The Cook Not Mad, or Rational Cookery: being a collection of original and selected receipts, embracing not only the art of curing various kinds of meats and vegetables for future use, but of cooking, in its general acceptation, to the taste, habits, and degrees of luxury, prevalent with the American publick, in town and country. : To which are added, directions for preparing comforts for the sick-room; together with sundry miscellaneous kinds of information, of importance to housekeepers in general, nearly all tested by experience. (Motto, Gen. Chap. 27, V. 1, 2, 3, 4.).
Watertown [New York]: Published by Knowlton & Rice, 1831.
Duodecimo (14 x 8 cm.), v, [2], 8-120 pages. Index. First edition, second printing, following the first of 1830. A Toronto printing was issued by J. Macfarlane, also in 1831, and is recognized as the first cookbook published in Canada. The book is clearly intended for the "American Publick" as it states in the introduction. Within you will find no “English, French and Italian methods of rendering things indigestible, which are of themselves innocent, or of distorting and disguising the most loathsome objects to render them sufferable to already vitiated tastes... These evils are attempted to be avoided. Good republican dishes and garnishing, proper to fill an every day bill of fare, from the condition of the poorest to the richest individual.” Lacking front free endpaper; rear blank is missing a good sized piece; foot of one leaf (page 117-118) lacking bottom .5 cm., with loss of two lines of index. Textblock otherwise whole but shaken. In scaleboard binding, covered and handstitched in an early vernacular cover of plain linen. There is an early ownership signature on a rear blank, "Luzetta Foose" or "Luzetta Foose Rooke" (likely died 22 June 1845). Scarce. [OCLC locates twenty-two copies, and eleven of the first printing; Checklist of American Imprints 6680; Lowenstein 139].
Price: $1,500.00