The Publication of "Mrs. Dalgairns' Cookery": A Fortuitous Nineteenth-Century Success Story
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In March I829, IS00 copies of Mrs. Dalgairns's The P)ractice ofCookSery were released to the public by an impatient author and her obliging publisher Robert Cadell of Edinburgh, along with his London agents Simpkin & MarshalP' (fig.I).Its publication was preceded by notices in the leading newspapers of Edinburgh, London, and Dublin, including a half-inch advertisement in The Tirnes.The cookbook, priced at 7s 6d, was an immediate commercial and critical success, and Cadell and his successors were to benefit from 30 years of steady sales of 16 editions from 1829 until 1861.In that year Mrs. Beeton's sumptuous Book of Household Ma~nagement was first published, crushing the competition.While the celebrated Mrs. Beeton compensated for her ignorance of cookery by cutting and pasting from the work of her predecessors, Mrs. Dalgairns was an original.The name "Mrs.Dalgairns" is known today only to culinary history cognoscenti, cookbook collectors, and writers on Scottish cookery.In I829 one might have predicted otherwise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".