Domestic and economical cookery recipes

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Domestic and Economical Cookery Recipes is an 1897 household cookbook by Lillie Richmond, blending high-class culinary technique with practical, budget-conscious family cooking. Drawing on 458 anchored food records and a handful of medicinal entries, the book moves from elegant hors-d'oeuvres and clear soups through fish, meat, game, and poultry cookery, into extensive treatments of sauces, pastry, puddings, ices, jellies, cakes, and preserves. It closes with invalid cookery, cold meat dishes, pickles, household staples like browning and baking powder, and an index followed by period advertisements. The recipes reflect a Victorian middle-class kitchen striving for both economy and refinement, offering everything from Cheese Aigrettes and Galantine of Fowl to Cottage Pie and Orange Marmalade. Interspersed are branded products such as Bird's custard powder, Hovis flour, and Milkmaid condensed milk, revealing the commercial culture surrounding domestic cookery of the era. The final sections, including a newspaper clipping about Richmond's medal for cookery lectures in Huddersfield and testimonials from figures like Mrs. A. B. Marshall, situate the author within the professional cookery-teaching world of late Victorian Britain. Modern readers will find a text that is both a practical recipe collection and a window into the domestic economy, technology (notably gas cooking), and consumer culture of 1897 middle-class households.

The book is organized into 11 sections that move from savory to sweet and finally to reference material. It opens with hors-d'oeuvres, savouries, and soups (section 1), then fish and meat cookery (section 2), followed by comprehensive joint-by-joint meat and vegetable instructions and poultry trussing (section 3). Game and poultry continue into sauces and pastry basics (section 4), then an extensive run of pies, tarts, and puddings (section 5), desserts, souffles, and jellies (section 6), more jellies, ices, breads, and cakes (section 7), and further cakes, biscuits, and branded Hovis recipes leading into invalid cookery (section 8). Section 9 covers invalid cookery, cold meat dishes, preserves, and miscellaneous kitchen basics like curing and rendering fat. The book concludes with an alphabetical index, a biographical newspaper clipping, and promotional material (section 10), and finally an index of advertisements and testimonials (section 11).