Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 31 No.

3 (2008)

Dening Good Food: Cookery-Book Illustrations in England

T ROY B I C K H A M

The eighteenth century marked the advent of the modern domestic cookery book in England. Unlike their predecessors, the new cookery books were cheap and abundant and written not for a small cadre of elite professional cooks but instead for domestic use by socially aspiring households. In consequence, these books signalled the intersection of the routine of eating with the hopes and anxieties of the burgeoning middling social ranks. Food and eating changed substantially during the eighteenth century. The growth and the stability of the empire ensured that former overseas luxuries, such as coffee, tea and sugar, became commonplace; earlier changes in domestic production secured greater variety and abundance of staples than ever; and the consumer revolution emboldened the English to work longer and harder to obtain little comforts, which included luxury and better quality foods.1 In the face of such plenty and diversity, selection and presentation rather than mere possession or abundance became essential to conveying messages of taste, wealth and power. The language of cookery and eating, as Roland Barthes has astutely described it, had suddenly become more complex for a large swathe of English society.2 Cookbooks, like other texts in the self-help genre of print that exploded during the eighteenth century, played the vital role of guide, helping men and women to negotiate the entire gamut of the food experience from purchase point to dinner-table presentation. These books were prescriptive to their core, and their popularity helped to create national cookery and dining standards at least for the middling and gentry households that used them. This article describes how illustrations worked as key components of these cookery books, visually reinforcing their prescriptive messages. As such, they offer important insights into the nature of food preparation and consumption. The illustrations, which abounded, can be divided into roughly three groups: diagrams for table settings, portraits of the authors, and kitchen scenes. Together they informed mistresses of how a proper kitchen should function and how guests would expect the meal to appear no easy task, considering the constant inux of new dishes and evolving table settings and etiquette. Such things mattered, the cookery books and social commentators argued again and again, because they ultimately reected the quality of the household and its mistress and master. The cookery books and
2008 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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their illustrations thus created, and ultimately reected, a set of public expectations for the domestic rituals of household cookery and eating as well as the extent to which food as fashion had become a business. Not surprisingly, all of these images were idyllic. The table diagrams showed items in perfect symmetry and proportion; the portraits were more brand images than actual likenesses; and the kitchen scenes showed happiness and order. But this was exactly what these books were peddling the simplication of difcult tasks, the instillation of economy, and display of fashion that would all ultimately impress others. * * *

There were few places better suited to showing off ones status and wealth than at the table. It was the height of renement and civility. As the The Hypochondriack remarked in the London Magazine in January 1779:
Amongst the arts by which civilization is marked, that of cookery, or the preparation of victuals for the table, is one of the most conspicuous. [...] In the most savage situation mankind devour their meat raw, and go naked; and from this state of brutality there is an ascent by innumerable gradations to the luxury and elegance of a company of ladies and gentlemen of high rank sitting at a dinner in London or Paris.3

At every stage acquisition, preparation, presentation and consumption food was malleable to the dictates of the English obsession with politeness. The consumption of food in middling and elite households was often what Lorna Weatherill has described as a front stage activity in which families displayed their wealth and status in a quasi-public setting.4 Aside from the food, which typically accounted for as much as half of the average households expenditure, a substantial portion of a familys material wealth was on display at a meal cutlery, table decorations, plates and even the actual table itself. Food was a part of fashion in the eighteenth century. The variations of cost, availability and a range of choices enabled a connoisseurship that depended as much upon knowledge as upon means, thus allowing for those sorts of judgements of taste and breeding that made the hair-splitting distinctions of groups and individuals within the sometimes amorphous ranks of the English middling and gentry ranks. As John Trusler, an author of numerous behaviour instruction manuals, remarked in his best-selling Honours of the Table (1788),
Of all the graceful accomplishments and every branch of polite education, it has long [been] admitted, that a gentleman and lady never shew themselves to more advantage, than in acquitting themselves well in the honours of their table; that is to say, in serving their guests and treating their friends agreeable to their rank and situation in life.5
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His guide narrates each aspect of the meal in tedious detail so that the youthful or inexperienced host might avoid awkwardness. Diners noticed discrepancies. The dons of University College, Oxford wagered bottles of port on whether or not cook had properly used calves feet to make his jellies.6 Fanny Burney complained in detail in her diary in 1773 that a hashed calfs head was nothing of the sort unless it followed the criteria laid out by her favourite and best-selling cookery book author, Hannah Glasse.7 The follies of failed cookery even entered the humour of the day. A joke in the popular Joe Millers Jests, begins with some gentlemen having a hare or supper. The cook, the joke continues, had crammed the belly full of thyme, but had not above half roasted the hare, the legs being almost raw; which one of the company observing, said, There was too much thyme (time) in the belly, and too little in the