A hundred years ago, in the heyday of the Victorian era, the principles of cooking were finally established. New recipes appeared and wonderful dishes were worked out in practice. Their creation and decoration took time and effort worthy of kings.
Queen Victoria had been reigning monarch for over 55 years when the Encyclopedia of Practical Cooking was published in England in the 1890s. A couple of years later, "Modern Cooking for the Family" came out, which became the prototype of today's recipe books, with a detailed composition of products and cooking technology. In total, over 100 popular cookery books were published in the 19th century, which were combined into eight thick volumes of the Encyclopedia. It is an illustrated work that covers everything related to the art of cooking and table setting.
In many ways, the Encyclopedia format is recognizable to modern housewives. It contains recipes, illustrations and food descriptions. Sometimes recipes are more poetic than accurate. So, in one of them it is recommended to take a lump of butter the size of a chicken egg.
The book also contains rare recipes. The Black Pudding recipe takes up a lot of space. This is a type of blood sausage using pork offal.
Much attention was paid at that time to the preservation of fresh food. To obtain two liters of pork blood, the blood sausage had to be made on the same day the animal was slaughtered.
The recipes are interspersed with a series of sumptuous illustrations. Some of them are just demonstrations of different types of cheeses or cake decorations. Others show more sophisticated tabletop decorations that clearly transcend the "home kitchen". These are huge festive compositions of many elements. In one in the center stands Neptune with a trident, in the other - a rooster in pince-nez and a hat.
Cooking is a real art. And you can admire for a long time mouth-watering photographs of delicacies from different parts of the world.
