This book is like warm comfort food and a great big hug. And even though there aren���t recipes listed within the book, you feel and taste and smell the comfort of food and the people who create it contained within. A feast for the senses, this inspiring book is about friendship, passion and determination. I loved it!" MY WEEKLY

How the sikbaj of Persia (sweet-n-sour stewed beef with sweet vinegar in it) became a fish dish like ceviche, fish & chips, tempura, escabeche, aspic – sailors’ help c.10th century; the influence of fish-during-Lent, the conquest of Peru, Portuguese Jesuits in Japan, of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Britain.I enjoyed reading about Eliza and how she got to to be a cook in the first place. She has to suffer many humiliations along the way and her father is bankrupt putting more pressure on the family. Eliza want to be a poet but is instead asked to write a cookery book for women. She is offended and doesn’t really know much about cookery but she gets an assistant in Ann who is 17 and caring for her parents She does want to be a cook and together the two of them cook up something (sorry not sorry) quite remarkable. This was the part of the story that I particularly enjoyed -seeing them try and fail, try something else, tinker with an idea and then come to a solution. It’s quite brilliant when you realise what they were up against and the time in history we are talking about. Told in alternate voices, this novel brings endearing friendship, the joy of cookery and creativity with food; and with limited options for spinsters, it also means certain independence. It's possible for speakers with a very high F0 to have a F0 higher than where their own F1 ought to be on some vowels, which can lead to problems with vowel identification. IIRC, classically-trained sopranos can also get F0 higher than even where some of their own F2s are expected; I am informed that they also are trained essentially to be able to consciously manipulate where their formants occur.) Told from two perspectives, that of Eliza and a housemaid by the name Ann Kirby, the reader is soon swept into a world where the kitchen is the centre of the household. The story is told through two perspectives, Eliza, born into a wealthy family who then loses it all and Anne, born into poverty with an alcoholic father and a Mother who has succumbed to dementia at an early age. The two meet when Eliza and her mother open a boardinghouse where Ann comes to work.

Overall, this is a lovely story of two very different women, from very different walks of life, coming together to create something worthwhile and helpful to generations of cooks who have benefitted from Eliza’s organization and instructions on not only the proper ingredients, but the steps needed to make the dishes a success. This format is still widely utilized today and has influenced several high-profile chefs over the years. The idea behind this story is pretty good, but with the modern twists and the controversial characteristic features of the protagonists, there were too many things that irked me. And it’s the first book about food that did not urge me to eat or to try some new recipes. True, there were some recipes that I wanted to see how they are written down nowadays (with pictures and all), and some recipes reminded me of my first mouthful of that particular food, but I did not want to eat it again or make it. It was interesting. It made me realize a lot of things. I mean, they've always been there but I've never perceived them before. Of course, some things make sense only in English (the longer the words, the pricier the object will be), but some of them are applicable in Italian as well. Why a sauce, for exemple, should be real, for instance. I mean, I really hope the tomato sauce the restaurant is using is real. If it needs to write it down, it makes me wonder. Culinary enthusiast, and fans of strong historical female characters will not want to miss this one! Ice creams, marmalade, sherbet, sorbet, and lemonade – ice cream’s original flavor (orange blossom); marmalade first flavor (quince); ways of freezing the ice better…

I will concede the point about the typos -- because, yeah, there are definitely a few misspellings someone should have caught. I think the most unfortunate typos were the ones in the French because now I'm wondering whether the Middle French had typos and I will never know, because do you even know what Middle French looks like? Yeah.