Many of the recipes Isabella Beeton passes on to us are for dishes that sound wholly unfamiliar to us now, and yet they were all once staples of the Victorian table – and not necessarily in the most well-to-do homes. There are recipes for the family living on slender means and a whole section for invalids, but it is inevitably the rather grander productions that catch our eye today.

Soup à la Cantatrice (“Singer’s Soup”) is a concoction of sago in a slightly sweet emulsion of eggs and cream. The author notes that it is “very Beneficial for the Voice”, and has been favoured by many of the great opera singers of the day, including the “Swedish Nightingale”, Jenny Lind. On the subject of songbirds themselves, larks make a dainty dish, either breadcrumbed and roasted, or else baked in a pie (in which case one must have precisely nine).

Sheep's head and hare's ears

A lack of squeamishness about the by-products of butchery is unquestioningly assumed, so that even something as straightforward as “Leek Soup” brings us up short as we note its first ingredient is a sheep’s head. “Prepare the head, either by skinning, or cleaning the skin very nicely; split it in two; take out the brains, and put it into boiling water…” Only after that can you think about the leeks.

Some recipes are a veritable anatomy lesson, filtered through the culinary terminology of the age. The “sounds” of a cod turn out to be its swim-bladders, “a great delicacy” that may be boiled in milk and water. Bath chaps are pig’s cheeks. Advice on carving roasted fowls is careful to include the best way of detaching the “merrythought” (a now-extinct term for the wishbone).

The importance of being able to carve roast meats neatly and efficiently at the table cannot be sufficiently stressed. Instructions for setting about a roast hare are given in fine detail, down to offering the ears – “which should be nicely crisp” – to a favoured guest. Remember, it is all too easy for the inexperienced practitioner to create an occasion-spoiling fracas:

“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.”

Changing tastes

Different assumptions about freshness in an era when electrical refrigeration was unknown can surprise. John Dory, still a much-prized fish today, can be tough when caught, we are told, and is “not the worse for being kept two, or even three days before it is cooked”. A side of bacon could be kept free from insect pests by being packed in a wooden box under an 8in layer of wood ash. Cheeses, if covered in saturated parchment or rubbed with melted fat, “may be preserved in a perfect state for years”.

Appetites were considerably more robust in those days, especially first thing in the morning. In the 1860s a stuffed pig’s face, amusingly dressed in a ruffled white paper collar, makes a good breakfast dish.

Techniques are often not what we are used to. As an alternative to frying, sausages might be boiled for 10-12 minutes, before being served on toast. A beaten egg apparently makes a good substitute for milk in the breakfast tea or coffee.

Certain ingredients that we take for granted as staples of everyday cooking are either absent or else have only walk-on parts. Surprisingly, garlic is very sparingly used, despite its growing wild in England. It is used by the single clove when it does appear, and even in a relatively exotic dish such as France’s Poulet (Chicken) à la Marengo, the instruction is for “a very small piece of garlic”. Amid all the ox feet and entrails, there is still a certain Victorian fastidiousness about ingredients that might produce unwanted after-effects. It is even recommended that garlic’s distant relative, the leek, be boiled well to prevent its “tainting the breath”.

Grand occasions, plus the danger of parsnips

There is caution about quite innocuous aspects of certain foods. We are warned that the skins of grapes are not good to eat; they should always be peeled. The water in which potatoes have been boiled is thought to be “injurious” (so woe betide any thought of adding it to your gravy). Many people find it hard to digest onion, the acrid juices of which can best be tamed by boiling. We note a medical authority, one Willis, who reports that eating parsnips was enough to send a whole family into helpless delirium.

By the time we get to the dessert stage, a whole cornucopia opens up before us. “Very Plain Bread Pudding” might not sound overly inspiring, but a pudding of boiled carrots and suet with dried fruits and nutmeg is surely irresistible. No? Best turn, then, to “An Unrivalled Plum-Pudding”, a festive recipe that contains around four pounds of dried fruits, 16 eggs, sweet spices and a quarter of a pint of brandy, and will feed upwards of a dozen ravenous Christmas revellers.

For weddings and other festivities, we might want to consider mixing up a “Champagne Cup” in a silver bowl. To the champagne itself is added soda water, brandy, caster sugar, pounded ice and a sprig of borage (which may, in a pinch, be substituted by cucumber rind). Summer thirsts might be slaked in July with a cup of “Whiskey Cordial”, which involves steeping whitecurrants, lemon rind and grated ginger in whisky, and then sweetening it with lump sugar.