Cookery

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

First published in 1897, Cookery is a household culinary handbook by Marguerite Ninet that seeks to persuade English housewives that Continental (largely French) cookery is neither extravagant nor impractical for everyday use. Organized around the classic architecture of French domestic cuisine, the book moves from foundational stocks and sauces through soups, fish, eggs, vegetables, and on to poultry, game, desserts, and preserved foods. It blends traditional slow-cooked techniques, such as five-hour beef stock, with contemporary convenience products of the period, including Maggi soup packets and Charles Driessens' solidified foundation sauces. The text is practical in orientation, offering detailed guidance on kitchen cleanliness, proper care of copper, steel, tin, and aluminium utensils, and technique-focused instruction on thickening sauces, preparing fish, and roasting poultry and game. Recipes span from simple preparations like boiled vegetables and plain omelets to elaborate dishes such as galantines and larded pike. The book closes with an extensive alphabetical index and a publisher's catalog advertising unrelated periodicals and books on photography and cycling, typical of the era's bound promotional material. This is a useful window into late Victorian domestic cookery, written to bridge French culinary sophistication with English household economy.

The book proceeds in a clear progression typical of period cookbooks: an introduction and practical hints on kitchen management (section 1), followed by the foundational stocks and sauces that the author treats as the basis of good cooking (sections 1 and 2), then soups and fish (sections 2 and 3), eggs, potatoes, and vegetables (section 3), and later poultry, game, desserts, and preserved foods (section 5). The volume concludes with a comprehensive alphabetical index and a publisher's catalog of unrelated books and periodicals (section 6). Chapters are numbered with Roman numerals (Chapter IV through Chapter XIV are visible in the summaries), suggesting a sequential chapter structure that the provided sections only partially capture, since section 4 is missing from the supplied material.