Anglo-Indian cookery at home

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

Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home is an 1895 recipe collection by Henrietta A. Hervey, documenting the domestic cuisine developed by British households living in India during the colonial period. The surviving cookbook content, concentrated in section 2, offers a compact but rich record of savory dishes, puddings, chutneys, sumbaloos, and pickles that blended British household cookery with Indian ingredients and techniques. Recipes such as Poofadh, Chillie-Fry, Goanese Tasta, and Foogard sit alongside puddings made from banana, plantain, rice, and coconut, revealing a cuisine built around adaptation and improvisation. The book also gives practical instruction on foundational techniques, including making curry powders and pastes, extracting coconut milk, preparing tamarind water, and cooking apums (hoppers) and chapaties. Modern readers should note that much of the surviving material in this particular scanned or archived copy is not cookery content at all: sections 3 and 4 consist of publisher's advertisements and catalog listings bound into the volume, offering an unintentional window into the broader publishing world of the 1890s rather than into Hervey's own kitchen. As a result, this dossier draws its culinary picture almost entirely from a single section, supplemented by a large set of anchored food records confirming the depth of recipe content originally present.

The cookbook proper is organized by dish category: savory dishes, puddings and sweets, fresh chutneys and sumbaloos, bottled chutneys, and pickles, followed by a miscellaneous section on kitchen implements, ingredients, and core preparation techniques (curry powders and pastes, tamarind water, coconut milk, hoppers, and chapaties). This structure is visible in section 2. Sections 3 and 4 are not part of the cookbook's culinary organization at all; they are publisher's catalog material bound with the volume, listing sporting, recreational, and literary titles, with an alphabetical index at the end of section 4.