Author | Eliza Smith |
---|---|
Country | England |
Subject | English cooking |
Genre | Cookery |
Publisher | J. Pemberton |
Publication date | 1727 |
The Compleat Housewife; or, Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion is a cookery book written by Eliza Smith and first published in London in 1727. It became extremely popular, running through 18 editions in fifty years.
It was the first cookery book to be published in the Thirteen Colonies of America: it was printed in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1742. It contained the first published recipe for "katchup", and appears to be the earliest source for bread and butter pudding.
The book includes recipes not only for foods but for wines, cordial-waters, medicines and salves.
The title page describes The Compleat Housewife as a
collection of several hundred of the most approved receipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz. drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.
The book was the first to publish a recipe for "Katchup"; it included mushrooms, anchovies and horseradish. [1] [2] The title The Compleat Housewife may owe something to Gervase Markham's 1615 The English Huswife . [3]
Little is known of Smith beyond what she writes of herself in the preface. She spent her life working as a cook or housekeeper in wealthy households, and unlike Elizabeth Raffald who left service to run her own shop, continued in that profession despite the success of her book. It is possible that she worked at Beaulieu Abbey, Hampshire. She is critical of cookery books written by men who conceal their secrets, preventing readers from using their recipes successfully. [1] [4] [5]
The preface contains the following passage:
It being grown as fashionable for a book now to appear in public without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to the custom for fashion-sake and not through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no argument to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but a few nowadays who love not good eating and drinking
The passage was lightly adapted from an earlier book with a similar title, John Nott's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary: or, the Accomplish’d Housewife’s Companion (1723), which declared he had added an introduction because fashion had made it as odd for a book to be printed without one as for a man to be seen "in church without a neck cloth or a lady without a hoop-petticoat." [6] [7] [8]
The following refer to the 9th edition, 1739.
Smith offers no general advice, either at the start of the book or at the start of chapters; each chapter consists entirely of recipes. There are no lists of ingredients, these simply being mentioned as needed in the recipes. Most recipes do not mention either oven temperature or cooking time, though for example "To candy Orange Flowers" instructs "set your glasses in a stove with a moderate heat", [9] and "To Stew a Rump of Beef" states "this requires six or seven hours stewing." [10]
The recipes are predominantly English, but dishes include French and other foreign names, and imported ingredients, such as spices.
Recipes are described tersely, and do not generally spell out basic techniques such as how to make pastry; the recipe for "A Battalia Pye" [lower-alpha 1] does not mention pastry at all, though it is called for with the instruction to "close the pye": [11]
A Battalia Pye
Take four small chickens, four squab pigeons, four sucking rabbets; cut them in pieces, season them with savoury spice, and lay 'em in the pye, with four sweetbreads sliced, and as many sheep's tongues, two shiver'd palates, [lower-alpha 2] two pair of lamb-stones, twenty or thirty coxcombs, with savoury balls and oysters. Lay on butter, and close the pye. A Lear. [11] [12]
However, a few frequently-used components of dishes are described, such as "A Lear for Savoury Pyes" and "A Ragoo for made Dishes". The "Lear" is a thickened sauce made with claret, gravy, "oyster liquor", anchovies, herbs, onion and butter. The "Ragoo" contains similar ingredients, with the addition of sliced meats and mushrooms; the recipe ends with "use it when called for", such as in the Battalia Pye. [13]
Recipes are provided for home-made medicines and remedies such as "To promote Breeding" for women wanting to become pregnant. The recipe calls for a spoonful of "stinking orrice" [lower-alpha 3] syrup to be taken night and morning, and for "good ale" to be boiled with "the piths of 3 ox-backs, [lower-alpha 4] half a handful of clary, a handful of nep (or cat-bos)", [lower-alpha 5] dates, raisins, and nutmegs. The woman drinking this mixture "at your going to-bed" is enjoined "as long as it lasts, accompany not with your husband." [14]
