A book someone just pointed to

The Bachelor and the Chafing Dish. It's an 1896 cookbook-plus-essays. Mostly essays, really. It's about how to cook when you're a nearly broke bachelor, from the late 19th century. A lot of it is based on the chafing dish, which we think of as just to keep food warm, but which the author, who was cooking without an actual kitchen, used to genuinely cook food.

I've been flipping through it, and it's a lot of fun. An essay about how he and one of his friends had been eating out at a particular restaurant, but they noticed that a lot of their friends ate at a cheaper place, so they started eating there, until they observed that, while they filled up their stomachs pretty well there, their stomachs didn't seem to STAY full that long afterward, having emptied themselves out... An essays about how to cook really well on a galley kitchen on a ship. An essay about one of his friends serving him a haggis.

It's worth looking at, I think.