A Household
in Recipes
Behind every dish, a household.
Open a recipe to explore the ingredients, labour, and economic circumstances that might have brought it to the table.
Companion exhibition
Bread, Work & Power
Follow food into co-operative accounts, women’s organising and political debates. This companion exhibition examines collective resources and public authority through distinct historical cases.
Explore Bread, Work & PowerPicture the household.
The book’s own menu designs, colour plates and engravings. Explore the images as historical objects, with their original captions and source locations.
Original scans: University of Leeds Library / Internet Archive · Public Domain Mark. Select an image to enlarge it and read its source caption.
Two Tables, One Household
Compare the book’s family and servants’ menus. Follow food between rooms, read the week for reuse, and ask whose work made the meals possible.
The Price of a Meal
Open an itemised dinner estimate for six. Explore the food prices, then look beyond the total to equipment, preparation and costs not separately shown.
A dish is not
a social class.
Ownership of a cookbook does not identify who cooked from it. The household that consumed a dish might differ from the worker who prepared it. This exhibition treats class, affordability, and labour as questions to investigate through evidence.
Research note: Three recipes are presented with scan-checked transcriptions and contextual evidence. Brackets mark reconstructed words at damaged margins. Printed prices are book estimates; no specific class or income has been assigned to the consumers. Read the full research dossier →
New source finding / p.797
A tool behind the recipe.
The raised-pie mould reference is now resolved: the book pictures it assembled and open. See the original page and its interpretation →
Food & social activity / a separate Washington case
The Cookbook
in Public.
Follow four documented or reported settings: personal canvassing, club discussions, fair booths and collective hospitality.