legs.8 Tea-drinking offers a useful vehicle for describing how these forces played out. Tea had outsold coffee to become the unassailable king of the English hot beverage trade by the 1740s, appearing in even the poorest households.9 Virtually all of the 62,000 shops licensed to sell it by the end of the century would have offered several types, some more than a dozen.10 Retailers liberal use of credit, the division of products into ounce-sized portions, and the postal system, ensured that even the rarest of teas were available even to labouring households in remote regions.11 Awareness of the variety of types was so common that it entered into puns in newspapers political commentary. In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, when a group of colonists protested British taxes by dumping tax-laden East India Company Tea into Bostons harbour in 1773, the London-printed Saint Jamess Chronicle remarked upon the military preparations making against the refractory Bostonians, that they have refused to admit our Hyson and Congo, the Government here have determined to try how they relish our Gunpowder Tea.12 Once the ingredients had been secured there was still the service itself, with a host of foreign and domestic porcelains and pottery from which to choose. Then there was the process of preparing the tea. Claiming not to support the prejudice itself, The New London Cookery and Complete Domestic Guide remarked: It is asserted by some female connoisseurs in tea, and perhaps it would be more difcult to disprove than to account for the fact, that tea tastes much better from Indian than British china.13 Once the tea had been selected, prepared and served, the setting became an arena of social display and judgement. Addressed to Parents and Tutors and with characters such as Miss Prattle and Master Thoughtful, such works as the pocket-sized Tea-Table Dialogues offered instruction in the form moral tales so that children might improve the Heart and correct the Manners.14 To help negotiate such mazes there was the modern cookery book that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century and ourished thereafter. Printed collections of recipes were not, of course, new in the eighteenth century; in fact, they appeared soon after the advent of printing itself. The vast majority of these earlier texts, however, were the works of court cooks aimed at the
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professional cooks of the super elite. What appeared in the mid-eighteenth century was more akin to the manuscript collections that had circulated amongst middling women for centuries. Some books protested that they were intended for the Use of all Ranks in general [...] either the Peer or the Mechanic and that the recipes ingredients were within the Purchase of all Ranks of people, but the books clearly appealed almost exclusively to the middling ranks and the gentry.15 Although the bulk of the books consisted of recipes, their primary purpose was that of domestic guide, and so they included the sort of information of value to the middling housewife, who as a result of geographic distance from helpful family advisors, or newly acquired social status, lacked easy access to the information necessary for the smooth running of her household. Some works also simultaneously addressed the primary housekeeper, who in a more prosperous or bachelor household might play a similar role. Thus, the cookery books included advice on how to hire and use domestic help, household economy, mathematical tables for estimating prices while shopping, and medicinal remedies for common ailments. In terms of cooking, the expectation of all of these books was that either the mistress would prepare the dishes herself or that her servants would do so under her direction. Generally priced at two to six shillings, they were affordable to their target audience. The genre was a tremendous success. What started as a trickle of titles in the 1730s turned into an explosion by the end of the century, with the best-selling works appearing in over a dozen editions each and the genre as a whole selling over half a million copies by the end of the century.16 The books themselves were consciously constructed as guides, presenting themselves as promoting key traits that would appeal to middling and gentry mistresses: ease of use, fashion and, most importantly, economy. This message was evident from the outset, as titles cued readers on the books guiding style with such words and phrases as ladys complete assistant and Housewifes Companion. The titles also evoked expectations of economy and ease with phrases such as the prudent housewife, plain and easy and easy and familiar. Such pledges had undoubted appeal. After all, commentators noted, cookery was not a casual pursuit; rather it was a complex art that required precision and study. Francis Collingwood and John Woollams went so far as to insist in the opening lines of the preface to their cookery book that Cookery is become a Science.17 Even books written by professional cooks increasingly presented themselves as lighthouses in treacherous and unfamiliar waters. Such authors as William Gelleroy, the late Cook to her Grace the Duchess of Argyle and now [...] the Lord Mayor of the City of London, included in his title the whole art of cookery and pastery made easy and familiar and concluded his preface with the hope that it will be useful to the notably less grand readers of his book.18 The books also routinely promised buyers the value that no other purchase would be necessary, with stock words and phrases such as compleat and universal. Penelope Bradshaws, The Family Jewel, and Compleat Housewifes Companion; Or, The Whole Art of Cookery Made
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Plain and Easy (1754) impressively managed to include almost all of these desirables within a single title. The material was separated neatly into categories listed on the table of contents. Groupings varied but the books typically divided the recipes, which usually numbered in the hundreds, into several dozen types of foods, such as soups and fricassees, or into seasons. The recipes themselves consisted of simple preparation narratives with ingredients listed within the text, and they often concluded with serving directions. The language throughout was step-by-step in its prescription and made few assumptions, as the rst lines of Martha Bradleys The British Housewife; Or, The Cook, Housekeepers, and Gardiners Companion (1756) exemplify: We are to conduct the Cook and the Housekeeper throughout the year, and we begin with the rst month.19 * * *

