PREFACE. THE following receipts were collected during twenty years' experience in housekeeping, and have been written for the especial purpose of affording to heads of families, as well as to cooks, a knowledge of the elegancies and comforts of a good table, and of the easiest modes and the most proper seasons for procuring and preparing them. Particular attention has been given to the details of the table, as well as to the estimates introduced for regulating this important branch of household expenditure; and the most approved rules have been added for detecting whatever deleterious substances may have been mixed up with provisions of every kind. The best information has been collected in regard to milks, broths, and other diet adapted for infancy, debilitated constitutions, and consumption; and many receipts are inserted expressly for the comfort of seafaring men, and for the relief of artisans and the poor. The department of foreign European cookery is constructed according to the best practice, which a long residence abroad enabled the Author to appreciate; and in this branch of the work will be found receipts for many excellent dishes which have never before been described to the public. The mulakatanees and curries of India; the sweet pillaus, yahourt, and cold soups of Persia; the cubbubs, sweet yaughs, and sherbets of Egypt; the cold soups and mixed meats of Russia; the cuscussou and honeyed paste of Africa; a light imitation of turtle, and methods of dressing the real, &c. &c. have been, for the most part, inserted with the view of introducing a less expensive, a more wholesome, and a more delicate mode of cookery. DOMESTIC ECONOMY AND COOKERY. No nation has written more on the subject of economy than our own, and no nation has practised it less. Indeed, the mass of the population can receive little or no benefit from the clearest general precepts. When they are told economy is a good and useful thing, that it will secure a comfortable subsistence to their children in their infancy, and themselves in their old age, they hear and believe; but this will never teach them that 3lbs. of one sort of meat may be had for the same price as one of another*, or that they may make wholesome beer for themselves, at one eighth of the price that they pay, as their forefathers did, and their neighbours do, for poisonous porter. Such precepts must proceed from those that have devoted a considerable portion of their time to domestic concerns; and in no work can they with more propriety be given than in a cookery-book, * Were I not afraid of frightening my readers, I should have added, and that they may make one of these pounds go farther than three cooked in the ordinary way. This, however, the receipts will show. I once saw a French family, consisting of six grown persons, a child, and a jack-daw, who, by the by, was the heaviest of the eight on the meat, dine on one pound of lean veal, made into a rich ragout, with mushrooms, morcls, &c. (see receipt) and goose fat, the properties of which I have amply enlarged upon. This may astonish my country folks, as I assure them it did me; and in the expectation that the moral of it may impress itself on others as it did on myself, I place it thus forward as being the first thing that opened my eyes to the advantages of French cookery. I may further add, that this entire family was enjoying perfect health, and had never heard of many of those disorders, which, under the different appellation of nervous, bilious, &c. are so prevalent in this country. from the hands it is likely to fall into, from its embracing the objects of expenditure more than any other, and because the waste of the necessaries of life is, of all others, the most injurious. The arrangement of those receipts has been no trifling labour. I indulge, however, in the hope that, by pointing out the means of preventing waste, I may be enabled, in some degree, to diminish the cares of the rich, and encrease the happiness of the poor. The dishes of our own and other countries which are given, have been all dressed in my own kitchen; and the foreign ones which are not yet used in England I have had proved. I have assigned a reason for every thing, as far as the limits would permit, that the cook may understand what she does, and why she does it. In gardening, agriculture, &c. analysis and generalisation have been introduced, to the great ease of the learner, and advantage of the community. In cookery, generalisation has certainly been recommended, but very little practised, because that art, though indebted to some professional men, as Dr. Hill, (Mrs. Glasse,) Dr. Hunter, and Dr. Kitchener, for the three best cookery-books we have at present, engages still less than any other the attention of those whose education renders them best calculated to simplify and improve. Not that cookery is in itself any ways inferior to many others in which they pride themselves in excelling, but they neglect it from the very reason that should have induced them to lend their assistance to it, namely, its universal practice; and in this consideration. I perhaps may be excused when I say, that I treat more of universals than the few who have restricted that term to themselves. As I shall have frequently to use the word economy, let it be understood that it is not saving mean. Saving is the privation of a comfort or luxury; economy, the procuring it at the least expence. Though deeply impressed with the importance of economy, and though convinced of the facility with which it may be practised, and of the happiness which may be the result, still it is with a feeling far short of confidence that I propose the following system, when I look around me on the habitual extravagance of every rank, the depravity of servants, the inability of women to manage their own affairs, and the rooted prejudice against improvement, a prejudice that has prevented ournsople from benefiting by the better customs of their neighbours, which the profusion of money, and local and accidental circumstances, have prevented them from discovering, or (more hopeless still) have brought into disuse. The middling classes, so far from wishing to save, seem to consider profusion a mark of affluence. The higher orders, who are above this vanity, are, in most cases, equally ignorant of the state of their establishments: while the poor are proportionably more extravagant than either. In fact, I know not where any thing like economy is to be found amongst us, except in the reduced families of the higher, and sometimes of the middling ranks. It is worse than ridiculous to hear the English boasting of their charitable and benevolent institutions, and valuing themselves on a comparison with the virtuous and unobtrusive frugality of the French, and indeed of every other nation, when there is twice as much wasted by their menials as would, if fitly administered, maintain in honest independence the wretches whose name is a sanction for drunkenness in a tavern, or dissipation at a masquerade. "A French family would live well on what is daily wasted in an English kitchen." This national blemish has originated amongst the rich, in the enormous disproportion between the wealth of this and of other countries; amongst the poor, in the demand for workmen, and the consequent high price of labour which attends a flourishing state. The habits of extrava gance thus acquired, in subsequent reduction, by fall of wages, sickness, or any other cause, are no less heavy and calamitous than they were criminal before. The manhood of such persons is a succession of intemperance and want; their age is spent in a workhouse. But we must contrast them with the working classes of other countries, to be awakened to the wretchedness of a condition to which, unfortunately, its very prevalence renders us callous. To these causes, and, in a great measure, to the fall of the Roman Catholic religion, I am inclined to attribute the manifest decline of the culinary art. The frequency of fasts and jours-maigres forced the people to exert their ingenuity in dressing vegetables, fish, eggs, &c.; and Friar's chicken, Pope's posset, Bishop, and Monk, |