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Chapter One: Culinarily Colonized: Cookbooks in Colonial New England
- University of Massachusetts Press
- Chapter
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7 During the colonial era, New England cooks in a position to make use of printed recipe sources had to rely on English cookbooks, since, as noted in the Introduction, the first American cookbook was not published until 1796. In the seventeenth century, the most popular of these was Gervase Markham’s The English Hus-wife, first published in 1615 and frequently reprinted until late in the century. Copies of this work were shipped to Virginia in 1620, and it seems likely that before long other copies made their way to New England. Miles Standish of Plymouth Colony, who died in 1656, may have owned it. By the 1680s, if not earlier, it appeared on lists of titles imported from London by Boston booksellers.1 Two other cookbooks appeared on these 1680s Boston booksellers’ import lists: The Queens Closet Opened, by “W. M.,” and The Queenlike Closet, by Hannah Woolley. The former, purporting to enshrine the domestic “secrets” of Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, had first been published in 1655 and was destined to be reprinted until 1713. The Hannah Woolley book, entitled with an eye to the success of The Queens chapter one • CulinarilyColonized Cookbooks in Colonial New England 8 • part 1. cooks and cookbooks Closet Opened, first appeared in 1670, with several reprints and supplements in the 1670s and 1680s.2 In the eighteenth century, cookery titles continued to be imported for sale to those colonists participating in the expanding colonial book market. In the second quarter of the century, E. Smith’s The Compleat Housewife (1727), which has been called “the best seller of the early eighteenth century” in Britain, was widely advertised in newspapers “throughout the colonies,” including New England. Its successful sale prompted an edition on this side of the Atlantic, in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1742, the first cookbook publication in British North America.3 Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), by far the most popular cookbook in eighteenth-century Britain, achieved a similar status in the colonies. Along with Glasse’s later and somewhat less popular The Compleat Confectioner (1760), The Art of Cookery was listed in the 1765 catalog of the circulating library of John Mein, a Boston bookseller. In the manuscript cookbook begun in 1763 by Anne Gibbons Gardiner of Boston, more than ninety of the recipes “can easily be traced” to The Art of Cookery. The popularity of Hannah Glasse in New England persisted after the achievement of American independence, if at the turn of the nineteenth century the region was anything like New York was at that time, as described by a memoirist writing in the 1840s: “Persons of a certain age were very much under the domination of that absurd style which was emphatically called ‘good old english cookery.’ 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 far more imperative and absolute.”4 John Mein’s 1765 catalog also listed The House-Keeper’s Pocket-Book (1733), by Sarah Harrison, and Madam Johnson’s Present; or, The Best Instructions for Young Women in Useful and Universal Knowledge (1754). Another Boston bookselling firm, that of Edward Cox and Edward Berry, listed The British Housewife (1756), by Martha Bradley, in its 1772 sale catalog.5 The Cox and Berry catalog featured a full-page advertisement for the first cookbook published in New England, the 1772 Boston printing (with copper plates by Paul Revere) of Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife, originally published in London in 1765. By this time, the most important and popular British cookbook of the closing decades of the eigh- [34.227.112.145] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:19 GMT) culinarily colonized • 9 teenth century, Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), had made its way to New England, as indicated by the fact that the Gardiner manuscript cookbook contains approximately fifty recipes copied or adapted from Raffald.6 Cookbook Writers and Readers in England Of the three cookbooks definitely known to have been imported into seventeenth-century New England, two of them represent the two major types produced in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . Markham’s English Hus-wife is an instance of the country household management manual, combining instruction in cookery with that in “Physicke [medicine] . . . Wooll, Hemp, Flax, Dayries, Brewing, . . . and all other things belonging to an Houshould.” In...