipe entries run into the thousands, and chapters are frequently subdivided by ingredient or by hot versus cold service.