Before The Joy of Cooking—even before Fannie Farmer—there was Mrs. Beeton and the Book of Household Management. Much more than just a cookbook, these thousand-plus pages told you everything you needed to know about running a household.

The Author

Mrs. Beeton’s book has been around, by various names, for more than a century and a half. So it would be reasonable to assume that “Mrs. Beeton” had no more real-life existence than Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima. But take a closer look at that title page, and you’ll see that the original publisher was himself named Beeton. Can we deduce that, after decades of domestic comfort, he persuaded his wife or mother to put her lifetime’s accumulated wisdom into book form?

Well, not quite.

For the long version, see the 2005 biography The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton by Kathryn Hughes.

Short version: Isabella Mary Mayson (born 1836) and Samuel Orchart Beeton (born 1830) both came from families that had climbed from rural working class to urban middle class. The families even knew each other slightly; in her teens, Isabella went to school in Germany with Samuel’s sisters. Before that, she had grown up as the oldest girl in an enormous blended family: four of his, four of hers (including Isabella)—and thirteen of theirs. Much of her childhood was spent in and around her stepfather Henry Dorling’s prize property, the Grandstand at Epsom, which included a commercial kitchen that could feed thousands. In Germany, Isabella developed an interest in pastry cooking, and went on to take private lessons in England. We have to stress: pastry cooking. The specialty was just barely genteel enough that a woman could study it without losing caste, so long as she didn’t do it for money.

Samuel, meanwhile, had started the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine a few years before his 1856 marriage. Isabella knew nothing about his work before­hand, and doesn’t even seem to have been interested. Nothing wrong with that: after all, an absolute separation of Home from Work was central to the very definition of middle class.

Within the first year of her marriage, all this changed. Isabella Beeton, barely 21 years old, began writing for the EDM. Within a few more years, her writing grew into . . . drumroll . . . the Book of Household Management. Initially the entire text was chopped into 48-page segments—even if it meant breaking off in mid-sentence—issued monthly from mid-1859 to mid-1861 at 3d. each. When it was all done, the 24 segments were republished as a single 7s. 6d. book.

Once that was out of the way, Isabella changed hats—literally—to become the EDM’s fashion editor. This must have been much more fun, since it included yearly trips to Paris.

And then, not yet 29 years old, she died. This is her legacy.

Sources

If you take the number of recipes in the Book of Household Management and set them against Isabella Beeton’s known age, you will see at once that she cannot possibly have tested them all herself. In fact the recipes are almost never her own. Even the ones submitted by readers of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, as promised in the Introduction, can just about be counted on your fingers.

But they had definitely been tested by someone, somewhere. Recipes in the BOHM are culled from a long list of books about cooking and house­keeping published in the century leading up to Mrs. Beeton. The chapter “Dine We Must” in the Hughes biography spends some time on the book’s culinary sources, complete with examples of parallel wording.

There are the Englishwomen: Hannah Glasse, Elizabeth Raffald, Maria Rundell, and above all Eliza Acton. There are the Frenchmen and other “man cooks”: Carême, Ude, Franca­telli, Simpson, Soyer. Some writers don’t fall neatly into either group: Kitchiner, Brillat-Savarin. The duo of Thomas Webster “and the late Mrs. Parkes” gave us the Encyclopædia of Domestic Economy, which Isabella Beeton shamelessly plundered. Many of these earlier books have made their way into the Cookery Collection at Leeds University Library. You don’t have to go to Leeds in person, though; most titles are available at the Internet Archive.

Finally, there are the non-culinary sources. If I could identify the original of this passage (sec. 944) about keeping poultry:

The perches must be level, and not one above the other, or unpleasant consequences may ensue to the undermost row

—where “unpleasant consequences” may be filed under Best Euphemism Ever—or this (sec. 947)

If the cock should, by any accident, get killed, considerable delicacy is required in introducing a new one. The hens may mope, and refuse to associate with their new husband, clustering in corners, and making odious comparisons between him and the departed

or this (sec. 771), about pigs:

But however few, or however many, young pigs there may be to the farrow, there is always one who is the dwarf of the family circle, a poor, little, shrivelled, half-starved anatomy, with a small melancholy voice, a staggering gait, a woe-begone countenance, and a thread of a tail, whose existence the complacent mother ignores, his plethoric brothers and sisters repudiate, and for whose emaciated jaws there is never a spare or supplemental teat, till one of the favoured gorman­dizers, overtaken by momentary oblivion, drops the lacteal fountain, and gives the little squeaking straggler the chance of a momentary mouthful.

