The Jane Austen Cookbook doesn’t look promising (it’s skinny) but it turned out to be a lot of fun. This book talks about cooking in a historical context, and then gives recipes in both their original forms and updated forms. Someone with an interest in history can enjoy the history, and someone who wants to actually cook the stuff can do so in a pretty accessible manner, although I doubt you’ll be whipping up Ragoo of Celery with Wine every weeknight. Personally, I hate to cook but I love to read cookbooks, and I learned a lot from this one although I have no intention of making Ragoo of Celery.

The book gets underway with some short but detailed chapters on cooking and eating in Jane Austen’s time and among the people of her social class. The second chapter talks about food as it appears in Jane Austen’s novels and letters. In this second chapter, the author mentions that Darcy invites Elizabeth Bennett and the Gardiners for dinner, but the dinner has to be cancelled due to news of Lydia’s elopement. At the very end of the book, there’s a hypothetical menu for “The Dinner That Never Happened.”

The next chapter talks about Martha Lloyd, the source of many of the recipes. Martha was a widow who lived with Jane, her sister Cassandra, and their mother at Chawton Cottage from 1805 until 1828, when she married Jane’s brother Francis and moved with him to Portsmouth. Martha kept a collection of recipes for food, medicines, and beauty and hygiene items (things like lavender water, coral tooth powder, and cold cream). Martha credited many of the recipes to friends and relatives who appear in Jane’s letters. The recipes in The Jane Austen Cookbook are taken from Martha’s recipe book, as well as the recipe book of family friend Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys and “others from published works of the period.”

Every recipe has a citation, so if you want to try to see the full original recipe instead of an excerpt, you have a shot at tracking it down (the bibliography is excellent).

And then we have…recipes! The format is such that each recipe is introduced by the Regency version of the recipe or at least an excerpt from the Regency Source. This is followed by a contemporary version written in a more modern style, with some additional notes and clarifications of terms, and some ingredient substitutions. The format means that even a lackluster cook like myself should be able to prepare most of these things, and a really good cook can handle all of them.

It gives me incredible satisfaction to know that I can now make syllabub if I want to. Am I going to? Of course not, don’t be silly. I read this cookbook while I ate Cheerios for dinner, for God’s sake. But I could, and that’s what counts in my fevered mind. Here’s how Maria Rundell says you should make a syllabub (A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1806):

Mix a quart of thick raw cream, one pound of refined sugar, a pint and a half of fine raisin wine in a deep pan, put to it the grated peel and the juice of three lemons. Beat, or whisk it one way half an hour, then put it on a sieve with a bit of then mustard laid smooth in the shallow end till next day. Out in glasses. It will keep good, in a cool place, ten days.

There are also sample menus, so you can put together an every day dinner or a fancy dinner or something for an “assembly.” There’s a rhyming recipe for Bread Pudding and a recipe for biscuits that only has three ingredients and various things involving eggs and toast that I must say sound divine.

Of course there’s White Soup and various drinks and desserts. I do feel cheated that we don’t get any recipes for medicines or home beauty products. The author left them out because, “By today’s standards they would nearly all be unnecessary to make and indeed some would be downright dangerous to use.” But she does list the titles mentioned in Martha’s cookbook, and for purely intellectual purposes I’d dearly love to see her remedies for “Gravel,” “Mad Dog Bite,” and, because it is relevant to my current needs, “Dr. Turton’s Remedy for Colds.”

If, like me, you want some historical insight into the Regency period, this book is a good introduction to what people ate, and when, and how. I also appreciated the section on food in the novels and the letters, because it gave me yet another way to look at Austen’s writing. If you are a cook, you might enjoy these, although most are not for the casual weeknight supper. If you are a historical cookery reenactor, these recipes should at least give you a jumping off point, although I suspect people who really love cooking historical foods will want to find and use the primary sources listed in the bibliography.

This is a niche cookbook – not something you’ll be using in your day-to-day life. But for Austen fans and history fans, it’s amazingly informative on an amazing number of levels for such a thin volume.

And good lord, the desserts look amazing. Anyone want to come over and cook for me?