Long before the The Joy of Cooking or The Silver Spoon, a Georgian-era cookbook caused a revolution in English kitchens. A bestseller for nearly a century after its first edition appeared in 1747, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy is encyclopedic in its breadth, a textual larder brimming with delicacies and oddities. Baked ox’s head, boiled pickled pork, beef olives, “a pig in jelly”, “a green goose”, three types of salmagundi, numerous pies (pigeon, Devonshire, calf’s foot, “pretty sweet lamb”), dozens of soups, pots, and puddings, a chapter on the politics of butchers, a chapter that includes both “a recipe against the plague” and “a certain cure for the bite of a mad dog” — what more, really, could any cook need?

For a modern-day reader, the language remains rich and succulent: she prescribes Eel Soop for those that “have a Stew-hole”; dishes are given names like “pigeons transmogrified”; the cookbook genre’s imperative voice gets put to memorable use: “Take fine young beans, gather them of a very fine day, have a large stone jar ready, clean and dry, lay a layer of salt at the bottom, and then a layer of beans, then salt, and then beans, and go on.” The dishes themselves may prove less appetizing, depending on your palate. The first recipe, for example, is for a kind of ersatz Noah’s Ark, as animal after animal proceeds into the pot. We start with a half-pound of untrimmed bacon, then a pound of veal, then coarse beef cut thin, then more bacon, then “a pigeon beat all to pieces”, then more beef, and, as an optional topper, an old cock, also beat to pieces. The aromatics are no less weighty: mace, cloves, pepper (white and black), nutmeg, truffles and morels, a few carrots and onions. The gravy is spartan: drippings, wine, and a couple spoonfuls of “catchup”. A Mediterranean diet this is not.

Glasse’s cookbook baked in a kind of aspirational social mobility, particular to the mid-eighteenth-century British household where it was so frequently consulted. As Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald detail, this was an era when more than fifty percent of London’s women were literate, but the mistress of a household was still expected to roll up her sleeves in the kitchen. By writing her cookbook so that “every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook”, Glasse targeted two audiences: the servants who could ascend the social ladder with their kitchen skills and women of the lower gentry or rising middle class that could now free themselves for a life of leisure by offloading their kitchen duties. Not that Glasse treated the former group with total warmth: “If I have not wrote in the high polite style, I hope I shall be forgiven; for my intention is to instruct the lower sort, and therefore must treat them in their own way.” There is perhaps an irony here, as the author herself was rather downwardly mobile. Born into a landowning family, Glasse (née Allgood) married John, an older Irish subaltern, and was forced to write the seemingly liberational cookbook to shore up her own failing fortunes.

The cookbook was widely influential and includes several firsts: trifle with jelly, Hamburgh sausages, piccalilli, the coinage of “Yorkshire pudding”. And Glasse disseminated, in the 1774 edition, one of the first English recipes for “currey the Indian way”, to be served with rice “pellow”, while the 1751 edition contained what is thought to be the first published recipe for turtle soup: “To Dress a Turtle the West Indian Way”, which involves laying it on its back, alive, the night before you intend to decapitate it. A product of imperial gustatory gathering (recipes call for turmeric, cocoa, ginger, Jamaica pepper, deer musk, whale ambergris), the volume made its way to the colonies and into the libraries of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. “We had emancipated ourselves from the sceptre of King George”, wrote The Knickerbocker magazine contributor John Waters in 1844, “but that of Hannah Glasse was extended without challenge over our fire-sides and dinner-tables, with a sway more imperative and absolute.”

But Glasse also had her critics, and her critics had serious beef. Ann Cook (yes, indeed) — who published a rival volume to earn money after her husband was sent to a debtor’s prison for feuding with Sir Lancelot Allgood (Glasse’s half-brother) — began her Professed Cookery (1754) with violent doggerel, calling Glasse a plagiarist, a fraud, and a cook of inedible meats. She also coins a lovely phrase, “the great roast-ruler of the nation”, and tried to claim the title through a systematic dismantling of her rival’s recipes. As Erin MacWilliam explains, Cook performs a “close reading of over 30 of Glasse’s recipes page-by-page” and “systematically criticizes each dish”. Others simply did not believe that such an encyclopedic work could be written by a woman. Walsh thought the true author was the botanist John Hill, author of The Vegetable System (which has nothing to do with steaming or peeling), and the same claim is made by publisher Charles Dilly in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. (Johnson pushes back, skeptical that Hill would ever mistake saltpeter for sal prunella, as Glasse did, but agrees that “women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery”.)

Today, her authorship is unchallenged — though she is suspected to have copied some 342 recipes from other, uncredited authors. The celebrity cook Clarissa Dickson Wright believes Glasse was “mother of the modern dinner party” and “the first domestic goddess”. And her attempts to write for the “lower sort” live on in language, too. Around four hundred quotations from The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy appear in the Oxford English Dictionary.