The thorough good cook

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The Thorough Good Cook is a sprawling 1895 English cookbook by George Augustus Sala, who claims fifty-five years of culinary study and personal testing of every recipe he presents. Aimed at general readers, mistresses of households, and working cooks alike, the book combines practical English cookery with substantial international material, surveying Greek, Russian, French, American, German, Spanish, and Scottish culinary traditions before settling into an extensive, numbered recipe collection organized by course and category. Readers will find hundreds of anchored food recipes spanning soups, fish, entrees, roasts, game, sauces, vegetables, salads, hors-d'oeuvres, puddings, ices, and drinks, alongside commentary on breakfast customs, curry technique, and the proper handling of leftovers. Sala writes with strong personal opinions, criticizing excessive meat at breakfast, defending broiling over frying for chops, and confessing a personal dislike of potatoes even while acknowledging their importance. The book blends Victorian formal dining recipes such as galantines, aspics, and chartreuses with homely economical dishes such as hash, bubble and squeak, and scraps cookery, making it a useful window into both elite and everyday English kitchen practice at the close of the nineteenth century. A general index and topical discussions close the volume.

The book opens with a three-part preface addressed to the general reader, the lady of the house, and the cook (section 1), followed by chapters surveying foreign cuisines including Greek, Russian, French, American, German, Spanish, and Scottish cookery (sections 1 to 2). It then moves through thematic essays on breakfasts, salads, Italian pastas, curry, scraps, and old-fashioned puddings (section 3), then confectionery, pies, savouries, potatoes, eggs, and oysters (section 4), and chops, partridges, cheese, drinks, and coffee (section 5). From section 7 onward the book becomes a numbered recipe manual organized into large courses: soups (sections 7 to 8), fish (sections 10 to 12), entrees of poultry, game, and meat (sections 13 to 14), roasts and poultry (sections 15 to 16), game and offal (section 17), beef, mutton, curries, and sauces (sections 18 to 19), vegetables (sections 20 to 21), salads, hors-d'oeuvres, and eggs (section 21), and finally desserts, puddings, ices, drinks, and miscellaneous preparations (sections 23 to 25). The book closes with American breakfast dishes, porridges, fruit preservation, and a general alphabetical index (sections 25 and 27).