Special Quality of Mrs. E.F. Haskell's “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia”

Based on Shep's Notes in “Civil War Cooking”

Abstract

We were not aware of the existence of any preceding studies in the United States on Mrs. E.F. Haskell's “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” the original text of “Keizaishogaku Kaseiyoshi” which is the translated book on home management spread most widely in the early Meiji Era in Japan. Recently, we knew that R.L. Shep ed. “Civil War Cooking, ” the reprinted edition of “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” was published in the United States. The purpose of this paper is to consider the special quality of “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” using Notes in “Civil War Cooking” by Shep, as part of the study on the translated books on home management in the early Meiji Era in Japan.
The conclusions are as follows :
Shep grasps “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” as a book on the American household of the 1860's and not just as a collection of cooking recipes. According to Shep's Notes, we can think that the content of “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” shows the process of americanizing the English life style of immigrants from Europe (especially England) in the new circumstances. Furthermore, Shep points out that “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” was concerned with women's lives in the period of the Civil War, closely.
If the special quality of “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia” is in the description on general home life beyond just a cooking book, as Shep mentions in Notes, we should not consider that Nagamine Hideki's translation had failed the special quality of “The Housekeeper's Encyclopedia, ” necessarily by not including in his translation the content on cooking which occupied the most part of the original text into “Kaseiyoshi.”