The Experienced English Housekeeper

MP3 Audio CD. The Experienced English Housekeeper by Elizabeth Raffald was a ground-breaking book at the time it was first published, in 1769, and it provides useful and entertaining insight for readers looking for information about how housekeeping was done in the 18th century, especially about the way food was made.

This volume is much more than a cookery book ? it is an invaluable document that reveals a lot about everyday life two and a half centuries ago. It contains over 900 recipes, including soups, main courses, desserts as well as pickles and essences. The recipes come with straightforward and easy to understand instructions, making them all very easy to prepare, even though they do not contain a separate list of the ingredients. The book contains three parts and a set of appendices.

Each of the main parts are dedicated to a type of dishes ? the first chapter deals with soups, meat, fish, pies and puddings, the second with desserts, the third with pickles and distilled essences. The appendices provide useful information about what ingredients can be found fresh in the different seasons of the year and about how to lay a grand table.

The author, Elizabeth Raffald, was a trail blazer in many fields. She was one of the very first women entrepreneurs in England, she ran a shop where she sold cooked meat products, she was the first to compile a street directory and also had an agency that provided employment opportunities for servants. She wrote not only about cookery and housekeeping ? subject matters that she knew very well as a mother of 16 children - but also about midwifery and, for a while, she ran a registry office, too. Her cook book was a huge success at the time it was published and it enjoys great popularity even today, still being used as reference by the most well-known chefs and cuisine writers.