The most common illustrations were diagrams of table layouts of dishes, or bills of fare as most cookery books called them. Appearing regularly by 1730s and a standard feature in the vast majority of cookery books throughout the second half of the century, these illustrations could number over one hundred in a single book. Most, such as Sarah Harrisons Devonshire-based book that rst appeared in 1733 (Fig. 1), started with just a handful of layouts in early editions and then steadily added more over time (by the 1760s her book featured several dozen). The diagrams differed substantially in quality from book to book. The Manchester-based Elizabeth Raffald offered large, copper-plate pull-out diagrams in her Experienced English Housekeeper (rst 1769), whereas others, such as Ann Peckham, mapped out the diagrams in typeset, using numbers to signify dish placement and a key at the bottom of the page explaining which number meant which dish.20 Martha Bradley offered perhaps the most detailed advice in The British Housewife by including simple images of the foods themselves in the diagrams. Regardless of quality, all of the diagrams had the same purpose: to instruct the user on selection and display of food for meals and to bring together the taste of the palate with the taste of the visual. As Martha Bradley remarked, To please the Palate is one Design of this Branch of Study [art of cookery], and to please the Eye is the other.21 In what Stephen Mennell has described as the civilizing of the appetite, selection, rather than abundance, had become the sign of status in the eighteenth-century English meal.22 Thanks to changes in agriculture and infrastructure, along with relative peace and prosperity, food was plentiful throughout the period. Provincial urban centres joined Londons rapid pace of growth to create massive, concentrated markets that entrepreneurs and producers around the world raced to exploit. These networks brought items as diverse as Devonshire cheese, Virginia tobacco and Barbadian sugar together on the same table. Urban areas were not alone in these changing patterns of consumption or consumer revolution, as it is most often described. Choice
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1. Bill of fare for the rst course of a dinner in Sarah Harrison, The House-Keepers Pocket-Book, and Compleat Family Cook, 6th edn rev. (London: printed for R. Ware, 1757). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; shelfmark 781 f.187, p.110

abounded at the tens of thousands of groceries operating throughout the nation by mid-century. For instance, a consumer shopping in even the small Cotswold town of Shipton-under-Wychwood would have had access to at least half a dozen types of Chinese tea, three or more blends of Arabian and West Indian coffees, and a host of spices and dried fruits.23 The cookery books
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helped users to negotiate the changing fare with explanations of the various ingredients, the dishes histories, and methods of preparation. They provided such fashionable new foreign dishes as curry the Indian way and New England pancakes along with traditional English roasts and stews. The bills of fare and their illustrations reect the cookery books primary aim to bring order to the confusion brought on by the diversity of choice and the powerful desires of mistresses to be fashionable while remaining prudent. They detailed how best to match the diverse dishes in order to produce a single course that would both have the greatest appeal to guests and took advantage of seasonal price uctuations, qualities and ingredients. Most collections of bills of fare divided according to season, course and meal. In his The English Art of Cookery, Richard Briggs, for example, was typical in his offering illustrations of the dinner bills of fare for two courses the usual number, given that sweets and savouries typically appeared in the same setting during this period for each month of the year.24 Charlotte Masons The Ladies Assistant offered the greatest number of settings with 140 in her inaugural edition alone, which she divided between season, meal and size of the party dining.25 Others included layouts for special occasions, such as Martha Bradleys impressive A Table for a Wedding Supper. A handful of cooks to the good and the great offered bills of fare for nationally celebrated meals, such as the feast which William Gelleroy orchestrated at Londons Guildhall for the 1761 Lord Mayors Day.26 Clearly, he did not expect the feast to be repeated at his readers homes. However, readers could nevertheless marvel at the splendour of the occasion, and in this sense the settings reveal the cookery books as tools of the imagination. Regardless of how dreary life might be in the immediate environs of womans own kitchen, the cookery book could be an imaginary gateway to lavish royal dinners and exotic cultures. Visual display was an essential component of these meals, and the illustrated bills of fare provided further detailed instructions on the precise placement of the dishes to help accomplish a pleasing effect. The best Dinner in the World, Martha Bradley warned housewives across the nation, will have an ill Aspect if the Dishes are not properly disposed on the Table.27 The communicative power of the table was not an invention of the new style of cookery book. Early manuscript collections of recipes of elite households often include handwritten layouts for specic occasions. An anonymous one from the 1720s is typical in that it maps such meals as the Kings dinner at Lord Ranelagh, but more telling is that it equally describes the settings of dinners and feasts laid out for less notable guests. Such meals include tenants dinners, meals for our Poor neighbors, Ordinary Trades People and The best sort of Trades People.28 Carefully crafted with pyramids of sweet and savoury pies on porcelain dishes, an array of meats and special treats that sometimes included chocolate and oranges, these meals for lower social ranks could at once display the wealth, taste and generosity of the hosts. The new cookery books made these tools more accessible, and, in consequence, more standardised and scrutinised.
