The Cook's Decameron

A novel with two hundred Italian recipes inside it: ten friends dine together for ten days, argue about food and cooks and country, and each day's talk ends in the day's menu.

About the Book

1901Published
Mrs. W. G. WaterAuthor
26Chapters
92Pages on this site

Mrs. W. G. Waters framed her Italian cookery book as fiction, after Boccaccio: a company of ten meets for ten days, and their conversation about taste, cooks, and the deficiencies of English cooking gives way each day to a menu and its recipes.

The result is a cookbook you can read straight through. The talk is opinionated and often very funny; the two hundred-odd recipes behind it are a serious introduction to Italian cooking for an English kitchen of 1901.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1901 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.

Rights & ReuseThe complete text of The Cook's Decameron (1901) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.