Burnside Rare Books

The Frugal House Wife [Housewife]: or, Complete Woman Cook. Wherein the art of dressing all sorts of viands, with cleanliness, decency, and elegance, is explained in five hundred approved receipts, in roasting, boiling, frying, broiling, gravies, sauces, stews, hashes, soups, fricassees, ragoos, pasties, pies, tarts, cakes, puddings, sylabubs, creams, flummery, jellies, giams, and custards. Together with the best methods of potting, collaring, preserving, drying, candying and pickling. To which are prefixed various bills of fare, for dinners and suppers in every month of the year; and a copious index to the whole.

Carter, Susannah

Dublin: Printed by James Hoey, Jun. at the Mercury, [ca. 1765-8].

Evident first edition, this Dublin imprint was functionally published simultaneous with the London imprint (see Maclean, pages 23-24). Bound in contemporary full speckled calf; five raised bands, later gilt-tooled red morocco spine label. Spine rebacked with original laid-down and early repairs to edges, 6.5 x 4", 18mo. Near Fine with small patches of worming at front pastedown and bottom margins of the first twenty-five leaves; not affecting text; old hand notations on front pastedown, lacking rear endpaper; small chip to rear pastedown; contents clean and bright.

An egalitarian cookery by a seemingly unknown London female cook, Susannah Carter (fl. 1765). A no fuss book of household management for the average 18th-century housewife. It seamlessly does away with extravagant spices and costly ingredients to make room for more homespun receipts at a time when cooking was arguably at its most decadent.

Carter was one of the first culinary authors to incorporate month-to-month seasonal recipes to encourage at-home cooks to employ cost-effective ingredients they could access from their garden plots. So revolutionary was this cookery that American writer, Amelia Simmons, nearly copied word for word her receipts in her American Cookery published in 1796. "Mary Toldford Wilson acknowledged that many of the recipes in American Cookery 'were outright borrowings from British cookery books of the period, particularly Susannah Carter's.'

Carter's work reworked the practice of home cooking with the use of simpler tools and step-by-step instructions. Her methods of preserving and drying were utilized and mimicked throughout the British Isles and American colonies. Her recipes still remain accessible even by today's standards. A scarce and comprehensive text that would forever modify the standard practice of cookery. Item #140946063

Price: $40,000