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Cookery books regularly included visually stunning desserts, such as the section of Felix Farleys best-selling The London Art of Cookery on Elegant Ornaments for a Grand Entertainment, which featured such spectacles as a giant sugar Chinese Temple and an edible Floating Desart Island that used eryngo root to create village dwellings.29 But, greater attention to aesthetics also increasingly accompanied more routine meals, and the cookery books focused primarily on these. The vast quantities of genuine and imitation Asian porcelain that appeared on even artisan tables during the eighteenth century is testimony to the growing social importance of the more routine meal. As Weatherill has noted in her extensive survey of probate inventories from the half-century following 1675, Asian porcelain ownership rose from 4 to 80%, and ownership of cutlery rose from 8% to 64%.30 Most cookery books included discussions of serving implements, noting which bowls and plates suited particular dishes, and the bills of fare paid attention to how these dishes appeared in concert, as well as the economy and fashion of the food itself. As Martha Bradley explained in the introduction to her collection of bills of fare, she considered not only what Kind [of provision] is in Season, but what Parts or Joints are most handsome at the Table; in what Manner they appear best, and with what Additions.31 * * *

Portraits of the author were the second most common type of illustrations in cookery books. Although they are not to be found in every book, a rough majority of titles included them. Portraits typically were busts of the authors that appeared early in the work usually immediately after the title page, as frontispieces and the subject almost invariably posed formally. These were not action shots of the authors at work; they rarely did more than hold their cookery books. The portraits served a number of functions, particularly in their creation of an intimacy between the author and reader and in their formation of commercial brand images. They thus ultimately reected the role of the books as business ventures as well as how aware producers were of their potential market. After all, cookery books were among the most popular non-ction genres, with an annual market easily worth in excess of ten thousand pounds by the end of the century. At least partly in consequence, leading cookery titles received the backing of the same publishers who produced the works of such notable authors as Daniel Defoe, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon.32 One of the Art of London Cookerys publishers, for example, was James Scatcherd, whose authors included the explorer James Cook. At the heart of the portraits purpose was the conveyance of intimacy. As noted above, the nature of the cookery book was advisory, and it served to replace or augment the wisdom that had traditionally been shared down the generations by women either within the same family or a close community. The explosion of the reinvented cookery book as a domestic guide did not happen until changes in English society particularly the combination of the
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emergence of materially ambitious middling social ranks, politeness and urbanisation strained traditional information networks for a larger number of literate women.33 The kitchen and the dinner table, no matter how frontstage and open to public scrutiny they had become, remained at the centre of domestic life. These still functioned largely as intimate family occasions; outsiders were invited. The selection of a cookery book was, in some ways, an invitation to the author, whether as a guest or by employment, into the heart of the home. A portrait put a likeable, familiar face to the printed advice an elderly aunt-like sage, the young, friendly housewife, the dashing celebrity male cook. Portrait captions, prefaces and title pages gave the portrait character and credentials, such as decades of domestic service, the title of Mrs and the claim to experienced housewife status, or qualications as a professional cook in well-known venues. All of this served to provide a pathway for an imagined intimacy that was necessary for the mistress to entrust such an important aspect of the household to someone else. In many cases these portraits served as the visual face of a brand. The relationship of cookery books with their purported authors was often tenuous at the best of times. Although willingly lending his name to the title and selling the book at his place of work, Felix Farley probably did not write much of the cookbook that claimed him as its author; Mrs Cole, the author of The Ladys Complete Guide; or Cookery in All Its Branches, probably did not exist; and, not unlike other successful works of this kind Hannah Glasses book continued to appear in new editions long after her death in fact, for seventy-three years following her death in 1770!34 Cooks who worked in well-known venues traded heavily on their public status, invariably noting their qualications on the title page and sometimes including a visual image of the venue. One of the most popular celebrity chef works of the day was Farleys Art of London Cookery, which enjoyed over a dozen editions in the two decades following its rst appearance in 1782. Farley was the principal cook at the famous London Tavern, which in that year alone hosted such nationally reported celebrations