The book was first published in 1727 and ran through 18 editions by 1773. [15] The first four editions were published under the byline "E— S—", but Smith did reveal she was a woman "constantly employed in fashionable and noble Families ... for the Space of thirty Years and upwards". [15] The fifth edition of 1732 gave the author's name as "E. Smith". [16]
The bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt recorded that the 7th edition included "near fifty Receipts being communicated just before the author's death". [17]
The Compleat Housewife was the first cookery book to be published in America, when William Parks, an ambitious and enterprising printer (originally from Shropshire) printed it in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1742. [6] [18] His version of The Compleat Housewife, a "cookery book of ambitious scope", was based on the fifth London edition of 1732, altered to suit American taste, and without recipes "the ingredients or materials for which are not to be had in this country." [19] Copies of the 1742 edition have become very rare, but "happily, one copy has returned to the city of its origin", and is in the Library of Colonial Williamsburg, Incorporated. [6]
In 1893, the bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt allocated 54 pages of his history of cookery books to the Compleat Housewife, commenting that "the highly curious contents of E. Smith ... may be securely taken to exhibit the state of knowledge in England upon this subject in the last quarter of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth [century]". [6] [20]
Christine Mitchell, reviewing the Chawton House reprint in 2010 for the Jane Austen Society of North America, wrote that Eliza Smith's book "met the growing need for a text to assist women with their task of maintaining a household." She quotes Elizabeth Wallace's introduction as saying that it gives modern readers reason to appreciate having a refrigerator and a global food system that brings us out-of-season produce. Yet, she observes, the English housewife had many varieties of vegetables, 30 kinds of seafood and 35 kinds of poultry (including hares and rabbits). She notes that the book also describes home remedies, the housewife having to function as " chef, doctor, pharmacist, exterminator, chemist, laundress, and all-around handy-woman." Reflecting that the recipes would "probably never" be used today, and the medicines are useless, the book remains invaluable for researchers, gives readers a glimpse into the world of Jane Austen and her contemporaries, and richly documents eighteenth-century English life. [1]
Patrick Spedding, in Script & Print, notes that the book was very popular in the eighteenth century, with 20 London editions in fifty years. However, he roundly criticises the 1983 Arlon House facsimile reprint of the 16th edition for deliberately omitting recipes including "To promote Breeding", suggesting this was because the publisher was concerned they might be harmful. [16]
The historian Sandra Sherman comments that The Compleat Housewife "is the first female-authored blockbuster." [21]
The bibliographer Genevieve Yost comments that "E. Smith's popularity in eighteenth century England was challenged perhaps most seriously by Hannah Glasse, who admittedly is better remembered today", [6] adding at once that Glasse is recalled mainly for the controversy over whether she actually existed, and for the recipe that people supposed started with "First catch your hare." [6] Yost suggests that the book's popularity in the colonies was probably increased by the publication of an American edition. [6] She concludes that
The quantities and ingredients render many of the recipes unsuitable to the modern kitchen, but these old cookbooks are increasing in value and interest to libraries, bibliophiles, and collectors, who find in them a truly revealing and fascinating glimpse of the past. [6]
In the Spring 2006 issue of Prairie Schooner , Sarah Kennedy published a poem called "The Compleat Housewife, 1727", with the gloss "the first popular cookbook published in Great Britain". The poem begins:
Learning to thigh a pigeon or tame a crab
was now within any woman's grasp,
even a maid could be taught to carve. [22]
Ketchup or catsup is a table condiment with a sweet and sour flavor. The unmodified term ("ketchup") now typically refers to tomato ketchup, although early recipes for various different varieties of ketchup contained mushrooms, oysters, mussels, egg whites, grapes or walnuts, among other ingredients.
Bakewell pudding is an English dessert consisting of a flaky pastry base with a layer of sieved jam and topped with a filling made of egg and almond paste.
Ratafia is a broad term used for two types of sweet alcoholic beverages, a flavouring essence whose taste resembles bitter almonds, later to a ratafia flavoured biscuit, a biscuit to be eaten along with ratafia, and later still, to a cherry variety.
