An interesting look at food culture in Georgian/Regency England, accompanied by dozens of contemporary recipes each with a modern "translation" to allow you to cook your own if you so please. I have to admit that I'm highly unlikely to ever try any of them myself—even in modernised form, many of them seem really fussy and time-consuming, and the flavour profiles preferred by the average member of the Georgian gentry seem quite different from my own. (The inclusion of photographs of the various dishes might have helped to whet the appetite more.) However, still fascinating to dip into, and full of interesting little nuggets of information—such as the fact that Austen's contemporaries were as likely to use the still-rare potato in sweet as they were in savoury dishes. ( )

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. ( )

The cookbook would have been greatly enhanced by inclusion of the passages from Austen's works which inspired the recipes contained in it. The book is more interesting from the standpoint of culinary history than from an attempt to provide recipes which modern cooks would wish to prepare. I have not yet figured out how to give 1/2 star ratings, but I'd really rate this as 3.5 stars. ( )

3/26/22