From the Economist

This is a useful and practical little book, with plain directions for making bread on the smallest and simplest scale, and which may encourage the most inexperienced to venture on a trial of home-made bread, in the superiority of which to the general run of bakers’ bread we heartily agree with Miss Acton; but it must be good home-made bread; very atrocious combinations under that name having presented themselves in our own limited experience. This, however, Miss Acton in the book before us does her best to remedy; and if her clear and sensible rules are closely followed, we feel sure that the result will be satisfactory, as much in an esthetic as an economical point of view. We fear that the art of bread-making does not rank so universally amongst modern female accomplishments as could be wished, and though we do not go quite so for as Mr. Cobbett, who says that every woman, high and low, ought to know how to make bread; if she do not, she is a mere burden upon the community; yet we quite agree with him in deploring the general ignorance on the subject which is found among the women of the labouring classes, especially in the southern counties of England. There is no doubt that the bread bill—that formidable item in a poor man’s housekeeping expenditure—might be greatly reduced tor the adoption of the practice of making bread at home. We wish Miss Acton’s book the circulation and success that it deserves.