This Victorian Era cookbook for the common people emphasizes simplicity and practicality while serving up delicious, inexpensive dishes any farmer’s wife could make. With over 450 easy made-from-scratch recipes utilizing the most basic of kitchen utensils, this beginner-friendly guide serves up masterpieces from humble beginnings.

I have made each receipt in itself as complete as possible...and the few references I unavoidably make will, after a little practice, become familiar to my readers. Many of the receipts may appear to you rather lengthy, but I want to draw your attention to the fact, that they are more than receipts - indeed, I may call them plain lessons, some containing a number of receipts in one.

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Glyn Hughes

Food historian

Chief cook at London's prestigious Reform Club, Soyer was a huge self-publicist and celebrity who did public 'performance cookery' and marketed his own range of kitchen equipment and bottled sauces. Generally accused - unlike today's celebrity cooks - of general toadying to the upper classes, he produced this low-cost cookbook to patronisingly tell the lower-classes how to cook Red Herrings and Simplified Hodge-Podge

Regula Ysewijn

Food photographer, writer and graphic designer

Written during Victorian times, and mentioning lots about the life of plain folk living in London. You almost walk the streets with him, you sit with him in the dark cottage where he shows an old lady how to braise an ox cheek. the book is full of stories as well as recipes. And shows a cooking which is aimed at the lower class rather than the upper class which had dominated cookery books for the centuries before.

Henry Notaker

Literary historian

One of the cookbooks Soyer published for different classes in Britain.