Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in the food history and domestic culture of the nineteenth-century West
- Cooking enthusiasts who enjoy browsing old recipes and tracing culinary history
- Students of family life, gendered division of labor, or material culture
- Teachers and writers who need free public-domain English domestic materials
Not a good fit for
- Everyday cooks who want only modern quick recipes with precise measurements
- Readers who are not comfortable with the English original and old-fashioned phrasing and need a Chinese translation
- Beginning cooks who expect a heavily illustrated step-by-step cookbook
Reading tips
- Read the chapters on entertaining and the order of courses first, then return to the recipes; the book's logic becomes clear faster.
- Keep a pen handy and note old measures and stove descriptions as you go, comparing them with today's methods.
- There is no need to read from cover to cover; jump by ingredient or type of dish and use it as a reference.
- If you are writing food history, excerpt the passages on table setting and hospitality as primary material.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
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Comments
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About the author
Mary F. Henderson (1842–1931) was an American author known for her books on household management and cookery. Public information about her life is limited; her representative work is Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving. Judging from its title and subject, the book addresses home readers, explaining everyday cooking methods and the arrangement of dinners for guests, and belongs to the practical domestic-writing tradition popular in the English-speaking world in the later nineteenth century. Such works are typically characterized by clear, workable steps and advice close to daily life, helping readers prepare meals at home and organize gatherings. Henderson's style is plain and direct, emphasizing usefulness rather than display. Her writing offered homemakers of her time a reference guide to cooking and hospitality, and it remains a readable source for the study of nineteenth-century food culture and domestic life.
