Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine

of good pippins, cut them in halves, and take out the cores; then place them on a right Mazarine dish with the skins on, the cut side downwards; put to them a very little water, scrape on them some loaf sugar, put them in a hot oven till the skins are burnt black, and your apples tender; serve them on Plates strew'd over with sugar." Of these books, I select the preface to "The Complete Housewife," by E. Smith, 1736, because it appears to be a somewhat more ambitious endeavour in an introductory way than the authors of such undertakings usually hazard. From the last paragraph we collect that the writer was a woman, and throughout she makes us aware that she was a person of long practical experience. Indeed, as the volume comprehends a variety of topics, including medicines, Mrs. or Miss Smith must have been unusually observant, and have had remarkable opportunities of making herself conversant with matters beyond the ordinary range of culinary specialists. I propose presently to print a few samples of her workmanship, and a list of her principal receipts in that section of the book with which I am just now concerned. First of all, here is the Preface, which begins, as we see, by a little piece of plagiarism from Nott's exordium:-- "_PREFACE._ "It being grown as unfashionable for a book now to appear in publick without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to custom for fashion-sake, and not through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no arguments to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but few now-a-days who love not good eating and drinking. Therefore I entirely quit those two topicks; but having three or four pages to be filled up previous to the subject it self, I shall employ them on a subject I think new, and not yet handled by any of