Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy first appeared in 1747 and stayed a bestseller for nearly a century — the dominant English cookbook of the Georgian era, written as a working manual rather than a display of taste. The Public Domain Review has reproduced the fourth edition of 1751, scanned from a copy at the US National Library of Medicine. Its author’s stated audience is the giveaway: she wrote so that “every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook.”

What’s actually in it:

  • Baked ox’s head, beef olives, “a pig in jelly”, three types of salmagundi, pigeon, Devonshire and calf’s-foot pies, “pigeons transmogrified”
  • A chapter that pairs “a recipe against the plague” with “a certain cure for the bite of a mad dog”
  • Firsts including trifle with jelly, Hamburgh sausages, piccalilli, and the coinage of “Yorkshire pudding”
  • “Currey the Indian way”, served with rice “pellow” — among the first English curry recipes
  • “To Dress a Turtle the West Indian Way” (1751), thought to be the first published turtle-soup recipe

The ingredients are a map of empire: turmeric, cocoa, ginger, Jamaica pepper, deer musk, whale ambergris. PDR calls the book “a product of imperial gustatory gathering”, and the volume travelled the same routes — onto the shelves of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

The social story matters as much as the recipes. More than half of London’s women were literate in this period, yet the mistress of a household was still expected in the kitchen. Glasse aimed at two audiences at once: servants who could climb with kitchen skills, and lower-gentry women who could offload the kitchen and buy leisure. She was blunt about the register she’d chosen — “my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way” — and the irony is that she was downwardly mobile herself, writing to repair failing family finances.

Critics were vicious. Ann Cook’s Professed Cookery (1754) opens with doggerel calling Glasse a plagiarist and a fraud, then close-reads more than thirty of her recipes to prove it. Others simply didn’t believe a woman could produce such a book, attributing it to the botanist John Hill; Samuel Johnson considered the theory and allowed only that “women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery.”

Her authorship is now uncontested, though around 342 recipes are suspected of having been copied from uncredited authors. Her real afterlife is in the language — roughly four hundred quotations from The Art of Cookery sit in the Oxford English Dictionary. John Waters put the colonial reach best in The Knickerbocker in 1844: “We had emancipated ourselves from the sceptre of King George, but that of Hannah Glasse was extended without challenge over our fire-sides and dinner-tables, with a sway more imperative and absolute.”