. . . I would unhesitatingly add the full text to my ebook collection. Meanwhile, I’ve collected some of the more interesting ones on the Sources page. Others are noted at the end of each file.

Illustrations

The Hughes biography helpfully identifies the BOHM’s artists:

• Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899) and Harrison Weir (1824-1906): illustrators
• Henry George Hine: frontispiece
• William Dickes: probable color engraver
• H. Newsom Woods: probable engraver

Foster and Weir both worked regularly with Samuel Beeton’s publishing house. Weir’s contribution is especially visible; he not only used a clear monogram, but is named in the text as “Mr. Harrison Weir, our artist”. (He has since acquired an even better sobriquet, as “Father of the Cat Fancy”. But there are no cats in the BOHM.)

Social Insights

Scattered throughout the Book of Household Management are clues about society that go far beyond the obvious descriptions of the Mistress’s day or a servant’s duties and wages. Take the tripartite classifi­cation into “meat”, “poultry” and “game”. The book’s target audience is the urban middle class, whose meat comes exclusively from the butcher. But the vocabulary harks back to a three-way rural split: large animals tended by men (cattle, sheep, pigs), small animals tended by women (domestic fowl, rabbits), and wild animals (venison, hare, most birds) brought home by poa— whoops! I mean, by hunters.

After telling us how to broil a beefsteak, it’s on to service:

Allow ½ lb. to each person; if the party consist entirely of gentlemen, ¾ lb. will not be too much.

To make up for their reduced appetite for beef, ladies get the best parts of a boiled fowl:

The wings, breast, and merrythought . . . are usually served to the ladies of the company, to whom legs, except as a matter of paramount necessity, should not be given.

The would-be carver has already been cautioned:

A tough fowl and an old goose are sad triers of a carver’s powers and temper, and, indeed, sometimes of the good humour of those in the neighbourhood of the carver; for a sudden tilt of the dish may eventuate in the placing a quantity of the gravy in the lap of the right or left-hand supporter of the host.

Finally, in the list of things not to be forgotten at a picnic, we are advised to “Take 3 corkscrews”. This sounds very much like the Voice of Experience.

The English Culinary Tradition

None of the BOHM’s sources were much older than 100 years (mid-18th century). This is not because old texts were hard to find; anything that remained in demand would have been reprinted over and over, yielding pure profit for the publisher. When it came to cookery, there was something else at play. Look at early English works and you’ll find an entirely different culinary language, with techniques and ingredients that Isabella Beeton and her contem­poraries would scarcely have recognized.

By the end of the 18th century, all of this earlier tradition had been lost—whether inten­tionally or otherwise—to be replaced with what is known today as English cooking. Now and then in the BOHM you can see glimmerings of cause and effect. Food intended for children—“nursery food”—is less flavorful, less complex than the adult version, thereby ensuring that each successive generation grows up with a taste for ever-blander foods.

For starters, almost all spices disappeared—at the very time that travel and colonialism had made imported spices cheaper and more readily available than in centuries past. (Note that the now-widespread myth about medieval cooks using heavy seasoning to camouflage the taste of spoiled meat had not yet come into circu­lation. The change was purely a matter of taste.)

Vegetables are typically boiled for half an hour. One modern writer observes that, while 19th-century ovens may have run cooler than today’s—explaining the long roasting times for meat—the laws of physics have not changed. Water boiled at the same temperature then as now. And vegetables can’t have been bigger; most were probably smaller. A further oddity is this, from the German traveler Gebhard Wendeborn, who wrote about England in 1791:

The English like also their vegetables on the table as green as when gathered, and therefore seldom boil them sufficiently . . . . though they would be more palatable, and more wholesome, if they dressed them as we do.

Does this mean that Germans in 1791 cooked their vegetables even longer than half an hour—or does it mean that the English taste for prolonged boiling was a very late devel­opment?

And then there was the matter of Hanging.

