Food in Early Modern England or First Catch Your Hare

Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads and Fashions

Author: Joan Thirsk

What did ordinary people eat and drink five hundred years ago? How much did they talk about food? Did their eating habits change much? Our documents are mostly silent on such commonplace routines, but this book digs deep and finds surprising answers to these questions. Food fads and fashions resembled those of our own day. Commercial, scientific and intellectual movements were closely entwined with changing attitudes and dealings about food. In short, food holds a mirror to a lively world of cultural change stretching from the Renaissance to the industrial Revolution. This book also strongly challenges the notion that ordinary folk ate dull and monotonous meals.

Interesting book: Optimal Muscle Training or Healthy Aging

First Catch Your Hare: The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747)

Author: Hannah Glass

"This book is, quite simply, the most important English cookery book of the eighteenth century, defining for many the food and dining customs of the Georgian era. This is a facsimile edition, for the first time in paperback. The facsimile is of the first (1747) edition and preserves its large format." "This edition also contains considerable information about Hannah Glasse in a biographical introduction, as well as two essays on the degree to which Glasse was indebted to other authors for her recipes. These essays (by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain) were important milestones in our understanding of the techniques of early cookbook compilation. There is also a detailed and informative glossary, with illustrations where necessary, which help the reader interpret the recipes and the ingredients referred to." Hannah Glasse was a remarkable woman. She was not a professional cook; rather her expertise was in dressmaking and mercery. Even if her recipes are often filched from other people's books, she certainly puts her own gloss on many of them, and there is a definite authorial voice to the text as a whole. The book is particularly significant both in its attitudes to the influence of French cookery on the English middle classes, and in its reflection of the roles of mistress and servant in the running of an urban household. Its recipes are often successful and still capable of reproduction. The first curry recipe printed in England appears here.