Description

[005044] Hall, T. The Queen’s Royal Cookery: Or, Expert and Ready Way for the Dressing of All Sorts of Flesh, Fowl, Fish: Either Bak’d, Boil’d, Roasted, Stew’d, Fry’d, Broil’d, Hash’d, Frigasied, Carbonaded, Fore’d, Collar’d, Sous’d, Dry’d &c. Etc. Etc. [London]: [C. Bates and A. Bettesworth], Unknown. 16mo. Hardback. Good. [6], 7-180p, n.d. but either 1713 or 1719. Remnants of full contemporary sheep, later rebacked, recornered, and restored, smooth back, modern endpapers

Rubbed to extremities, corners bumped and worn, internally browned and lightly foxed throughout. Title with bottom inch or so torn away, leading to loss of imprint and edition, but with the often missing wood-engraved frontispiece with a portrait of Queen Anne, a kitchen scene, and vignettes of a pastry room and a woman distilling. The full page wood-engraved illustration of pie toppings is slightly shaved to fore edge but without loss to text or image

From the collection of the chef Antony Worrall Thompson, but without indicia of this

It is either the second edition of 1713 (seven copies in ESTC), or possibly the third edition of 1719 (which appears to have been a reprint of the second with the same pagination, frontispiece, and plate, with five copies in ESTC). All early editions are uncommon

The first edition, published in 1709, is almost unobtainable (with only three copies in ESTC), with many of the recipes being borrowed from Kenelm Digby’s Closet Opened, despite the author’s claims to their originality. The author in their preface notes that the work “is not stuff’d with superfluous Trifles, as most of its nature are; or with old and antiquated Receipts; but with Things wholly new and useful”.

See Bitting, page 220; Cagle 719; Maclean, page 65 (noting the change in imprint between the second and third editions from C. Bates to S. Bates); Oxford, pages 51-2; Vicaire, page 437; Wellcome III:197