In Section 74, discussing the foods that are in season each month, the May entry includes “green geese”. The good news is that this does not mean geese that have been left to hang until they develop a greenish sheen. The bad news is that this description does not need to be stated, as it applies universally to Meat, Game and Poultry—although not, mercifully, to Fish. The following section (75) explains:

As soon . . . as the slightest trace of putrescence is detected, [meat] has reached its highest degree of tenderness, and should be dressed immediately.

Or, in plain English: cook it as soon as it starts to rot.

The recipe for Roast Saddle of Mutton is more specific about the time involved:

To insure this joint being tender, let it hang for ten days or a fortnight . . . . and trim away every part that has not indisputable pretensions to be eaten.

Moving on to Game, we are told:

Things edible have their degrees of excellence under various circum­stances: thus, asparagus, capers, peas, and partridges are best when young. Perfection in others is only reached when they attain maturity. . . . But others, again, are not good until decompo­sition is about to set in.

You don’t have to take Mrs. Beeton’s unsupported word for it, either. For pheasant, she cites Ude:

They are only fit to be eaten when the blood begins to run from the bill, which is commonly six days or a week after they have been killed.

For partridge, we are allowed a little more leeway:

The time they should be kept, entirely depends on the taste of those for whom they are intended, as what some persons would consider delicious, would be to others disgusting and offensive.

This is one of the few times the Editress, or her source, concedes that not everyone cares for decomposing meat.

Culinary Notes

If you’re planning to cook from this book, rather than just read it like a novel, here are a few things to be alert for.

• First and foremost: In the recipes, “Time” refers strictly to in-the-oven, on-the-stovetop, over-the-fire cooking time. It does not include preparation time—up to and including making puff pastry or stock, which can take another six hours by itself.
• “Cold Meat Cookery” doesn’t mean cold dishes; it means being creative with leftovers. The same applies to most recipes with “Hashed” in the name, whether or not they have the Cold Meat label. 19th-century cooks found themselves between a rock and a hard place: with no effective refrigeration, uncooked meat quickly went bad—but cooking only enough for one meal meant keeping the fire going all day, every day.
• “Removed by” in bills of fare means “followed by” within the same course, while everything else stays on the table. The book talks several times about the difference between service à la Française and à la Russe.

Trans-Atlantic Variations

Extras for Americans:

• In the same way that a modern “coffee cake” does not ordinarily contain coffee, none of the recipes with “cheesecake” in the name contain any kind of cheese.
• An entrée is an appetizer or side dish, not a main course. Technically it means a dish that is already on the table when you enter the room—but in service à la Française, this would apply to almost everything.
• A fit (in the sections on children and nursing) is a medical term equivalent to “seizure”.
• Mustard-and-cress, otherwise known as garden cress, is a single plant.
• Pancakes always means thin pancakes, which you may be accustomed to calling crepes or blintzes.
• The English pint is 20 ounces, not 16, so half a pint is 1¼ cups (10 oz.). This may also help explain why English beer seems to go further than American beer.
• Store doesn’t mean shop; it means storage. So a “Store Sauce” is one that you made yourself and keep in the pantry.
• A tammy (in the Culinary Vocabulary as “Tamis”) is loosely equivalent to cheese­cloth.
• Treacle is molasses.
• Weighing dry ingredients: A pound of white sugar is pretty exactly 2 cups; a pound of rice is 2¼ cups; a pound of elbow macaroni is about 4 cups; and so on. If you’re baking bread, better get out the scales, though.

Conversely, for Brits:

• A table napkin is called a napkin. If you are looking for the s-word, head for the 1906 edition, which not only uses the French word consistently, but also offers at least a dozen decorative ways to fold the said serviette. This tells you everything you need to know about the difference between 1861 Victorians and 1906 Edwardians.
• The word “pudding” has not yet become a synonym for “dessert”, though we see a foreshadowing of the usage in the Bills of Fare section. Now and then, some vegetable or seafood dish may appear “instead of pudding” as the third course of a Plain Family Dinner. In the rest of the book we are in the realm of the boiled pudding, which has these features:
  • It contains a great deal of suet;
  • cooking time is anywhere from two hours to all day;
  • the end result is much too heavy for the modern stomach.
  Consider yourself warned.

Ingredients

There is no section of the book set aside for descriptions of herbs and spices. For this you must rely on the Index. Many other recurring terms are hidden in the Sauces section, or in the Culinary Vocabulary list near the beginning.

