This e-text project is based on a copy of Mrs. Beeton's Dictionary of Every Day Cookery  that I purchased at an antiquarian book fair in 1996. I had been looking for a suitable text on which to use OS/2 Warp's VoiceType Dictation software, and the Beeton seemed ideal. I dictated and composed the first three sections of the Philosophy of Housekeeping, then ran into the complex tables of the Housekeeing Accounts section. This seemed like a good place to stop and catch my breath. The hiatus lasted five years.

    I revisited the Beeton in 2002 because I had started a weblog. I expected traffic to my main page would increase as the weblog began to be found in index searches, and to track that access I installed a visit-counter. To my surprise, one of the first "hits" came, not from the weblog, but from the Beeton. Either the pages had been linked, or they were showing up in index searches. It was a shame that they were so fragmentary; there was very little of use to a researcher.

    I took another look at the tables that had been my Waterloo, and discovered that they no longer seemed impossible. I had learned a lot of HTML skills in the intervening years, and composing complex tables was one of them.

    Other new techniques, such as using non-break spaces to create paragraph indents, and character entity references to produce specialized symbols such as £ and ½, let me more closely approximate the Beeton 's distinctive and charming typography. Finally, I decided to add name anchors to the numbered sections in the Philosophy of Housekeeping, to allow others to link to individual statements.

    It was also a good excuse to re-visit VoiceType Dictation. Ironically, I had been planning to move to a Mac platform with OS X, which does not bundle a similar application. I was debating whether to purchase a dictation program separately, or lose the functionality.

    As a result, during one weekend in April I fell in love with dictation software, and with the Beeton, all over again. The document will probably always be fragmentary, but it will probably continue to grow.

-- bew