The Ladies Complete Cookery; or, Family pocket Companion, made plain and easy; Being the best Collections of the choicest and least extravagant Receipts in every Branch of Cookery, Pastry, preserving, candying, pickling, collaring, &c. With Plain and easy Directions for marketing, with the Seasons of the Year for Butcher's Meat, Poultry, Fish, &c. &c. Also the Art of making Wines, brewing, making French Bread, &c. To which is added, family Receipts for the Cure of several Disorders incident to the Human Body [...]

Bookseller Notes

Scarce in trade is this breezily written and very informative eighteenth-century cookbook. The opening section on Instructions how to Market gives a guide to ingredients and their seasons, encompassing every kind of flesh, fowl ('Goodwetts, marle, knots, ruffs, gull, dotterel and wheat-ears'), fish, eggs, and dairy. Wilson gives superb and very visceral tips on how to to tell when produce is fresh or past its best. Pork, for example 'if it be young, the lean will break in pinching with your nails, it will make a dent; also if the fat be soft and pulpy, in a manner like lard... it is old'. Recipes follow, including various 'soops': oyster, rice, mussel, eel, scaite, turnip. Pickles, including asparagus, peaches, white plumbs, codlings, fennel, and radish pods. Desserts and sweet dishes including jellies, syllabubs, flummeries, pies, tarts. Winemaking (quince, cowslip, turnip, raspberry) and rules for brewing, before a separate section on bread, including French bread and how 'to make white bread, after the London way'. There are some fascinating things here, including a recipe to make anchovies (with the inclusion of cochineal), a Christmas Pie of fowl embedded within one another, and 'icing for a great cake', which is achieved by whisking together egg and sugar (for an extraordinary two-to-three hours) and then applying it to the waiting cake with feathers. Amongst all this, the reader is faced with flashes of modern sentiment: 'most people spoil garden things by over boiling them'. Wilson closes with a section on household cures for common ailments including swelled legs (wormwood and rue), 'chapt hands' (wash with flour of mustard), spitting blood (half a pint of stew'd prunes), hard breast (apply turnips-roasted 'till soft'), lice (a sprinkle of Spanish snuff), and ear ache ('smoak of tobacco'). Nothing is known of Wilson beyond the energy she demonstrates here, and her book seems to have run to only one edition. Such cookbooks are not only culturally potent documents, but reflect changing social structures; Wilson's titular emphasis on the 'the choicest and least extravagant receipts' may be seen as a direct appeal to a growing 'bourgeois readership concerned with elegance but skittish of extravagance' (Gilly Lehmann, Gastonomica 4.2 (2004) p. 102).