The New-England Cookery, or The Art of Dressing all Kinds of Flesh, Fish, and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and all Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake. Particularly adapted to this part of our country

Montpelier [VT]: Printed for Josiah Parks, 1808. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good. 3.5" x 6", pp. [1-5], 6-81, + [3] (index). Worn contemporary binding of paper-covered wooden boards with muslin spine. Cookery-related newspaper clippings affixed to front pastedown, handwritten recipes (icing for tarts, "Washington Cake," and three kinds of gingerbread) on verso of front free endpaper and both sides of rear free endpaper. Rear hinge cracked but holding, text clean, with occasional light foxing.

In her preface to this work, Lucy Emerson acknowledges that the text is not entirely original, and many recipes are "due to those ladies who have gone before me." Her most significant source was Amelia Simmons American Cookery (1796) -- the first cookbook written by an American and published in the United States. Lowenstein (48) notes that "much of the text is a verbatim copy," and some writers describe this as a "pirated edition" of Simmons' work. However, Willan (Women in the Kitchen, p, 60) notes that "Lucy Emerson added more than sixty new recipes, with sections 'Of Frying,' 'Of Broiling,' and 'Of Stewing,'" and also added an index. Emerson was a schoolteacher, and she presents her book as "not so much for the Lady of fashion, and fortune, as for those in the more humble walks of life, who by the loss of parents, or other unfortunate circumstances, are reduced to indigence" and, more broadly, as an undertaking aimed at "the improvement of the rising generation of females in our country." Gilman, Bibliography of Vermont, p. 87. (Inventory #: 22289)