Image: Hannah Glasse · Public domain
The Compleat Confectioner
- Year
- 1760
- Era
- 18th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
The Compleat Confectioner is Hannah Glasse's specialist follow-up to her celebrated Art of Cookery, devoted to the sugar arts, preserving, candying, syrups, creams, jellies, and dessert table arrangement. Published in London around 1760, it offered English households practical access to skills long associated with professional confectioners, and remains an important source for understanding eighteenth century dessert practice, sugar work, and the domestication of confectionery knowledge.
Cooking from this book
Sugar-spun fruits and preserved sweetmeats
Signature dishGlasse's confectionery sequel is best remembered for its glittering displays of candied and preserved fruits, the centrepieces of a fashionable Georgian dessert table. These translucent sweetmeats, set alongside syrups, pastes and spun sugar conceits, showcased the household confectioner's mastery of sugar at its various heats. The book became a touchstone precisely because it brought this once secretive craft, long the preserve of court still rooms, within reach of the literate English mistress.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
