Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine by William Carew Hazlitt
page 50 of 177 (28%)
page 50 of 177 (28%)
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20. The Modern Cook. By Vincent La Chapelle, Cook to the Prince of
Orange. Third edition. 8vo, 1744. 21. A Treatise of all sorts of Foods. By L. Lemery. Translated by D. Hay, M.D. 8vo, 1745. This completes the list of books, so far as they have fallen in my way, or been pointed out by the kindness of friends, down to the middle of the last century. It was probably Charles, Duke of Bolton (1698-1722), who was at one time Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and who in the beginning of his ducal career, at all events, resided in St. James's Street, that possessed successively as head-cooks John Nott and John Middleton. To each of these artists we owe a volume of considerable pretensions, and the "Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary," 1723, by the former, is positively a very entertaining and cyclopedic publication. Nott inscribes his book "To all Good Housewives," and declares that he placed an Introduction before it merely because fashion had made it as strange for a book to appear without one as for a man to be seen in church without a neckcloth or a lady without a hoop-petticoat. He congratulates himself and his readers on living in a land flowing with milk and honey, quotes the saw about God sending meat and somebody else sending cooks, and accounts for his omission of pigments by saying, like a gallant man, that his countrywomen little needed such things. Nott opens with _Some Divertisements in Cookery, us'd at Festival-Times, as Twelfth-Day, etc._, which are highly curious, and his dictionary itself presents the novelty of being arranged, lexicon-wise, alphabetically. He seems to have been a fairly-read and intelligent man, and cites, in the course of his work, many celebrated |
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