as the East India Company directors party for victories over the Dutch in Asia at Batavia and Padang, and Admiral George Brydges Rodneys festivities following his victory over the French West India eet at the Battle of the Saintes.35 The frontispiece includes both a portrait of Farley (Fig. 2) and the recognisable front of the tavern. Farleys portrait appeared at the front of virtually every edition, and, although it changed to varying degrees at least four times, he remained young and dapper. The portrait caption and the title page invariably noted his association with the London Tavern, although the image of the building itself appeared more sporadically among the editions. Sometimes the portraits were the victims of the success of the cookery books in which they appeared. Especially in those works reprinted over several decades or more, publishers often changed the portraits themselves, altering such details as the clothing or hairstyle to make them seem more fashionable and contemporary all with the undoubted intention of selling more books.
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2. Frontispiece to John Farley, The London Art of Cookery, 10th edn (London: Printed by C. Whittingham, 1801). The British Library. All Rights Reserved No book was more guilty of this than Elizabeth Raffalds The Experienced English Housekeeper, which rst included a portrait of an elderly Raffald in the eighth edition two years after her death in 1781. The next four editions, which all purported to include new recipes and advice from the author, carried versions of this portrait, but by 1803 the publishers had apparently decided that youth was in fashion and replaced the elderly version of Raffald with a beaming young one. * * *

Although not as common as table diagrams or authors portraits, illustrated scenes of cookery were sufciently common to merit discussion here, not least
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because they are among the few popularly printed illustrations of domestic life which have come down to us. In keeping with the rest of the content of these books, the cookery scenes were, of course, idyllic, and they offer far better glimpses into what was prescribed and pursued rather than the realities of food preparation in a middling or elite household. The kitchens are faultlessly organised and tidy and the gures neat and apparently content. Most, unsurprisingly, show kitchens in which a cookery book features, either in the form of the mistress or housekeeper consulting the open book as she prepares the meal, or of the mistress copying out the recipe for a waiting servant. As early as 1736, Nathan Bailey featured images of women churning butter, making wine and cooking while reading his domestic dictionary.36 Cheap and abundant, these books were not too precious to prevent their exposure to the hazards of the eighteenth-century English kitchen. At a cost of a few shillings, they were not necessarily disposable, but nor were they irreplaceable. Although admittedly they offer only anecdotal evidence, such illustrations suggest a broad culture of literacy among women by indicating an expectation that higher ranking female servants could read.37 During the second half of the century, newspapers regularly carried advertisements for female cooks, and the cookery book authors themselves often professed an expectation that servants would be reading their works. As Hannah Glasse remarked in the preface of her Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, If I have not wrote in the high, polite, Stile, I hope that I shall be forgiven; for my Intention is to instruct the lower Sort and therefore must treat them in their own Way. The result, she promised, was that every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook, and those who have the least Notion of Cookery, cant miss of being very good ones.38 The regular presence of the head female of the house emphasised that even ladies with a host of servants should maintain some role in food preparation through the selection and presentation of the food.39 As Charlotte Mason remarked in the preface of her very popular cookery book, the table reected the host: It is certain, that a woman never appears to greater advantage than at the head of Well-Regulated table [...] a table may be so conducted as to be the taste and management of the mistress.40 If not inclined to micromanage the selection of the specic dishes, she could at least exercise her taste by carefully choosing the most appropriate printed guide for her servants to consult. As Glasse remarked in the conclusion to her preface: I shall say no more, and only hope my Book will answer the Ends I intend it for; which is to improve the Servants, and save the ladies a great deal of Trouble.41 The acceptability of this practice is illustrated in the frontispiece of William August Hendersons The Housekeepers Instructor; Or The Universal Family Cook (Fig. 3). According to its caption, the illustration depicts A Lady presenting her servant with the UNIVERSAL FAMILY COOK who difdent of her own knowledge has recourse to the Work for Information. Henderson was one of the many professional cooks who designed his work for domestic use, addressing both servants and housewives. The engraving
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3. Frontispiece to William Augustus Henderson, The Housekeepers Instructor; Or, Universal Family Cook, 5th edn (London: W. & J. Stratford, 1793). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; shelfmark Johnson e. 1918

