Let us extract the way "to make Black-caps":—"Take a dozen of good pippins, cut them in halves, and take out the cores; then place them on a right Mazarine dish with the skins on, the cut side downwards; put to them a very little water, scrape on them some loaf sugar, put them in a hot oven till the skins are burnt black, and your apples tender; serve them on Plates strew'd over with sugar."
Of these books, I select the preface to "The Complete Housewife," by E. Smith, 1736, because it appears to be a somewhat more ambitious endeavour in an introductory way than the authors of such undertakings usually hazard. From the last paragraph we collect that the writer was a woman, and throughout she makes us aware that she was a person of long practical experience. Indeed, as the volume comprehends a variety of topics, including medicines, Mrs. or Miss Smith must have been unusually observant, and have had remarkable opportunities of making herself conversant with matters beyond the ordinary range of culinary specialists. I propose presently to print a few samples of her workmanship, and a list of her principal receipts in that section of the book with which I am just now concerned. First of all, here is the Preface, which begins, as we see, by a little piece of plagiarism from Nott's exordium:—
"PREFACE.
"It being grown as unfashionable for a book now to appear in publick without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to custom for fashion-sake, and not through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal, needs no arguments to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but few now-a-days who love not good eating and drinking. Therefore I entirely quit those two topicks; but having three or four pages to be filled up previous to the subject it self, I shall employ them on a subject I think new, and not yet handled by any of the pretenders to the art of cookery; and that is, the antiquity of it; which if it either instruct or divert, I shall be satisfied, if you are so.
"Cookrey, confectionary, &c., like all other sciences and arts, had their infancy, and did not arrive at a state of maturity but by slow degrees, various experiments, and a long tract of time: for in the infant-age of the world, when the new inhabitants contented themselves with the simple provision of nature, viz. the vegetable diet, the fruits and production of the teeming ground, as they succeeded one another in their several peculiar seasons, the art of cookery was unknown; apples, nuts, and herbs, were both meat and sauce, and mankind stood in no need of any additional sauces, ragoes, &c., but a good appetite; which a healthful and vigorous constitution, a clear, wholesome, odoriferous air, moderate exercise, and an exemption from anxious cares, always supplied them with.
"We read of no palled appetites, but such as proceeded from the decays of nature by reason of an advanced old age; but on the contrary a craving stomach, even upon a death-bed, as in Isaac: nor no sicknesses but those that were both the first and the last, which proceeded from the struggles of nature, which abhorred the dissolution of soul and body; no physicians to prescribe for the sick, nor no apothecaries to compound medicines for two thousand years and upwards. Food and physick were then one and the same thing.
"But when men began to pass from a vegetable to an animal diet, and feed on flesh, fowls, and fish, then seasonings grew necessary, both to render it more palatable and savoury, and also to preserve that part which was not immediately spent from stinking and corruption: and probably salt was the first seasoning discover'd; for of salt we read, Gen. xiv.
"And this seems to be necessary, especially for those who were advanced in age, whose palates, with their bodies, had lost their vigour as to taste, whose digestive faculty grew weak and impotent; and thence proceeded the use of soops and savoury messes; so that cookery then began to become a science, though luxury had not brought it to the height of an art. Thus we read, that Jacob made such palatable pottage, that Esau purchased a mess of it at the extravagant price of his birthright. And Isaac, before by his last will and testament he bequeathed his blessing to his son Esau, required him to make some savoury meat, such as his soul loved, i.e., such as was relishable to his blunted palate.
"So that seasonings of some sort were then in use; though whether they were salt, savoury herbs, or roots only; or spices, the fruits of trees, such as pepper, cloves, nutmeg; bark, as cinnamon; roots, as ginger, &c., I shall not determine.
"As for the methods of the cookery of those times, boiling or stewing seems to have been the principal; broiling or roasting the next; besides which, I presume scarce any other were used for two thousand years and more; for I remember no other in the history of Genesis.