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Learn to COOK - The Jane Austen Cookbook
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List Price: $19.95
Our Price: $17.95
Your Save: $ 2.00 ( 10% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: McClelland & Stewart
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641
EAN: 9780771014178
ISBN: 0771014171
Label: McClelland & Stewart
Manufacturer: McClelland & Stewart
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 128
Publication Date: 2002-05-10
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Release Date: 2002-05-10
Studio: McClelland & Stewart
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Editorial Reviews:
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Jane Austen wrote her novels in the midst of a large and sociable family. Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, friends and acquaintances were always coming and going, which offered numerous occasions for convivial eating and drinking. One of Jane’s dearest friends, Martha Lloyd, lived with the family for many years and recorded in her “Household Book” over 100 recipes enjoyed by the Austens. A selection of this family fare, now thoroughly tested and modernized for today’s cooks, is recreated here, together with some of the more sophisticated dishes which Jane and her characters would have enjoyed at balls, picnics, and supper parties. A fascinating introduction describes Jane’s own interest in food, drawing upon both the novels and her letters, and explains the social conventions of shopping, eating, and entertaining in late Georgian and Regency England. The book is illustrated throughout with delightful contemporary line drawings, prints, and watercolours.
Authentic recipes, modernized for today’s cooks, include:
• Buttered Prawns
• Wine-Roasted Gammon and Pigeon Pie
• Broil’d Eggs
• White Soup and Salmagundy
• Pyramid Creams
• Martha’s Almond Cheesecakes
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Authentic, well-researched
Comment: WOW. This cookbook is so much more than a cutsie tribute to Austen and her works. The author, a culinary historian, thoroughly outlines the eating habits and customs of the day and provides recipes in the language of the era. So if you're looking for something both academic and entertaining, this is the perfect book. It's NOT just a quickly produced theme-based cookbook; it's the real deal!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Jane Austen's world: The Meals!
Comment: Any fan of Jane Austen's novels would do well to read, or at least sample, this book. Austen's work is the story of domestic life of her time, and this book provides a lot of useful information about an important context of her novels: food, meals, and dining. What is a nuncheon? How do cooks cope without refrigeration? And how, specifically, does one prepare many of the foods familiar to Austen's world? This book addresses these questions, in a well-written and well-researched style. It is physically attractive, and soundly based on contemporaneous records and recipes ('receipts') of the time, although these were recorded in ways foreign to us.
Customer Rating:
Summary: great mix of cooking and literature
Comment: I haven't tried any recipe yet, but any Jane Austen's reader will enjoy such a fun way to get into her world. It's a good reading and I hope it'll be practical too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great book to own
Comment: This cookbook is charming. It has useful recipes in it, along with modern-day interpretations of the recipes, and interesting stories about food. It even explains how people preserved and bought food in Jane Austen's day. That is quite interesting, I love to learn more about lifestyles in different historical eras. It's not only a cookbook, it's a history book. It's worth it, you won't be disappointed!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice little introduction to Jane Austen's food and culture
Comment: This is a lovely and shortish introduction to cooking and culture of eating and entertaining for the late Georgian period when Austen was alive. I loved the fact that this was about cooking and eating rather than some of the less universally approachable subjects (letters, literary criticism). Maggie Black and Deidre Le Faye have both written Jane Austen style and culture type books before so both understand the period and are able to draw on a large resource of appropriate information.
The introduction is very much about how people ate - what was available, how it got to houses, and why this was so. There is some division by class (upper class, middle class and lower class are all discussed) but also the divisions by Geography - whether coastal with access to fresh fish, or inland - how food was transported, and even in terms of access to market towns. Even 5 miles away was almost impossible for those trying to get up a dinner from 'scratch' so to speak if someone was coming around.
The introduction also talks about the types of food and dishes which were eaten, and that the whole culture of dining was completely different. Not only were meal times different, but how they dined. The explanations are simple and there is good use of quoted material throughout, the diaries and letters of the time providing a strong and occassionally humourous voice.
Where possible leFaye and Black have used diaries and 'receipts' from Austen's friends and family and point out that in the days before recipe books were published these books of receipts would be handed down from mother to daughter and one family's speciality would be renowned - they were truly heirlooms.
The last section of the book is a collection of recipes - these are taken from books of reciepts. The original receipt is usually fairly interpretative, that is the measurements are not generally noted, nor how to put them together or cook them. So there has been experimentation and the recipe is re-written with the details put in. These essentail details would have been handed down in a practical manner, but in the days before temperature gauges you would have needed to rely on simple temperature variations, quick, moderate and slow oven to dictate just when to cook it.
Most of these recipes are actually very useable for today - they don't have many potted meats, but mostly roasted meats, cakes, egg dishes and still room crafts. There are some things we dont' see these days like Syllabub - which is quite tasty
There are other books of this kind around - Margeretta Ackworth's cookbook for instance, which is interesting too - but I would recommend this is a good modern cookbook and an interesting historical look at the culture of food in this period.
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