Product Description

Drawing on the experience she gained while 'constantly employed by fashionable and noble families', Eliza Smith, writing a hundred years before Mrs Beeton, compiled a collection of more than 600 recipes which had met with 'the general approbation'. She was also at pains to pass on, for the benefit of every 'accomplished gentlewoman', a multitude of cures and remedies 'never before made publick' for every ailment from a pimpled face to the bite of a mad dog, together with a number of useful DIY tips.
Published originally as The Compleat Housewife, Eliza's compendium proved so popular that by 1758, thirty years after her death, it was in its seventeenth edition and famous not only in Britain but in America, where it was the first cookery book ever published. Today, in an age of convenience foods, labour-saving technology, fashionable fads and sophisticated cuisine, this once indispensable handbook provides a fascinating glimpse of domestic economy in the eighteenth century, when a housewife's duties ranged from marketing, cooking, brewing and preserving to applying medieval cures which sound to the modern ear more likely to kill than cure.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2162052 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 413 pages

Customer Reviews

One of the great joys of reading ...
is finding off-beat connections between books. In the Preface to the 1905 edition of Kidnapped (Scholastic Classics), Mrs. Stevenson writes:

"One day, while my husband was busily at work, I sat beside him reading an old cookery book called 'The Compleat Housewife: or Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion.' In the midst of receipts for 'Rabbits, and Chickens mumbled, Pickled Samphire, Skirret Pye, Baked Tansy,' and other forgotten delicacies, there were directions for the preparation of several lotions for the preservation of beauty. One of these was so charming that I interrupted my husband to read it aloud. 'Just what I wanted!' he exclaimed; and the receipt for the 'Lily of the Valley Water' was instantly incorporated into Kidnapped."

(The recipe for Lily of Valley Water is one of the four gifts that David Balfour receives in Chapter One, as he is leaving his home town and setting out on his own at age 17.)

This volume is beautifully printed by Wordsworth Editions, and is a great fun to read and, perhaps, to make your own Lily of the Valley Water.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Fascinating.
This book is very interesting. It contains countless recipes, not only for cooking, but also for remedies. I mean all kinds of remedies, everything from common cold remedies, to remedies for consumption. Even a recipe for laudanum. It even tells you how to make your own paint. I found it absolutely fascinating.