A Good Housekeeping Cookery Compendium Par I: Basic Cookery Part II: Picture Cookery Part III: Cake Making Compiled By The Good Housekeeping Institute Hardcover - 1954

London: The Good Housekeeping Institute , 1954. (UK) No date, I believe the first edtion was 1952; date uncertain but most likely mid-950s. No markings, a touch of rubbing to edges of cover cloth, small skinned spot to illus. end papers,there is an old-book smell to the pagesm but i do not find it unpleasant, Good used copy; no dust jacket. Black leather-like cloth, colour illus end paper, 640pp, index. Lots of B&W photos; colour photos of prepared dishes. From GoodReads: The book is divided into three parts. The first - Basic Cookery - provides series of picture lessons from which the most inexperienced beginner can quickly learn how to produce the dishes required for everyday use in the home.Section two - Picture Cookery - goes a stage further. It comprises a complete course of home cookery in pictures: the processes are again shown in step-by-step pictures, but more fully and with many additional and more elaborate recipes.Part three, Picture Cake Making, devotes itself to a subject which has perhaps the widest appeal in the whole range of cookery. It shows, in the same step-by-step pictorial fashion, all the processes of mixing, baking, icing and decorating cakes, and includes hundreds of recipes for all kinds of plain and fruit cakes, sponges, gateaux, small cakes and patisseries.All three sections of the Cookery Compendium have been revised, with recipes re-checked and many new pictures introduced. Contains nearly 2000 photographs, of which 64 pages are in wonderful natural colours. There are mroe than 1500 recipes, all tested by Good Housekeeping Institute.This book must have appeared when it began to be cheap and easy to produce photos as there is a super-abundance of them. Some of them are very useful, like the photo of the cake icing nozzles types, but others seem merely redundant. The recipes are surprisingly brief e=when compared to modern cookbooks. A recipe for both a single tier wedding cake and a two tier weeding cake takes only half a page of text! Obviusly the recipes assume a degree of cookery experience on the part of the reader. The cake, and baking sections are particularly generous in recipes. The Angel Food Cakes distinguish betwen British and American types. There is a recipe for a caadain Fig cake which we call date squares now. There is much lost knowledge to be found here. For example, "unlike rabbits, hres should not be eaten fresh but shoud be allowed to hang like game for about a week to improve the flavour and texture of the flesh." A heavy book. (4.5 JM HOJ 300/b4. 1st. Hardcover. Good/No Dust Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾".