Modern cookery, for private families : reduced to a system of easy practice, in a series of carefully tested receipts, in which the principles of Baron Liebig and other eminent writers have been as much as possible applied and explained / By Eliza Acton.

  • Acton, Eliza, 1799-1859.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Modern cookery, for private families : reduced to a system of easy practice, in a series of carefully tested receipts, in which the principles of Baron Liebig and other eminent writers have been as much as possible applied and explained / By Eliza Acton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    completely explained, .may perhaps be more acceptable to the reader than a larger mass of materials vaguely given. “ Our directions for boning poultry, game, &c., are also, we venture to say, entirely new, no author that is known to us having hitherto afforded the slightest information on the sub- ject ; hut while we have done our utmost to simplify and to render intelligible this, and several other processes not generally well understood by ordinary cooks, our first and best attention has been bestowed on those articles of food of which the consumption is the most general, and which are therefore of the greatest consequence ; and on what are usually termed plain English dishes. With these we have inter- mingled many others which we know to be excellent of their kind, and which now so far belong to our national cookery, as to be met with commonly at all refined modern tables.” Since this extract was written, a rather formidable array of works on the same subject has issued from the press, part of them from the pens of celebrated professional gastronomers; others are constantly appearing; yet we make, nevertheless, but slight perceptible progress in this branch of our domestic economy. Still, in our cottages, as well as in homes of a better order, goes on the “ waste ” of which I have already spoken. It is not, in fact, cookery-books that we need half so much as cooks really trained to a knowledge of their duties, and suited, by their acquirements, to families of different grades. At present, those who thoroughly understand their business are so few in number, that they can always command wages which place their services beyond the reach of persons of moderate fortune. Why should not all classes participate in the benefit to be derived from nourishment calculated to sustain healthfully the powers of life? And why should the English, as a people, remain more ignorant than their conti- nental neighbours of so simple a matter as that of preparing it for themselves? Without adopting blindly foreign modes in anything merely because they are foreign, surely we should be wise to learn from other nations, who excel us in aught good or useful, all that we can which may tend to remedy