Today’s Google Doodle honours English cookbook author Hannah Glasse on the 310th anniversary of her birth. Glasse, who has been described as “the first domestic goddess”, is known for popularising the modern English-language cookbook.
She was born in 1708 as the illegitimate daughter of a London landowner and went on to become a dressmaker, but “it was her recipes for English staples and not her stitching that earned her acclaim”, says Time magazine.
Her cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, contained a whopping 972 recipes - athough historians believe she borrowed the majority from other sources, including 263 taken from one earlier tome. Published anonymously in 1747, the book remained a staple for home cooks for more than 100 years.
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At the time, cookbooks were mostly for professional chefs but Glasse’s book brought simple and accessible cooking to the masses.
The message of The Art of Cookery is that “most people can make something pretty good, as long as you have a book to show you the way”, says Vox.
Despite the success of the work, Glasse became bankrupt in 1754 and was forced to auction the copyright to her book.
In 1757, she was placed in debtor’s prison but was released later that year. She wrote a second book, The Compleat Confectioner, but its success was nothing like that of her previous work.
She died in September 1770 at the age of 62.
The book includes one of the earliest published recipes for Yorkshire pudding - as depicted in the Doodle - as well as one of the first English recipes for Indian curry.
Here are a few of Glasse's recipes:
Yorkshire pudding
Take a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter with flour, like a pancake batter.
You must have a good piece of meat at the fire, take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the fire; when it boils, pour in your pudding; let it bake on the fire till you think it is nigh enough, then turn, a plate upside down in the dripping pan, that the dripping might not be blacked; set your stew-pan on it under your meat and let the dripping drop on the pudding, and the heat of the fire come to it, to make it of a fine brown.
When your meat is done and sent to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dry, at you can into a dish, melt some butter, and pour it into a cup, and set it in the middle of the pudding. It is an excellent good pudding; the gravy of the meat eats well with it.
Custard fool
Take the juice of six oranges and six eggs well beaten, a pint of cream, a quarter of a pound of sugar, a little cinnamon and nutmeg. Mix all together, and keep stirring over a slow fire till it is thick, then put in a little piece of butter, and keep stirring till cold, and dish it up.
Turnip soup
Take a gallon of water, and a bunch of turnips, pare them, save three or four out, put the rest into the water with a half an ounce of whole pepper, an onion stuck with cloves, a blade of mace, half a nutmeg bruised, a little bundels of sweet herbs and a large crust of bread.
Let these boil an hour pretty fast, then strain it through a sieve, squeezing the turnips through; wash and cut a bunch of celery very small, set it on in the liquor on the fire, cover it close and let it stew.
In the mean time, cut the turnips you saved into dice, and two or three small carrots clean scraped, and cut in little pieces: put half these turnips nd carrots into the pot with the celery and other half fry brown in fresh butter. You must flour them first, and two or three onions peeled, cut in thin slices and fried brown then put them all into the soup with an ounce of vermicelli. Let your soup boil softly till the celery s quite tender and your soup good. Season it with salt to your palate.
