Practical household cookery

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Practical Household Cookery is an 1891 cookbook by E. Duret, a former manager of St. James' Hall, who frames cookery as both a science and an art. The book is thoroughly Anglo-French in character, moving from stocks and soups through sauces, eggs, garnishes and hors d'oeuvre, fish, meats, poultry and game, pies and puddings, vegetables, and finally desserts and frozen preparations. With 661 anchored food records, it is a dense, professionally-minded manual that blends everyday domestic dishes with elaborate restaurant-style preparations such as salpicons, quenelles, and iced bavarois creams. Readers will find detailed treatment of meat cuts, fish handling, and vegetable cookery alongside more refined dishes drawing on French technique and terminology. The book closes with a utensil list scaled to household size and a general index, underscoring its intent as a working kitchen reference rather than a casual read. For the modern reader it offers a vivid window into how an educated, French-influenced approach to cookery was presented to English-speaking households at the close of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on technique, economy, and presentation running throughout its many sections.

The book opens with a publisher's preface, table of contents, and an introduction laying out cookery as science and art, followed by remarks on meat cuts (section 1). It then proceeds through numbered chapters: soups and stocks (sections 1-3), sauces and vegetable purees (section 5), eggs and forcemeats leading into garnishes (section 6), hors d'oeuvre and fried preparations including offal (section 7), an extensive run of fish chapters organized by species (sections 9-11), then beef, veal, mutton, lamb, and pork (sections 11-12), ham, boar, venison, hare, rabbit, and poultry-selection notes (section 13), poultry proper (section 14), game birds (section 15), meat pies, puddings, and potted meats followed by potato and vegetable cookery (sections 16-17), and a closing dessert chapter covering puddings, souffles, jellies, and iced creams (section 19). The book ends with frozen desserts and preserves, a utensil list scaled for households of six to twenty-four persons, and a general index (section 20). Recipes throughout are numbered sequentially, and chapters are marked with roman numerals and descriptive remarks sections on ingredients.