A menu is indeed given for every day of the year. Beginning on Jan 1st, a week of typically Victorian middle-class indigestibility is prescribed, course by course, and laid out across two pages.

The menus are clearly based upon English food and service, but American equivalents have been carefully substituted. Scrapple for brawn, black bass for the salmon.

Someone therefore, at some stage, proofread and edited this from an existing British manuscript or publication. Back then copyright, especially the hard-to-catch and even harder-to-punish international variety, wasn't yet afforded legal or practical protection.

And so to this book, where for every week after those New Years Day to Jan 8th suggestions, there is that same menu. The same recommendations in all their exact multiplications of appearance. The seasons could go hang, apparently. Because, from the frozen depths of January to the sapping tropics of August, every Sunday breakfast is the same. The same as last Sunday's breakfast. Every Thursday breakfast is the same, the same as last Thursday's breakfast.

A clever scam indeed. Which potential buyer will read closely? Not, they calculate, that busy young woman out shopping for a hat who, finding this alternative at the bookstall on the street corner near the tram stop, glances briefly and decides it will suffice as a sop to mother: mother, who gave her a doorstop volume on housewifery that makes her feel inadequate. Now - with another book on the dresser (and such a bargain!) - maybe mother will be pacified into believing young Maisie is serious about her role.