Every century has an epic lady cookery writer: Elizabeth David and Isabella Beeton obviously spring to mind for the 20th and 19th centuries, but how many of you have heard of Hannah Glasse? Like all great cookery writers, Hannah's life was a bit of a mess, but her most famous work, Art of Cookery, first published in 1747 was the household book of the 18th century. It would eventually save Hannah from the debtors' prisons of the Fleet and the Marshalsea, and enable her as a widow to raise her eight children.

Hannah was born in 1708 in London, but raised in the North. She married John Glasse, a man in service and moved with him first to Essex, then to London. As a wife and mother, Hannah spent her time producing the enormous Art of Cookery, but the year it was published, by subscription, her husband died. She struggled to support her family, despite the huge success of her book and it seems likely she was taken advantage of. Hannah would go on to write more books, but nothing equalled the success of her mammoth cooking and household manual, and she died in 1770 with only a short note in the London Gazette to her name. In 2010, I will be blogging about London's 18thC career women, but I am dedicating this Christmas week to Hannah Glasse.

Elizabeth David is commonly credited with introducing the ignorant British to European food. Not so. Hannah's book contains recipes for food done in the Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian, East Indian and Jewish 'fashions', most using authentic ingredients such as spices, truffles and morels that were clearly available in London at the time. She includes recipes for those on tight budgets, as well as those for cooking sixty pound turtles, and she makes chocolate in no small quantities:

Take six pounds of cocoa-nuts, one pound of aniseeds, four ounces of long pepper, one of cinnamon, a quarter of a pound of almonds, one pound of pistachios, as much achiote (annatto) as will make it the colour of brick; three grains of milk, and as much ambergrease, six pounds of loaf sugar, one ounce of nutmegs, dry and beat them, and fierce them through a fine sieve: your almonds must be beat to a paste, and mixed with the other ingredients; then dip your sugar in orange-flower, or rose-water, and put it in a skillet, one a very gentle charcoal-fire;...stew all these very well together over a hotter fire than before; then take it up, and put it into boxes, or what form you like and set it to dry in a warm place.

Sounds good to me. Hannah didn't limit herself to food only; she did offer some recipes for medicines, including yesterday's rabies treatment, but this is one for keeping your lips kissable during this cold weather, especially when there's so much mistletoe around:

A fine lip salve: Take two ounces of virgin's wax (pure beeswax), two ounces of hog's lard, half an ounce of spermaceti (sperm-whale wax), one ounce of oil of sweet-almonds, two drams of balsam of Peru, two drams of alkanet root cut small, six new raisins shred small, a little fine sugar, simmer them all together a little while; then strain it off into little pots. It is the finest lip salve in the world.