I love cooking. And even more than that, I love the history of food and cooking. And, of course, I love books. All of which means that I collect old cook books (mostly pre-1890) and read them cover to cover. Sometimes I even have a go at some of the recipes, though there’s generally quite a bit of guesswork involved in that as most of them don’t use measurements.

So the other day I was leafing through Soyer’s Modern Housewife (1851), a book of “Nearly One Thousand Receipts.” It was written by Alexis Soyer, a French chef who worked in England, primarily at the Reform Club in London (yes, the same Reform Club that features in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days). Soyer was an innovator who came up with many concepts that we now take for granted, like cooking with gas, refrigerators and ovens with adjustable temperatures. In addition to all of this, he wanted to widen the horizons of British housewives and teach them how to cook properly.

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