The Good Huswives Handmaid
- Year
- c.1590
- Era
- 16th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
The Good Huswives Handmaid, issued anonymously in London around 1590, is an Elizabethan kitchen manual offering receipts for cookery alongside the wider domestic concerns of a well ordered household. Belonging to the small surviving corpus of late sixteenth century English cookery books, it documents the dishes, ingredients, and techniques familiar to the Tudor housewife, and stands as an important witness to vernacular culinary practice before the proliferation of named authors in the following century.
Cooking from this book
Boiled Capon with Sops
Signature dishA boiled capon served upon sops of bread soaked in its rich broth stands as a quintessential dish of this Elizabethan handbook. The bird, gently simmered and dressed with a mildly spiced and slightly sweetened pottage, embodies the late Tudor table at its most characteristic. As a manual aimed at the careful housewife managing a modest gentry kitchen, the book naturally favours such accessible centrepiece fare, where thrift, hospitality and quiet refinement meet in a single steaming dish.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
