Ann Cook versus Hannah Glasse: Gender, professionalism and readership in the eighteenth-century cookbook

Abstract

Ann Cook’s Professed Cookery (1760) contains a vitriolic attack on the most celebrated cookery book of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747). In addition to analysing this conflict, this article also explores Cook’s previously unobserved ‘A Plan of House-Keeping’, which depicts a utopian vision of housekeeping based on a partly real but largely imagined sorority. It concludes that throughout her writing Cook could not conceive that a cookbook might be read by those not requiring instruction.