The Book
365 Dishes of All Nations was published in 1908 by Dean & Son, Ltd., of London, under copyright of George W. Jacobs & Company of Philadelphia. It belongs to a popular Edwardian series of “365” books — a year of breakfasts, a year of desserts, a year of this and that — each offering one short recipe for every day of the calendar.
This volume’s conceit is geography. The dishes are drawn, at least by their titles, from twenty-seven cuisines: the great kitchens of France, Germany, Italy and Spain; the regional tables of Bavaria, Vienna and Yorkshire; the Jewish cookery of Europe’s communities; and a sweep of what the book calls the Orient — from Constantinople and Cairo through Bombay and Madras to Peking and Tokyo. The recipes are brisk paragraph affairs, written for a cook who needed no coddling: “Season a pike; put in a baking-pan…” and away you go.
Reading the Recipes
A word of caution and of charm alike: these are 1908 recipes. They assume coal ranges, ice-boxes, lard by the kettleful, and a cheerful indifference to precise times and temperatures. Some ingredients — sheep’s head, calves’ feet, squirrel — have rather left the ordinary market. Read them as history first and dinner second, though a great many (the puddings especially) would still serve nicely.
Period spellings have been kept as printed — paprica, cocoanut, Bannanes — along with the book’s occasional eccentricities of grammar. Recipe numbers restart with each month, so a dish’s number is simply the day it belongs to.
This Edition
Every page of an original copy was scanned, and all 365 recipes were transcribed from those scans in full, each onto a page of its own that can be linked, bookmarked and read straight through the year. Nation attributions follow the book’s own index, which files its dishes by country — useful for the untitled Frenchness of Boulettes or Compote de Bannanes. The calendar presents the year as the book arranged it; the world map presents it as the title promised it. The book is in the public domain.