Consult me

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

Consult Me is a sprawling household encyclopedia published in 1902 by Robert Kemp Philp, the compiler also known for Enquire Within. Organized alphabetically from Abdominal Ruptures to Yorkshire Pudding, it mixes cookery recipes, home remedies drawn from American reformed (botanical) medicine, household management advice, and rules for parlour games and card games into a single continuous run of entries. Modern readers will find recipes for beef, mutton, poultry, fish, cakes, puddings, preserves, and beverages sitting alongside remedies for ailments ranging from bronchitis to cholera to smallpox, plus instructions for billiards, whist, bezique, cricket, and croquet, gardening calendars, legal notes on landlord-tenant law and married women's property rights, and practical chemistry for inks, cements, and dyes. The book presents itself as an exhaustive one-volume reference for the Victorian and Edwardian household, aiming to answer nearly any domestic question a family might have. Its scope is genuinely encyclopedic rather than narrowly culinary, and the recipe count (over 1,200 anchored food entries) is matched by a substantial body of medicinal material (38 entries) and a smaller set of household-chemistry entries (8). Readers approaching it today should expect a snapshot of turn-of-the-century domestic life, medicine, and leisure rather than a curated modern cookbook.

The book is organized as a single alphabetical sequence of entries, running from A (Abdominal Ruptures, Abscess, Ale) through Y (Yellow Wax, Yorkshire Pudding), so that cookery, medicine, household chemistry, and games are interfiled rather than separated into distinct parts. Within this alphabetical run, entries cluster around headword topics, for example extended runs on Ale and Beer, Apples, Beef, Bezique and other card games, Cakes, Cheese and Chicken, Cholera, Ham, Lemon preparations, Mutton, Rabbit, Veal, and Wild Fowl. Some stretches are dominated by a single subject for many consecutive pages, such as the card game rules in sections 12 and 13, the cold water cure therapy in section 16, the ballroom dance instructions in sections 19 and 20, and the month-by-month gardening calendar in section 24. The final page (section 55) closes with pigment and wax recipes, a Yorkshire pudding recipe, and publisher advertisements for related reference works.