Customer Reviews

Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats

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This book is a jewel. Being a 16th-17th century reenactor, I would not have thought that Martha Washington's cookbook would have become such a favorite of mine. The annotations by Karen Hess make it invaluable to anyone interested in historical cookery from the Elizabethan age onwards, and it is a darned good read, informative and fun even if you aren't. This is the book I will give someone who thinks they might possibly be vaguely interested in historical cookery and would like to learn more. It is very well-researched and there is something to learn on every page. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This is the historical food researcher's answer to Oprah's "AHH HAA" moments in your life! Sit back and let MS. Hess fill you full of delight as you find out exactly where and how gingerbread got its beginnings and why do we call turkey, well, turkey. The amount of historic research and information is a true goldmine for one serious in their food history or for the novice who would just love to know where all our food preferences comes from. I am a teacher of historic foodways and tell each and every one of my students to start here first! You won't be disapointed.

I stumbled upon this book when I was visiting Mt. Vernon for the first time a few years ago. It looked so interesting I had to purchase it. Even though this is a cookbook, it's very unique with a lot of additional material that explains cooking and the recipes from the time period that the book was written. I'm more of a history buff than a cook, but I really, really enjoyed it.

I don't suppose we can say it too often but Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery was owned by Martha but wasn't written by her.
What we have here are two culinary manuscripts that are Tudor-Jacobean (recipes dated circa 1580-1625) that were passed
down in the family of Martha Washington's first husband. Martha rec'd the manuscripts when
she married Daniel Custis in 1749. She kept the two manuscripts until she gave them to Nelly
Custis, her granddaughter in 1799.
The book is titled the way it is because mentioning Martha Washington
draws attention to the volume and she was the most famous of the owners.
(One should ignore the picture of George eating a cherry that appears on the paperback edition. He had nothing to do with the book.)

The late Karen Hess transcribed the manuscripts and added helpful notes and commentary. One thing Hess did was
mention contemporary Elizabethan recipes that are similar to the ones in the manuscripts.
So she often refers to Markham, Plat, Dawson, etc.
The manuscripts are
'A Booke of Cookery' which has 206 recipes while 'A Booke of Sweetmeats' has 326 recipes.
All in all a great book to own for not only the recipes but for the bibliography and all the notes.

This is such a great book and a must have piece of history. I received it as a gift and loved it so much that I bought a copy for my mom as a gift. She loves it too!