There are some predictable omissions: the Editress doesn’t seem to have heard of paprika; cardamom is vanishingly rare; and no recipe—not even the one for homemade curry powder—uses cumin. (What was it with cumin, anyway? One mid-century encyclo­pedia that may have been on the Beetons’ shelf asserts that the taste and odour of cumin are so disagree­able, it can only be used in veterinary medicines. Maybe it didn’t travel well.)

arrowroot

Oh, go ahead. Where it isn’t a primary ingredient, use cornstarch.

bay salt

is now called sea salt. Feel free to argue about whether the difference between sea salt and ordinary table salt really is significant.

bitter almonds

In the U.S., bitter almonds are illegal because of their dangerously high cyanide content. The simplest alternative is to combine ordinary almonds (for texture and bulk) with almond extract (for flavor).

butter

clarified butter

The book explains how to make your own. But if you have access to an Asian market, buy ghee; it’s the same thing. Even better is to find a movie theater that uses “real” butter and see if you can piggyback on their order. It will be called something like Anhydrous Butterfat, which again is the same as ghee.

fresh butter

generally means unsalted butter.

melted butter

A sauce made from butter, flour, and water or other liquid. Typically it will have less flour and more butter than a roux-based sauce.

oiled butter

Another term for clarified butter.

cavice

As with Harvey’s sauce, below, both Mrs. Beeton and her sources seem to assume the reader knows what this is. In fact, they sometimes suggest Harvey’s sauce as an alternative.

cayenne

Surprised? English cookery is not generally associated with cayenne pepper in any quantity at all, let alone “to taste”. But it shows up in more than 200 recipes.

cochineal

Yes, you may use red food coloring. Or some other color, if you want to be really daring.

curry powder

Then as now, “curry powder” meant a standard blend of coriander (cumin is mysteriously absent), cayenne, turmeric, assorted other spices—and, inevi­tably, far too much fenugreek.

garlic

To make up for the unexpected popularity of cayenne, the fear of garlic is well established. It only appears in about 20 recipes—almost all of them for sauces or pickles.

ginger

generally means fresh ginger root, except when the book expressly says “powdered” or “ground” ginger.

Harvey’s sauce

Everyone must have known what this is, in the same way that a 20th-century cookbook would not need to explain “Worcestershire sauce”. If you prefer to make your own, the book has a recipe.

isinglass

Good luck finding any; today isinglass (made from a fish’s “sound” or swim bladder) is primarily used in brewing. Fortunately, gelatin does the same job.

ketchup

Relax, everyone. She does not mean tomato ketchup. The word kecap—or ketjap, depending on whose colonial orthography you ended up with—is a generic Malay term for any kind of sauce. By 1859 there was something known as tomato ketchup: not today’s sugary slurry, but more like a tomato-sauce concentrate. Eliza Acton, who spells it “catsup”, and Thomas Webster both have recipes. But when Mrs. Beeton says “ketchup” she means mushroom (472), walnut (535), or oyster (490) ketchup.

lard

is formally pork fat, while suet is beef or mutton fat. If you choose to make substitutions, I won’t tell.

onion stuck with cloves

Pro tip: use a fork or skewer to poke holes in the onion first, and you’re less likely to break the cloves. The only reason for the onion-sticking business is that cloves are too small to be easily fished out, but too large to be eaten. If the dish is to be strained—or if you don’t mind sinking your teeth into a whole clove—you can just throw them in loose.

roux

Glossed in the vocabulary section as “Brown and white; French thickening”; the Sauces section explains how to make it. But it is not this book’s standard method of thickening.

salad oil

always means olive oil.

soft water

means exactly what the term means today. The book does not explain how mid-19th-century suburbanites were to obtain it, short of putting out a drum to collect rainwater.

soy

Soy sauce. Really. “Indian soy” is a mystery to me, though.

sugar

moist sugar

The nearest equivalent is dark-brown sugar.

powdered sugar

doesn’t mean powdered sugar in the modern sense, just granulated (as opposed to loaf) sugar.

tartaric acid

Baking powder was only just coming into use. Most recipes will specify tartaric acid (or its close relative, cream of tartar) and carbonate of soda as separate ingredients.

tous-les-mois

shows up in a few recipes—possibly cribbed from Eliza Acton, who also uses it. Another starch, similar to arrowroot.

whipped cream

Much like “melted butter”, this is a multi-ingredient recipe (No. 1492).

wine

cooking wine

didn’t exist yet. If you don’t have anything else available, remember to reduce the amount of salt in the recipe.

port

Where a recipe calls for a small amount of port, use two parts red wine to one part brandy or vodka. You may also need to add a little sugar.

