Kitchen Essays Agnes Jekyll 1922 antiek engels kookboek

Kitchen Essays
With Recipes and Their Occasions
Agnes Jekyll
1920
paperback in nieuwstaat
reprint uit 2008 van het oorspronkelijke boek uit 1922

First published in The Times (London) during the 1920s, Kitchen Essays explains the proper way to make Lobster Newburg while offering fascinating insight into the social history of England.

Agnes Jekyll (1860–1937) was the daughter of William Graham, Liberal MP for Glasgow and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites. A celebrated hostess and entertainer, her first dinner party included Robert Browning, John Ruskin, and Edward Burne-Jones. She lived in Surrey, England.

This English collection offers a look into a past, privileged way of life, where the lady of the house needed to plan for the cook’s absence since the less experienced kitchen maid would be filling in. Published in 1922, these recipes are for experienced cooks with sometimes very general directions for preparation, amounts, and seasoning. A recipe for a Dutch Omelet begins: “Prepare some batter with milk, flour and 4 yolks of eggs.” The recipes reflect food preferences of the time, with the ingredients often being put through sieves/puréed or encased in aspic. And a few ingredients were unfamiliar, although perhaps it’s just the terminology that’s changed.

But among the thirty-five essays, there are also recipes for breakfast, tea-time, Venetian and Florentine food, dinners, tray food, rather elegant picnics, meatless meals, food for the punctual and the unpunctual, and holidays. There are some surprising and simple ideas: “Salted almonds are expensive, and by many thought indigestible; they can be understudied by a packet of the American cereal Puffed Wheat. A few spoonfuls of this, crisped hot in the oven and lying invitingly on small mother-o’-pearl shells, or in some such decorative and labor-saving receptacles before each guest, will comfort the shy, stem the torrent of the fluent-obvious, and generally promote a flow of that pleasant conversation, such as the late Lord Acton yearned for when he bade his friend remember that ‘One touch of ill nature makes the whole world kin.’”

And the author’s delightfully readable style offers apt descriptions and frequent quotations: “Toast, to be good, demands a glowing grate, a handy toasting fork, and a patient watcher—counsels of perfection indeed, for the ideal rack is like friendship and the immortality of the soul, almost too good to be true.”

Agnes Jekyll felt that cooking should fit the occasion and temperament and states that “a large crayfish or lobster rearing itself menacingly on its tail seems quite at home on a sideboard of a Brighton hotel-de-luxe, but will intimidate a shy guest at a small dinner-party.” And that “a hardy sportsman should not be fed in the same way as a depressed financier.”