Tried favourites cookery book

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Tried Favourites Cookery Book is a substantial household manual by Mrs. E. W. Kirk, presented here in its tenth edition (1909). It belongs to the tradition of comprehensive British domestic cookery books that combine everyday recipes with household management advice, medical remedies, and practical kitchen science. The book moves from soups and stocks through fish, meat, game, and vegetables, into an extensive vegetarian section, then sauces, forcemeats, and egg dishes, before turning to the vast pudding, pastry, cake, and confectionery repertoire that dominates its middle chapters. It closes with jams, preserves, beverages, and a long run of household and laundry advice, home remedies, and stain-removal instructions, ending with publisher testimonials and period advertisements. With 1,228 anchored food records alongside a smaller number of household and medicinal entries, the book reveals itself as a working reference meant to serve a household across cooking, health, and domestic maintenance. Readers today will find it a rich window into Edwardian domestic life, showing how food, home remedies, and household chores were treated as a single continuous body of practical knowledge. The scale and variety of recipes, from mock turtle soup to treacle pudding to furniture polish, make it valuable both as a culinary record and as social history of the middle-class household kitchen of its era.

The book is organized into sequential culinary chapters that mirror the courses of a meal and the tasks of a household. It opens with handy measures and 'golden rules for the kitchen' (section 1) before moving through soups (sections 1-2), fish (sections 2-3), and beef, mutton, veal, and game (sections 3-6). Vegetable cookery and a substantial vegetarian section follow (sections 6-8), then sauces, forcemeats, stuffings, cheese and egg dishes (sections 8-9). A very large pudding, pastry, and dessert section spans several chapters (sections 10-14), followed by cakes, biscuits, and 'American recipes' (sections 14-16), and an 'Invalid Cookery' section for the sick and convalescent (section 16). Later sections shift into a home medical guide with remedies and poultices (sections 16-18), then jams, jellies, marmalades, and beverages (sections 18-19), and finally an extended household management section covering kitchen preparations, laundry, cleaning, stain removal, and domestic remedies (sections 19-22). The book closes with promotional testimonials and advertisements (section 23).