Measurements

Some recipes refer to “the size of a shilling”. Shilling coins in Mrs. Beeton’s time were 23.6mm, or pretty exactly the size of a North American quarter. Unless your coin drawer dates to before 1990, do not use a modern 5p coin as a guide; the best match is currently the £1 coin.

“The size of a walnut” is self-explanatory. “The size of a nut” (variety unspe­cified) means a hazelnut or filbert.

Liquid measures, from smallest to largest (most from Section 77, pg. 40):

saltspoon

Approach with caution; sources disagree about whether it means ¼ or ½ (modern) teaspoon. Unlike the “breakfast cup”, it’s either-or; nobody has suggested it means one-third or three-eighths teaspoon. Judging by the salt spoons—as such—that I’ve personally seen, ¼ tsp seems more likely.

teaspoon, drachm

In the book, “a Teaspoonful is equal in quantity to a drachm of water”. Today a teaspoon is defined as ⅓ tablespoon (5 cc, or about 100 drops). Mrs. Beeton’s teaspoon seems to be ¼ Tbsp (⅛ oz.) instead.

The dra(ch)m is mainly used in apothe­caries’ formulations, especially in the Medical section. It also shows up in some recipes lifted from Webster’s Encyclopædia, where it is equivalent to a teaspoon.

dessertspoon

Defined in the book as “the half of a table-spoonful”. Today a dessertspoon is defined as ⅔ Tbsp, so watch out. Both then and now, a dessert­spoon is two teaspoons; only the relationship to a tablespoon has changed.

wineglass

Careful! A “wineglassful” is not the 5 ounces of today’s canonical “drink”, but less than half that. Kitchiner, in the Cook’s Oracle, says plainly: “By a wine-glass is to be understood two ounces liquid measure”.

gill

The word means ¼ pint, i.e. 5 oz. Most recipes just say “¼ pint”, though.

teacup

6 oz. (¾ cup).

breakfast cup

Assorted modern sources have suggested anything from 7 to 10 ounces (⅓ to ½ English pint).

pint

The 20-ounce pint was codified in the Weights and Measures Act of 1824, before the Editress was born. But, since a number of the book’s culinary sources are still older, some recipes may have been intended for 16-ounce pints.

Technology

bain marie

has generally been superseded by the double boiler, though you can still get bain marie vessels.

hair sieve

So called because it was originally made from horsehair. Yes, you may use a fine wire sieve instead.

knife-cleaning machine

How Victorian ingenuity dealt with the lack of stainless steel. Picture a cross between a knife block and a drive-through car wash: insert a bunch of similarly sized knives all around the gadget’s circumference, turn the crank, and the knives all get cleaned at once.

lined saucepans

Enamel coating or lining was just coming into widespread use; anomalously, it caught on sooner in England than in the US.

preserves

The Mason jar was only patented in 1858, and didn’t catch on overnight. Jars of preserves, pickles or “store sauces” are to be covered either with a bladder or with paper brushed in egg white.

salamander

In restaurant kitchens, the salamander’s job is now generally done by an overhead broiler. Some modern sources suggest, in all seriousness, that for home use you will do better with a small blowtorch.

On the other hand:

• Cooking with gas: Although there is a brief explanation of gas cookers, nobody had yet thought of making an entire gas stove, using the same overall design—burners, oven and so on—as a wood stove.
• Refrigeration was almost completely foreign to Mrs. Beeton. The actual word “refrigerator” (meaning what we now call an icebox) occurs only once; elsewhere there are just a few scattered references to storing things “on ice”.
• Stainless steel genuinely didn’t exist; it would not be invented until early in the 20th century. Where instructions call for glass or ceramic containers, or enamel-lined cooking vessels, you can generally get away with stainless steel instead.

