Modern cookery, in all its branches: reduced to a system of easy practice. For the use of private families / By Eliza Acton. Illustrated with numerous woodcuts.

  • Acton, Eliza, 1799-1859.
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Modern cookery, in all its branches: reduced to a system of easy practice. For the use of private families / By Eliza Acton. Illustrated with numerous woodcuts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and nothing which is really calculated to advance either the great or the small interests of society is now regarded as too homely or too insignificant for notice. The details of domestic economy, in particular, are no longer sneered at as beneath the attention of the educated and accomplished ; and the truly refined, intelligent, and high-minded women of England have ceased, in these days of comparative good sense, to consider their acquaintance with such details as inconsistent with their dignity, or injurious to their attractions :—and who can direct their households with the same taste, the same judgment, and the same watehful care for the comfort of others as themselves? Who, indeed, can guard all the interests of home as they can? And surely a woman does not preside less pleasingly in her own immediate circle, nor do the honours of her table, or of her drawing-room, with less grace and ‘propriety for having given (often from pursuits much more congenial to her) some portion of the day to the examination and control of her do- mestic affairs; it is rare, too, we should suppose, for a husband to be otherwise than grateful to his wife for the exertion of a surveillance which, if steadily and judiciously maintained, will affect his expenditure beyond all that a careless calculator would imagine possible. This, at a period when the struggle for income is so general, and the means of half the families holding a certain rank in the world are so insufficient for the support of their position, is a consideration of very deep im- portance. Few things are more certain to involve persons of narrow fortune in painful difficulties than the ruinous, because constant (though not always perceptible), extravagance which so often exists in every department of a house of which the sole regula- tion is left to servants, who, more than any other class of people in the world, would appear to be ignorant of the true yalue of