The whole Body of COOKERY DISSECTED (1682)
A facsimile of the 1682 edition, with glossary
389 pp; 216 x 138 mm; hardback
ISBN 0907325110 £25.00
(published December 2003)
His cookery book went through five editions and this current volume
is a facsimile of the 1682 printing. The text is a remarkable statement
of the art of cookery as it was in the 1660s, and proved to be surprisingly
influential over a very long period: there are examples of wholesale borrowing
from his recipes as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. Of course,
he himself was not innocent of light-fingered loans from earlier authors
as well as using his book for conservative, revivalist ends. Hence his
recycling of a treatise on carving that started its life in the fifteenth
century, and his printing of an order of feasting from that same period.
All this was so ‘that thou maist see what Liberality and Hospitality there
was in Antient times amongst our Progenitors: Thus hoping to see Liberality
flourish amongst us once more, as in old time’.
The modern cook will find plenty to amuse, from making a ‘broth
or pottage called skink’, trotter pie, a quince cream, a lamprey eel pie,
or how to fry primrose leaves with eggs.
