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Three men in a boat

by Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome

THREE MEN IN A BOATJEROME K. (JEROME KLAPKA) JEROME
Our binding, not the publisher's

“For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon, which were easy to cook, cold meat, tea, bread and butter, and jam. For lunch, he said, we could have biscuits, cold meat, bread and butter, and jam—but _no cheese_. Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy flavour to everything else there. You can’t tell whether you are eating apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.”

From a cookbook of 1861

A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.

1861  ·  Beeton
STRAWBERRY JAM

1594. INGREDIENTS.--To every lb. of fruit allow 1/2 pint of red-currant juice, 1-1/4 lb. of loaf sugar. _Mode_.--Strip the currants from the stalks, put them into a jar; place this jar in a saucepan of boiling water, and simmer until the juice is well drawn from the fruit; strain the currants, measure the juice, put it into a preserving-pan, and add the sugar. Select well-ripened but sound strawberries; pick them from the stalks, and when the sugar is dissolved in the currant juice, put in the fruit. Simmer the whole over a moderate fire, from 1/2 to 3/4 hour, carefully removing the scum as it rises. Stir the jam only enough to prevent it from burning at the bottom of the pan, as the fruit should be preserved as whole as possible. Put the jam into jars, and when cold, cover down. _Time_.--1/2 to 3/4 hour, reckoning from the time the jam simmers all over. _Average cost_, from 7d. to 8d. per lb. pot.

Sources: The passage is from Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome, Three men in a boat, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from Beeton, The Book of Household Management of 1861, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — moss cloth, rowboat stamp.

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