Last night I had all the ingredients to make two Victorian desserts, and I decided to charge forward despite the fact that I was pretty sure the houseguest I was cooking for this weekend was going to cancel. It’s been about a month since I made a feast or even a simple meal. I am mindful of the passage of time because the menus are starting to reflect local spring ingredients like asparagus.

Now that I am about a fourth of the way through my year of Victorian cooking, I am able to reflect on how it’s going and what I’m getting out of it. I feel lucky that I read Beeton’s newest and most comprehensive biography first. It gave me fair notice that she did not test even a fraction of the recipes before she slammed them out in serial form. This historical document I have been planning parties around was once just another sheisty Victorian moneymaking scheme.

So how’s that working out for me? What am I getting from this? A lot of stomachaches. Fun, in that new-recipe way. I am doing a lot of personal research around the recipes and ingredients, and that always gives me a boner.

One feeling I get very strongly is that it would be nice to have Beeton’s rewritten with care and edited judiciously by someone who actually gives a shit about cooking. The extant abridged version cuts pages and menus off willy-nilly, sometimes in mid-menu. The recipes that the menus suggest are not included in the abridged one, which is more poor editing and proof that it has just become a crusty historical document. Though, to be fair, sometimes my unabridged version cross-references recipes that do not actually exist (looking at you, Sorrel Sauce), and I think if I was creating a book in serial form with 1200+ recipes without the aid of a computer, I would be fucking shit up left, right, and center.

I find myself editing some of the recipes as I go, since generally it pains me to waste or ruin food. I followed her advice on baking apples (something I rarely do) last night and ended up with applesauce. Franny says it is delicious.

Some of the recipes I would cut all together, like the “French” forcemeat recipe that calls for calf udder. Many of the recipes are interesting from a historical perspective, but I wonder if some of them were passed over even when the book was new. Why make forcemeat that requires boiling calf udder for hours and then pushing it through a sieve when you could make the simple one that calls for yummy bacon?

Anyway, the short answer is that I have no regrets about starting this project. My regrets center more around the fact that work has become exponentially more stressful in the past month, something I did not see coming at all, and I am trying to do that work-life balance thing. The best part of my day yesterday was making accidental applesauce and a lemon custard that did not thicken and probably will never set, while Franny sat around and played string games and talked to me. I was grump all day and cheerful after that. Tonight I will do my best not to ruin dinner, and I suppose I will make a quick gluten-free cake for dessert instead.

I think I will change tack though. If something sounds wrong to me, I am going to have to modify it a little, while still keeping the spirit of things. I cannot pour out another unset dessert.