Practical household cookery

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

Practical Household Cookery is an 1891 cookbook by E. Duret, a former manager of St. James' Hall, who frames cooking as both a science and an art. Aimed at household kitchens but written with the technical precision of a professional chef, the book opens with instruction on meat cuts, kitchen equipment, and cleanliness before moving through an ambitious sequence of French-influenced culinary chapters. It covers stocks and soups, sauces and flavored butters, eggs and forcemeats, garnishes and hors-d'oeuvres, an enormous range of fish and shellfish, and detailed treatments of beef, veal, mutton, lamb, pork, ham, game, and poultry. Later sections address meat pies and puddings, extensive vegetable and potato cookery, and a full dessert chapter of puddings, souffles, jellies, and iced creams. The book closes with a utensil list scaled to household size and a detailed general index. With roughly 661 anchored food records, this is a substantial reference work bridging English domestic cookery and elevated French technique, useful to modern readers as a window into how an educated Victorian household cook was expected to think about ingredients, timing, and presentation across an enormous repertoire of dishes.

The book proceeds as a sequence of numbered chapters following classic French culinary organization: introduction and meat remarks, stocks and soups, sauces and vegetable purees, eggs and forcemeats, garnishes and hors-d'oeuvres, fish, then a long run through beef, veal, mutton and lamb, pork, ham and game meats, poultry, game birds, meat pies and puddings, vegetable cookery, and finally desserts and frozen sweets. Recipes are numbered continuously across sections (visible numbering runs into the 700s by section 17), and many entries are grouped by ingredient or technique with introductory remarks on selecting and handling that ingredient. The volume ends with a utensil list scaled by household size and a general index for navigation.