was made especially for his cookery book. Hendersons frontispiece also reects the status of men in English cooking practices. English women played a greater role in food preparation in middling and elite households than their European continental counterparts did, authoring far more cookery books and serving as professional cooks in elite households at a much higher rate.42 This is not to suggest that cookery represented a separate or private sphere for women. The public functions of the domestic meal in terms of its reection of household management, taste and status along with the shift towards
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the visible shopping for food in markets and groceries severely eroded the privacy of the meal.43 Men, of course, took an interest in domestic cookery, but in comparison with the ranking women they typically played a decidedly secondary role in middling and most elite homes. Thus, in Hendersons scene a lady issues the instructions. Many professional cooks from elite public venues and households were men, including Henderson, but when they published their works they knowingly addressed a predominately female audience and publicly counted their female fellow authors as peers. As with other male cookery writers, when in 1797 Francis Collingwood and John Woollams, Principal Cooks at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand, unveiled the culinary secrets of the elite venue that would host the two thousand guests at Charles James Foxs birthday party the following year, they entitled their work city and country housekeeper and paid homage to authors Hannah Glasse and Charlotte Mason.44 Once the food reached the table, however, mens knowledge, taste and skill went on display. During the eighteenth century, meals became less formal, with guests serving themselves and each other from dishes that either the hosts or servants laid out on the table.45 Prescribed seating arrangements continued to take account of social rank, but they also increasingly advocated malefemalemale patterns in which the male assisted the females on either side of him. This offered ice-breakers for conversation, and whether or not a man could properly identify and serve the dish forced him to expose his culinary knowledge and taste. In consequence, men who moved in polite circles needed at least a rudimentary knowledge of cookery. Carving, which in the illustration the young man practises with the aid of Hendersons book, was the most public extension of a polite mans understanding of cookery, because the host was expected to perform the act without assistance in full view of his guests. Women also carved, but the male host was expected to perform the act while standing at his end of the table. Not surprisingly, detailed guides regularly appeared in cookery books. The link between carving and politeness is perhaps best demonstrated in John Truslers The Honours of the Table (1788), which mostly consists of a seventypage section on the art of carving. Packed with detailed diagrams for carving everything from half a cows head boild to a cods head, the section offers step-by-step instructions on how best to portion and serve the food. Carving, Trusler explained, makes the male host the focus of the partys attention and offers a key opportunity for him to demonstrate his skill, physical grace and sensitivity. Appealing to his audiences sensibilities, Trusler declares, We are always in pain for a man, who, instead of cutting up a fowl genteely, is hacking for half an hour across a bone, greasing himself, and bespattering the company with sauce.46 In consequence, Trusler instructs on issues of deportment as well as which cuts should go to guests of which rank, and he implores readers to share the instructions especially with young people, because Experience will teach them, in time, but till they learn, they will always appear ungraceful and awkward.47
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Creating a meal that suited the diverse expectations and met the scrutiny of guests was a notoriously difcult task so much so that in his opening preface for 1754 the editor of the London Magazine used it as a metaphor to explain the difculties he faced in his position. As we look upon ourselves in the Light of a Cook to dress a Dinner for a numerous Company of all Ranks in Life, and consequently of very different Tastes, we have sometimes been obliged to descend to what may have been, perhaps, thought too vulgar or low by some of our readers, he declared. But every one must see, he continued, that we have dealt less in this Sort of Cookery than any of our Rivals; and accordingly we nd, that our Magazine is sought after chiey by those rened Taste and Judgment.48 The consumer revolution, the rise of politeness, the emergence of the substantial but opaquely dened middling and gentry ranks all worked to make food a part of fashion, and so the acquisition, preparation and eating of it became expressions of taste, social rank and wealth. For the mistress of a prosperous or ambitious household this change of attitude undoubted translated into intense anxiety. The style of cookery book that dominated from the 1730s onwards played the roles of teacher, advisor and companion depending on what was needed. Packed with detailed explanations of all things related to food, they guided housewives and their servants from the point of