From the American Institute of Wine & Food Collection.

From the American Institute of Wine and Food Collection.

The first female cookbook author to write in English, Hannah Woolley, who was twice widowed, produced her books at times of financial need. She learned household skills from her mother, and later, when she worked in a wealthy household. In addition to the basic skills of cooking, brewing, and baking, she teaches her readers how to feed the young and the sick, how to distill, and how to compound medicines.

The volume also has a separately paginated section with its own title page: Parisische Küchmeister…gedruckt im Jahr 1679.

When Anna Wecker published her New, Delightful, and Useful Cookbook in 1596 she became the first female food writer. She was the wife and mother of physicians, so it is not surprising that she includes many medical recipes as well as foods suitable for children, along with a very substantial number of recipes appropriate to the tables of Colmar’s well-to-do citizens. The appendix, The Parisian Master Cook, is an early example of the spread of fashionable French cuisine.

Fifth edition; first published in Braunschweig, 1692.

Bound with her:
Der Wohl-unterwiesenen Köchin, zufällige Confect-Buch bestehend in Zuibereitung allerhand mit Zucker eingemachten Früchten, Weinen, Aquaviten, Brandtweinen, Pieren, Essigen und der gleichen … [etc.]
Berlin: Bey Johann Andreas Rüdigern, 1723.

Schellhammer’s massive pair of volumes parallels Hannah Woolley’s work (above) in range, and exceeds it in quantity. From the slaughtering, butchering, and preservation of animals, to complicated confectionary and medical remedies, she covers a large part of a woman’s duties in managing a large country estate. It is enriched with engraved plates illustrating table setting and kitchen equipment.

From the American Institute of Wine and Food Collection.

Gift of Sophie Coe.

Coe was an anthropologist, food historian, and translator. In 1955 she graduated from Radcliffe College and married Michael D. Coe, with whom she worked on various archaeological projects in Mesoamerica and the United States. She was a serious student of native New World cooking and a collector of ethnic and charitable cookbooks from around the world. Her research culminated in America’s First Cuisines (1994). This cookbook is included in a collection of ten English and American manuscript cookbooks containing recipes, household hints, and home remedies.

From the collection of Samuel and Narcissa Chamberlain.

One of the most long-lived and most widely distributed of English cookbooks, Glasse’s Art of Cookery was as much a compendium of extracts from earlier books as it was a source for following generations of writers in the United Kingdom and North America. The process by which the recipes in her work circulated is neatly illustrated in the frontispiece of this posthumous edition, in which a recipe is passed between two literate women of different classes. The cookbook remains, pristine, in the parlor; the cook carries the hand-written copy into the kitchen, where the ‘choice viands’ referred to in the verse await.

Gift from the Sontheimer Foundation, Greenwich, CT.

François Menon was the most prolific food writer in eighteenth-century France. Most of his books were addressed to a very wealthy clientele, but it was the Cuisinière bourgeoise that remained France’s best-selling cookbook well into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. It even continued to be issued nearly annually in Paris during the height of the French Revolution. This is a very late edition, and the contents of this volume have evolved considerably from the first edition of 1746. Many old favorites remain, but Menon never published any potato or tomato recipes in his Cuisinière. It is possible to trace the evolution of this work because the Schlesinger Library possesses sixty editions of it, thanks in very large part to the generosity of donors, especially the Sontheimer Foundation and the American Institute of Wine and Food.