322

"Pastry, Preserves, Puddings, Pickles."

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles Start Price:150.00 USD Estimated At:300.00 - 400.00 USD
 Pastry, Preserves, Puddings, Pickles.
Rare American edition of antebellum cookbook, The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual, containing Receipts for Cookery, and Directions for Carving.... "Also, the Art of Composing the Most Simple and Most Highly Finished Broths, Gravies, Sauces, Store Sauces, and Flavouring Essences; Pastry, Preserves, Puddings, Pickles, &c., with a Complete System of Cookery for Catholic Families...," by William Kitchiner. N.Y.: 1846, "Harper's Stereotype Ed...Adapted to the American Public by a Medical Gentleman / from the last London ed." 4 1/4 x 7 1/4, 432 pp., index, with detailed woodcuts of carving techniques; full original calf. An exhaustive compendium for cooks, with some 697 recipes, and chapters on boiling, baking, roasting, frying, broiling, vegetables, fish, pastry, bread, "observations on puddings and pies," and more. Many of the names, recipes, and foods are now largely absent from the American table - and from the marketplace, such as "Stuffing for Hare" (p. 265), "Forcemeat-Balls for Turtle...," "Boiled Salad," "Brain Balls," Oyster Ketchup, Tewahdiddle (table beer with brandy, brown sugar, and lemon peel), Hunter's Pie, Knuckle of Veal, Pounded Cheese, Bread and Butter Pudding, and a delightful and seemingly endless parade of pastry offerings. Inserted manuscript sheet with the reader's recipe for Snow Pudding, in pencil. Front cover detached, spine covering loose, leather powdering; binding shaken, some signatures loose, varied foxing, from very light to moderate, but a very satisfactory copy, clearly used to prepare countless delectable (and perhaps less so) meals in pre-Civil War America. WorldCat locates just three copies of this American printing (Harvard, New York Academy of Medicine, and University of Richmond).