purchasing the food all the way to serving it at the table. Illustrations of bills of fare visually instructed the user in the later steps, detailing which dishes combined well and how best to place them for a pleasing effect. They reect the extent to which cookery was an art that was as much visual as it was gustatory. Not surprisingly, the books were enormously successful. The leading authors became household names, and the domination of the cookery-book trade by works of this kind compelled even elite professional cooks, who had previously written primarily for each other, to conform to the middling female market. The illustrated kitchen scenes and portraits reected and underlined how these works contributed to the commercialisation of domestic life. The kitchen scenes were idyllic and advertised the efciency and economy for which many middling women, who were faced with the constantly changing fashion of cookery and public expectations to run an economical and tasteful household, undoubtedly yearned. A cookery book gave the mistress the condence necessary to select dishes and direct servants; it ensured that the ingredients would be in season, wastage would be avoided, dishes would be prepared properly, and the result would look attractive on the table. The portraits reected how these books had brand identities not unlike modern advertising icons whose persona is designed and altered to t specic contexts. These cookery books concocted, with both images and words, characters that appealed to the market. Some were experienced women who had spent decades in service; some were slightly more experienced housewives ready to help a junior friend; still others were foppish professional cooks ready
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to spill the trade secrets of elite households and celebrated, and largely unaffordable, public eateries. Captions and appearances evolved over the editions. Even the authors death, if he or she ever existed or wrote the book at all, could not stop the brand.

NOTES
1. See especially, James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (New York, 1997); Troy Bickham, Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Past and Present 198 (2008), p.71-110; Carole Shammas, Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being in Early Modern England, The Journal of Economic History 43 (1983), p.99-100; Jan de Vries, Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods, in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London, 1994), p.85-132; and Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England, 1750-1830 (Oxford, 2000). 2. Roland Barthes, Toward a Psychology of Contemporary Food Consumption, in European Diet from Pre-Industrial to Modern Times, ed. Elbord Forster and Robert Forster (New York, 1975); see also his Ornamental Cookery, in Mythologies (Paris, 1957). The discussion has also been shaped by Claude Levi-Strausss seminal The Origin of Table Manners (New York, 1978). 3. London Magazine, January 1779, p.53. 4. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760, 2nd edn (London, 1996), p.153-5. See also Sara Pennell, The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England, 1650-1750, Oxford University, DPhil Thesis, 1997. 5. John Trusler, The Honours of the Table, Or, The Rules for Behaviour during Meals (London, 1788). 6. Oxford, University College, University College betting book, UC: 01/A1/2, Stapylton v. Davidson, 19 June 1809. 7. When complaining about the dish, Burney went so far as to note the page number of Glasses Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. DArblay, Frances Burney, The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis, 2 vols (London, 1889), entry for 19 August 1773, i.244. 8. The Genuine Edition of Joe Millers Jests, new edn (London, s.n., 1790), joke No. 200, p.36. 9. S. D. Smith, Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1996), p.183-214; Walvin, Fruits of Empire, p.120; A. J. S. Gibson and T. C. Smout, Prices, Food and Wages in Scotland, 1550-1780 (Cambridge, 1995), p.233-4. 10. Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna H. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (Kingston, London, 1989), p.200 and 179. 11. Helen Berry, Prudent Luxury: The Metropolitan Tastes of Judith Baker, Durham Gentlewoman, in Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (Aldershot, 2003), p.133-55; I discuss these networks in detail in Eating the Empire. 12. Saint Jamess Chronicle, 24 March 1774. 13. The New London Cookery and Complete Domestic Guide (London: G. Virtue, 1827), p.629. 14. Richard Johnson, The Tea-Table Dialogues (London: printed for T. Carnan, 1772). 15. Felix Farley, The London Art of Cookery (London: J. Fielding, 1783), p.v; William Augustus Henderson, The Housekeepers Instructor; Or, Universal Family Cook, 5th edn (London: W. and J. Stratford, [1793?]), p.3. 16. Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Totnes, 2003), p.65. This work provides the most comprehensive study of eighteenth-century British cookery books. 17. Francis Collingwood and John Woollams, The Universal Cook, and City and Country Housekeeper, 2nd edn (London: printed by R. Noble, for J. Scatcherd, 1797). 18. William Gelleroy, The London Cook, Or The Whole Art of Cookery Made Easy and Familiar (London: S. Crowder & Co., 1762). 19. Martha Bradley, The British Housewife; Or, The Cook, Housekeepers, and Gardiners Companion (London: printed for S. Crowder and H. Woodgate, 1760).
