Image: Penelope Bradshaw · Public domain
Bradshaw's Valuable Family Jewel
- Year
- 1748
- Era
- 18th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
Bradshaw's Valuable Family Jewel, first issued in 1748, is a compact English household manual combining receipts for cookery, preserving, and home physic with practical domestic instruction. Penelope Bradshaw aimed her compilation at middling housewives, and the small format made it a working kitchen companion rather than a presentation volume. Reprinted in successive editions through the mid eighteenth century, it stands among the popular pocket guides that shaped vernacular English domestic practice.
Cooking from this book
A Made Dish of Pigeons
Signature dishAmong the small, practical dishes that fill Penelope Bradshaw's pocket guide, a made dish of pigeons stands out as emblematic of her brisk, household style. Pigeons were a staple of the mid-eighteenth-century English table, and Bradshaw treats them with the unfussy confidence aimed at busy mistresses and cook-maids. The dish captures the book's purpose: useful, compact instruction for everyday gentility rather than grand cookery, suited to the modest kitchens her manual was designed to serve.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
