The Aardvark Blog

Model Cookery
14/08/2013

Just had in a copy of the  Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book, published by Warne;s the publisher of Beatrix Potter amongst others. begins with helpful advice on how to market and what you should have in your kitchen - very like the most cutting edge practical cookery books today, What has changed is what people eat now. Not sure you would have a bestseller in 2013 with a chapter headed 'To melt lard, to pickle pork'.

Nick Rennison produced a volume called the 'Rivals of Sherlock Holmes ', looking at other detective stories published in the Strand and other magazines around the same time as Doyle's stories were appearing. It occurs to me that there would be an equally good book to be had out of the Rivals of Mrs Beaton. The second-half of the nineteenth century saw a growth in affluence amongst the middle classes, and there were a raft of authors and publishers who set out to instruct them on how to cook and entertain. One of my favourite from that period is 'The Breakfast Book' published in 1865. I currently have a copy of this in stock, and when looking at it I never fail to marvel at the amount of meat and fat that the average person consumed at that period.