The Compleat Housewife, or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion: being a collection of upwards of five hundred of the most approved receipts in cookery, pastry, confectionary, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials : with copper plates curiously engraven for the regular disposition or placing the various dishes and courses, and also bills of fare for every month in the year : to which is added, a collection of near two hundred family receipts of medicines ... by E.S.
London: Printed for J. Pemberton, 1727.
Octavo (19.5 x 12 cm.), [16], 326, [16] pages. Signatures: A-X Y ( -Y4) a . Index. Illustrated with woodcut vignettes in the text, and with [6] folded leaves of plates; lacking part of plate no. 1, after the first fold. Bitting notes the "plates are not usually present until the 9th edition and those that follow" (page 438). Other titles: Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion; Compleat Housewife. FIRST EDITION. An important cookbook. "After Hannah Glasse and, perhaps, Elizabeth Raffald, Eliza Smith is one of the best known of 18th Century cookery writers...' (Maclean page 134). Originally published in 1727, The Compleat Housewife was issued in many editions; in 1742 it became the first cookbook printed in what was to be the United States, fifty-four years before the first cookbook compiled and published in the U.S., Amelia Simmons' American Cookery (Hartford, 1796). The author was a cook or housekeeper, and the recipes were drawn largely from her private recipe manuscripts, the tradition to date, though one which was waning as more cookbooks were compiled with recipes borrowed from other books. The medicinal recipes were included largely to help less fortunate neighbors, as the members of the household would have a doctor (Lehman, The British Housewife). During the author's lifetime her name appeared only as "E_ S_", expanding to "E. Smith" in the fifth edition, but never appeared fully as "Eliza Smith". Lehman concurs with Genevieve Yost that there is no evidence for the author's first name being Eliza (Lehman, page 450-51). ~ Lacking part of the first plate as noted above; otherwise folding plates are clean and sound. A few small pencil annotations to text. Rebound in red calf, using original, gilt-paneled boards; new hinges and gilt-titled and -decorated spine panel. Generally near very good. Rare; not one copy of the first edition sold at auction in the last fifty years (RareBookHub). [OCLC locates six copies of the first edition; Bitting, page 438 (but only for the fourth edition of 1730; Maclean, page 134].
Price: $4,500.00