s a variety
of topics, including medicines, Mrs. or Miss Smith must have been
unusually observant, and have had remarkable opportunities of making
herself conversant with matters beyond the ordinary range of culinary
specialists. I propose presently to print a few samples of her
workmanship, and a list of her principal receipts in that section of
the book with which I am just now concerned. First of all, here is the
Preface, which begins, as we see, by a little piece of plagiarism from
Nott's exordium:--

"_PREFACE._

"It being grown as unfashionable for a book now to appear in publick
without a preface, as for a lady to appear at a ball without a
hoop-petticoat, I shall conform to custom for fashion-sake, and not
through any necessity. The subject being both common and universal,
needs no arguments to introduce it, and being so necessary for the
gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums
to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but few
now-a-days who love not good eating and drinking. Therefore I entirely
quit those two topicks; but having three or four pages to be filled
up previous to the subject it self, I shall employ them on a subject I
think new, and not yet handled by any of the pretenders to the art of
cookery; and that is, the antiquity of it; which if it either instruct
or divert, I shall be satisfied, if you are so.

"Cookrey, confectionary, &c., like all other sciences and arts, had
their infancy, and did not arrive at a state of maturity but by slow
degrees, various experiments, and a long tract of time: for in the
infant-age of the world, when the new inhabitants contented themselves
with the simple provision of nature, viz. the vegetable diet, the
fruits and production of the teeming ground, as they succeeded one
another in their several peculiar seasons, the art of cookery was
unknown; apples, nuts, and herbs, were both meat and sauce, and
mankind stood in no need of any additional sauces, ragoes, &c., but a
good appetite; which a healthful and vigorous constitution, a clear,
wholesome, odoriferous air, moderate exercise, and an exemption from
anxious cares, always supplied them with.

"We read of no palled appetites, but such as proceeded from the decays
of nature by reason of an advanced old age; but on the contrary a
craving stomach, even upon a death-bed, as in Isaac: nor no sicknesses
but those that were both the first and the last, which proceeded from
th