The French Country Housewife

Cora Millet-Robinet (1798–1890) published her two-volume epic of household management, cookery, gardening and agriculture for the French country housewife, Maison rustique des dames, in 1845. Over the next eighty years, it went through a score of editions. Rather as England's Mrs Beeton's, it was a book to be found in every household, a first resource in the kitchen, the garden and the drawing-room. Despite its title, it seems to have been as popular among the urban middle classes as with their peers living in the country.

The French Country Housewife is a translation into English of the first volume of the fourth edition (1859). It includes the sections dealing with furnishing and decorating, managing the family and the household, entertaining guests, and cookery in all its guises, from bottling and preserving fruit and vegetables, making jam, and salting meat to the staples of the best-loved style of French cooking, la cuisine bourgeoise.

Madame Millet-Robinet’s book is a treasure trove of information for lovers of history, for readers of novels from the heroic age of French literature – Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, for enthusiasts for French cookery and for all those people with houses deep in the French countryside wanting to know more about their surroundings.