Culinary Delights: Cookery and Confection

The first cookbook published by an American author was American Cookery by Amelia Simmons in 1796. But British cookbooks had circulated in North American since Anglo-Americans arrived in the colonies. These books provide a unique window into eighteenth-century life in Great Britain and the American colonies, including the ingredients available to cooks through local production and international trade, eighteenth-century tastes and preferences, medical knowledge and remedies, and housekeeping techniques.

Cooking was traditionally the domain of women in the eighteenth century and many of these books were written by women, including Amelia Simmons, Eliza Smith, Elizabeth Raffald, and Hannah Glasse. Cookbooks were certainly not the only way that food and medical knowledge circulated, in fact these sorts of books were only available to those who could afford and read them. In many colonial households, cooks prepared dishes that they learned from family, friends, and neighbors. Cookbooks, however, give us a glimpse of what kinds of communal knowledge was passed between women in both printed and spoken form.