Audiobook · read by volunteers
Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers
Elizabeth E. Lea (1793–1858)
Read by Gesine, Martin Clifton, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Zale Schafer (Rose May Chamberlin Memorial Foundat, Lisa Chau, Peter Yearsley, Deborah Clark, Kristen McQuillin, Cori Samuel, Chris Vee · 20 chapters · 8 h 47
About the book
Before supermarkets, refrigerators and recipe websites, a young wife setting up her first household often had to work things out by trial and error. Elizabeth Lea, writing for exactly such readers, gathered what she had learned from experienced housekeepers and from her own experiments into one volume. Domestic Cookery covers meats and poultry, soups, puddings, cakes and preserves, but it goes beyond the kitchen, with advice on household management and even on the cultivation of flowers. The recipes are written in the compact style of the nineteenth century, with pinches, teacups and cooking times that rely on judgment more than gadgets. For anyone interested in food history, it is a rich portrait of American domestic life in its day, full of practical wisdom and unexpected details. Twenty chapters, almost nine hours, and plenty to savour.
Introduction
Elizabeth E. Lea (1793–1858) compiled Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers for readers who, like her, had taken on the duties of running a home with little preparation. In her own preface she describes how she gathered information from people of experience and then added the results of her own experiments. The edition recorded here dates from 1866. Because the text is organised by subject, you can follow it from beginning to end or listen to a single chapter on its own, according to taste and curiosity. Cooks will enjoy the old measures and methods, and historians the glimpse of daily provisioning in a world before refrigeration.
Books of this kind were a staple of nineteenth-century households. They functioned as cookbook, medicine cabinet and household manual at once. Lea’s work moves from meats, poultry and soups to puddings, pastry, preserves and drinks, and the closing chapters broaden the scope with general remarks and a section on the cultivation of flowers. The word receipt, used in place of recipe, is a reminder of the period. For modern listeners the interest is partly culinary and partly historical. The quantities, methods and ingredients show what ordinary people ate, how they preserved it and what they expected of a well-run home. Some advice will make you smile, and some will make you grateful for modern kitchens.
The recording is divided into 20 chapters and lasts almost nine hours. It was read by a team of LibriVox volunteers.
It is an unusual choice for listening, but a rewarding one for anyone curious about food, domestic history or the long lineage of the cookbook.
Public domain
Elizabeth E. Lea died in 1858: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text