Chess pie is a dessert with a filling composed mainly of flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and sometimes milk, characteristic of Southern United States cuisine. It is similar to pecan pie without any nuts.
Hannah Glasse was an English cookery writer of the 18th century. Her first cookery book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, became the best-selling recipe book that century. It was reprinted within its first year of publication, appeared in 20 editions in the 18th century, and continued to be published until well into the 19th century. She later wrote The Servants' Directory (1760) and The Compleat Confectioner, which was probably published in 1760; neither book was as commercially successful as her first.
Pickled walnuts are a traditional English pickle, made from walnuts. They are considered a suitable accompaniment for a dish of cold turkey or ham, as well as blue cheese. There is a reference to "a mutton chop and a pickled walnut" in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and a mention in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
Susannah Carter was the author of an early household management and cookery book, The Frugal Housewife, or, Complete woman cook. Little more is known than that Carter was from Clerkenwell in London as stated in the title page of the first edition.
Bread and butter pudding is a traditional bread pudding in British cuisine. Slices of buttered bread scattered with raisins are layered in an oven dish, covered with an egg custard mixture seasoned with nutmeg, vanilla, or other spices, then baked.
Elizabeth Marshall was a cook who ran a patisserie and cookery school in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1770 and about 1790. She is the author of The Young Ladies' Guide in the Art of Cookery, subtitled being a Collection of useful Receipts, Published for the Convenience of the Ladies committed to her Care, by Eliz. Marshall. Her Art of Cookery was printed by Thomas Saint, printer of wood engravings by Thomas Bewick as well as the printer and publisher of the Newcastle Courant, a forerunner of The Journal and the Evening Chronicle.
A New System of Domestic Cookery, first published in 1806 by Maria Rundell, was the most popular English cookbook of the first half of the nineteenth century; it is often referred to simply as "Mrs Rundell", but its full title is A New System of Domestic Cookery: Formed Upon Principles of Economy; and Adapted to the Use of Private Families.
The Experienced English Housekeeper is a cookery book by the English businesswoman Elizabeth Raffald (1733–1781). It was first published in 1769, and went through 13 authorised editions and at least 23 pirated ones.
Eliza Smith was one of the most popular female 18th-century cookery book writers. Unlike other popular woman cookbook authors whose books overlapped with hers, such as Hannah Glasse, nothing seems to be known about her personal life beyond the fact that she was one of the first popular female cookbook authors. Her one book, The Compleat Housewife, or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion, went through 18 editions in Britain and in 1742 Smith became the first cookbook author published in colonial America. Prior to her death, the name published in her book was E___ S____. After her death it was published as E. Smith. She was a housekeeper for thirty years: "for the Space of Thirty Years and upwards ... I have been constantly employed in fashionable and noble Families."
The Housekeeper's Instructor was a bestselling English cookery book written by William Augustus Henderson, 1791. It ran through seventeen editions by 1823. Later editions were revised by Jacob Christopher Schnebbelie.
Battalia pie is an English large game pie, or occasionally a fish pie, filled with many small "blessed" pieces, beatilles, of offal, in a gravy made from meat stock flavoured with spices and lemon. The dish was described in cookery books of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary: or, the Accomplish'd Housewives Companion was a cookery book written by John Nott and first published in London in 1723.
The English Art of Cookery is a cookery book of English cuisine by the tavern cook Richard Briggs, first published in 1788.
Mary Eales was a writer of the cookery and confectionary book Mrs Mary Eales's Receipts, published in 1718. The little that is known about her life is from the title pages of the various editions of her book.
Ann H. Cook was an English cookery book writer and innkeeper.
Martha Bradley was a British cookery book writer. Little is known about her life, except that she worked as a cook for over thirty years in the fashionable spa town of Bath, Somerset.
The Lady's Complete Guide, or Cookery in All its Branches by Mary Cole is a pioneering cookery book, the first in English that systematically ascribed recipes to their authors, where known. It was first published in 1788 and was followed by revised editions in 1789 and 1791.
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