Vocabulary

aperient

laxative. For several generations, the medical profession regarded bleeding-and-purging as the twin cures for all ailments. By 1861 bleeding was beginning to go out of fashion; purging had a ways to go.

d’oyley

Fun fact: The doily took its name from a London draper named Doily or Doiley. (Unlike many etymologies claiming to hark back to some named individual, this one is really true. Look it up.) The name was historically D’Oily or similar, but the eponymous draper never used the apostrophe. The OED snootily labels the various with-apostrophe spellings as “erron.”

esculent

Fancy word for edible. When used, a clear giveaway that Mrs. Beeton is quoting one of her scientific sources.

fecula

is now called starch.

muriatic acid

is now usually—but not always—known as hydrochloric acid.

prussic acid

is now better known as cyanide.

spirits of wine

is now called alcohol.

tribe

Today a “tribe” is the taxonomic layer between family and genus, with names ending in -eae; it is rarely used except in botany. In the Book of Household Management—whose sources are never later than 1859—you can generally interpret “tribe” as “some group of animals, defined by similar appearance or behavior, that seemed like a good idea at the time”.

Formalities

Most recipes end with four short items: “Time”, “Average Cost”, “Seasonable” and “Sufficient”. In the printed book, “Time” and “Average Cost” were usually, and “Seasonable” and “Sufficient” sometimes, combined on a single line. I’ve put each on its own line.

The line drawings and color plates are shown in their original places, give or take a paragraph. I sized them to fit most screens while giving as much detail as possible, so the drawings will appear a little larger, the full-page plates somewhat smaller than their original size. Each plate consists of three to five separately labeled pictures. The count goes from A to Z and then starts over again with A1. As an old-fashioned touch, there is no plate J—though U, V and W are all used. I’ve shown these individual illustrations, slightly enlarged, near the text that references them (“see Colour Plate B”). When a parti­cular subplate is never named in the text, I’ve put it where it seems most appropriate.

Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each chapter. All corrections listed in the author’s Errata have been made in the text. (Some of them are quite funny. “Oh, oops, I guess that would work better with two pounds instead of half a pound.”) The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctu­ation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space. Invisible punctu­ation at line-end (not common) has been silently supplied. A few invisible numbers in recipes were supplied from the 1863 edition, which appears to be a page-for-page reprint of the 1861 original.

Inconsistent italicization, such as “bain marie” on one page and “bain marie” on another, is in the original. The same applies to variable spelling of French words in the body text: here an “entree”, there an “entrée”.

Finally, I’ve included the signature marks (“Aa”, “Bb” and so on at every 16th page) so you can see where the issue breaks fell. As originally published in 1859–61, every three signatures made one threepenny pamphlet; the all-in-one volume came afterward.

Spelling

If you are searching for exact text, note that headers do not have diacritics (“accents”). So à la génévese or maître d’hôtel or Française in the body text will be a la Genevese or Maitre d’Hotel or Francaise in recipe titles. This may or may not matter, depending on your device. It would have been trivial for me to add the missing diacritics, but it seemed better to leave everything as printed.

Unless otherwise noted, all spellings are as in the original. Variable spelling and hyphen­ization may reflect different sources from different dates. Some words are spelled one way at the beginning of the book, another way at the end.

• arnatto, arnotto
• broccoli in the in-season list (Sec. 74), brocoli elsewhere
• chetney
• clotted, clouted (cream)
• comfiture, confiture
• confectionary (noun) more common than confectionery
• Curaçoa
• fillet is used consistently; filet only occurs in French terms
• fricassee is rarely written with acute accent (fricassée), even in the main text
• ipecacuhana and ipecacuanha both occur, though the first is probably an error
• noyeau
• osmazome, ozmazome
• peas and pease are both used (“pea”, singular, is a back-formation from “pease”, collective, though the latter was definitely old-fashioned by 1859)
• percolater
• ragout and ragoût both occur
• riz de veau is probably an error for ris de veau
• Shakspere, Shakspeare and other 19th-century spellings
• shalot is much more common than shallot
• shred is consistently used where we would now say “shredded”
• spaddle, spattle (never spatula)
• tomato, tomata (Eliza Acton used the -a spelling consistently; even in Isabella Beeton’s time it hadn’t become fully standardized)

Hyphens:

• dessertspoon(ful) is more common than dessert-spoon(ful)
• force-meat at the beginning of the book, later forcemeat
• fryingpan, frying-pan
• milkpan, milk-pan
• pattypan, patty-pan
• stewpan never has a hyphen. I don’t know why this should seem any odder than “saucepan”, but it catches me up every time.
• tablespoon is almost never hyphenated (table-spoon)