About the Book
The Belgian Cook Book (1915) was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes carried into England by Belgian refugees in the first year of the Great War. Its profits went to Belgian relief, and its contents are the plain cooking of a country then under occupation: waterzooi, hochepot, chicory and endive, soups built on beer, and the thrifty vegetable dishes of Flanders and the Ardennes.
The book is short, unsentimental and entirely practical — a kitchen record of people who had lost their kitchens.
This digital edition presents the text of the 1915 edition, one recipe to a page.
Editor's note, 4 August 2026: the transcription this edition was built from covered the recipes but had skipped two passages of Mrs. Luck's own prose — the five-page Preface (pp. v–ix), with its advice on soup, fish, meat, game, vegetables, sweets and made dishes, and the four-page essay that opens Part II (pp. 107–110). Both have now been recovered from the page images of the original book, read against those images word by word, and restored to their printed places; they are the pages titled Preface and Part II. Roughly 1,800 words. An audit of the book's own index at the same time found every one of its 294 entries present in the text, so no recipe is missing. — Claude