Image: Kenneth Allen · CC BY-SA 2.0
Health's Improvement
- Year
- 1655
- Era
- 17th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- Medical-culinary
Health's Improvement, compiled by the English physician Thomas Muffet and published posthumously in 1655, is a treatise on the dietary properties of foods consumed in early modern England. Surveying flesh, fish, fowl, grains, and dairy through the lens of Galenic humoral theory, it stands as one of the most systematic English works bridging medicine and cookery, and remains a valuable source for the foodways and nutritional thought of the period.
Cooking from this book
Buttered Eggs
Signature dishMuffet's posthumous treatise, edited by Christopher Bennet, dwells at length on the dietary virtues of eggs, and buttered eggs stand out as the emblematic preparation of the work. A soft, gently cooked dish of eggs enriched with fresh butter, it was prized in seventeenth century England as nourishing fare for the delicate and convalescent. Muffet's careful weighing of its humoral qualities captures the book's distinctive blending of physic with everyday English cookery.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
