Description
This cookbook is the first of six items in the library's collection titled "John and Henry Locke Cookery Archive, 1820-1896." The inside front cover of this book is inscribed "Hy. Locke on Cookery & Confectionery Cheltenham 52" in the same hand as the rest of the book, so presumably Henry Locke is the book's author. Henry Locke also inscribed
the second book in this collection of which he was one of several authors, and he describes himself in this inscription as a "cook and confectioner," presumably by profession.
Eighty-four pages in length, this cookbook contains glossaries of French terms, as did many published British (and American) cookbooks appearing during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the upper-class English vogue for fancy French cooking, already on the rise in the eighteenth century, reached a fever pitch. This book is organized, albeit with occasional deviations from the organizational scheme, proceeding from meat and poultry dishes, to sauces, to puddings, to desserts, to fish dishes, and finally to general culinary instructions, most of which pertain to roasting and boiling a wide variety of meats. Judging from their phrasing, many of the recipes were copied or paraphrased from published sources. These sources were English, not French. While some recipes, particularly in the meat and poultry section, have French titles and are ultimately French in origin, many of these recipes had been naturalized in England for a century or more, and even those that were more recently imported are adapted to English kitchens, calling for such things as mushroom ketchup and mace, which the French rarely used, and expressed in typical English culinary terms. Actually, for all the book's French inflections, most of its recipes are simply English, including a string of sauces based on so-called "melted butter," which was disparaged, perhaps unfairly, by one eighteenth-century French wag (allegedly Voltaire) as England's only sauce--and a bad one.
