Image: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain
Primitive Cookery
- Year
- 1767
- Era
- 18th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
Primitive Cookery, issued anonymously in England in 1767, is a slim cookery pamphlet advocating plain, frugal fare drawn largely from vegetables, pulses, grains, and dairy. Its recipes reject the elaborate meat cookery and rich sauces favoured by Georgian gentry, aligning instead with mid-eighteenth-century currents of dietary simplicity and economy. As an early vegetable-forward English text, it occupies a notable place in the prehistory of vegetarian and reform cookery literature.
Cooking from this book
Herb Pottage
Signature dishA humble pottage of garden herbs and pulses stands as the emblematic dish of this little pamphlet. Thrifty, meatless, and built around whatever greens the cottage plot might yield, it captures the book's central argument that wholesome eating need not depend on butcher's meat or costly spice. The dish embodies the late Georgian taste for plain fare and the moral preference for simplicity that runs through these pages, speaking to labouring households as much as to philosophical readers.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