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20. Ann Peckham, The Complete English Cook; Or, Prudent Housewife (Leeds: Printed by Grifth Wright, 1767). 21. Bradley, The British Housewife, p.69. 22. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford, 1985). 23. Accounts of Ann Gromm, grocer, Oxfordshire Record Ofce, OA/B/118. 24. Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery, According to the Present Practice; Being a Complete Guide to All Housekeepers (London: Printed for G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1788). 25. Charlotte Mason, The Ladies Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table, 5th edn (London: printed for J. Walter, 1786). 26. William Gelleroy, The London Cook (1762). 27. Bradley, The British Housewife, p.69. 28. Mss Cookery Book, Bills of fare for everyday, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HM58283 (unfoliated). 29. Felix Farley, The Art of London Cookery, 7th edn (London: J. Scatcherd & J. Whitaker, 1792), p.373-4. 30. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, p.25-8. See also Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), esp. ch. 2-4. 31. Bradley, The British Housewife, p.16. 32. Leading London publishers included the Longmans, John Almon, William Strahan and R. Baldwin. 33. The literature on these social changes is extensive. For two of the classic works that have especially shaped the ideas in this article, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1992); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, eds., The Birth of a Consumer Society (London, 1982). On the changing relationships between women and print during this period, see n.37 below. 34. There has been some debate over how much Farley wrote himself: much of it appears to have been compiled by Richard Johnson (apparently without complaint from Farley), from other cookery books. This was a fairly common practice, albeit not to the degree followed by Farley and Johnson. See Fiona Lucraft, The London Art of Plagiarism: Part 1, Petits propos culinaires 42 (1992); and Peter Targett, Johnson or Farley, Petits propos culinaires 58 (1998). The London Tavern appears to have endorsed the publication, as it was advertised as being sold on the premises. On Cole and Glasse, see Lehmann, The British Housewife, p.141 and 108-11. 35. For references of famous guests, see Ruddimans Weekly Mercury [Edinburgh], 13 November 1782 and the Derby Mercury, 28 November 1782. 36. Nathan Bailey, Dictionarium domesticum, Being a New and Compleat Houshold Dictionary. For the Use both of City and Country (London: C. Hitch, 1736). 37. On servants reading see, Jan Fergus, Provincial Servants Reading in the Late Eighteenth Century, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, 1996), p.202-25. On womens reading, see especially Naomi Tadmor, In the even my wife read to me: Women, Reading and Household Life in the Eighteenth Century, in Practice and Representation of Reading, ed. Raven, Small and Tadmor, p.162-74; Jan Fergus, Women, Class, and Growth of Magazine Readership in the Provinces, 1746-1780 Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986), p.41-53. See also Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London, 1989); Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Womens Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (London, 1972), ch. 7. 38. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, 5th edn (London: sold at Mrs. Ashburns China Shop, 1755), p.ii. 39. For an informative description the managerial role of gentry, see Amanda Vickery, The Gentlemans Daughter: Womens Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, London, 1998), ch. 4 (on their management of food acquisition, preparation and presentation specically, see p.135-8 and 152-3). 40. Preface to Charlotte Mason, The Ladies Assistant, 5th edn (1786). 41. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, p.iv. 42. Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500-1800, trans. Allan Cameron (New Haven, CT, London, 2002), p.161-2. 43. During the second half of the century public consumption of specic foods increasingly became associated with moral and political sentiments. This is most evident with advent of

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consumer boycotts, such as American colonists association of tea with British tyranny in the early 1770s and British associations of sugar with African slavery at the turn of the century. See especially, T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, Oxford, 2004), ch. 6; and Timothy Morton, Blood Sugar, in Romanticism and Colonialism, ed. Timothy Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge, 1998), p.187206. 44. Collingwood and Woollams. The Universal Cook; Edwina Ehrman, The Eighteenth Century, in London Eats Out: 500 Years of Capital Dining (London, 1999), p.53. 45. Lehmann, British Housewife, p.336-45; Trusler, Honours of the Table, p.6. 46. Trusler, Honours of the Table, p.24. 47. Trusler, Honours of the Table, p.2. 48. London Magazine, January 1754, p.2. Troy Bickham is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University. He is particularly interested in the cultural history of the British Atlantic world. He has published articles in Past & Present, Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William and Mary Quarterly, and he is the author of Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (Northern Illinois University Press, forthcoming 2008). His current project investigates the development of a national imperial culture in Britain during the eighteenth century, particularly in terms of how Britons who stayed at home experienced and imagined the empire.

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