Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery

I think yesterday was one of the coldest days I've ever experienced in Oz - it felt more Dublin than Hobart.  Rob and I decided to take a trip out to the block to check out a few things.   I refused to get out of the car until we arrived at Peppermint Bay for my promised afternoon tipple!  I ordered an excellent Stoney Vineyard Cabernet and we settled ourselves by the fire.  There were a few magazines scattered around for our reading plesure but the book that caught my eye was 'Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery' published in 1923.  It was a gem of a book with a plethora of great advice for the budding homemaker and hundreds of recipes to boot.  Most of the recipes involved ingredients I've never heard of but the dedication at the front of the book is worth repeating for you here:
"Without Rival
Mrs Beeton's competitors and would be successors have paid her the compliment of imitation and adaptation up to and sometimes beyond, the limits that the law allows, but her work stands today, as of old, without a rival.  Press and public alike proclaim its merits, and even the writers of romances of domestic life have recorded how it constantly rescues young housekeepers from perplexity and woe."

Oh, if only modern cookery books could rescue me from perplexity  and woe!