During the first 150 years of American colonial history, there were no printed cookery books, and early pioneering families had to rely upon their collected hand- written recipes or oral tradition: recipes passed down from mother to daughter. This was a tradition that would continue well into the nineteenth century.
Not until 1742 was a cookbook actually printed on American soil: The Compleat Housewife, by one Eliza Smith, who, in biographical and bibliographical records, is an obscure figure. No one seems to have known who she was but, nonetheless, the Williamsburg, Virginia, printing of this lady's work was from the fifth London edition, which was, in fact, a best seller of the time. Not it was, in reality, not the first American cookbook, in that it was only a reprint of an English work. From the standpoint of American cultural history, it is important as a landmark in printing and publishing history. Its printer, William Parks, had founded the Maryland Gazette in 1736. He also published a number of minor books and pamphlets of literary and historical importance; and considering that Williamsburg, as the capital of America's largest and wealthiest colony, had by then become a noted center of aristocratic life, a cookbook was certainly in order. It would be his major book publication.
The earlier cookbooks, not having the advantage of dust wrapper blurbs extoling the virtues of the publication, nor a promotional press review, made up for the deficiency in the exaggerated and verbose form of the title page. Consider, for example, the title page of E. Smith's work: The compleat housewife; or, accomplish'd gentlewoman's companion: being a collection of several hundred of the most approved recipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz. drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.
During the eighteenth century, the English cookbook was the American cookbook. In remarking upon Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, first published in London in 1747 and reprinted many times, the noted food historian, Karen Hess, states in her introduction to the first American edition [in facsimile] (Alexandria, 1805) that "It was the most English of cookbooks. It was the most American of Cookbooks. George Washington owned a copy, as did Thomas Jefferson; indeed, recipes attributed to Mrs. Glasse are included in cookery manuscripts kept by Jefferson's granddaughters, for example."
Hannah Glasse's work was widely used in the United States. Two American editions were printed in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1805 and 1812. These editions, adapted for use in Virginia, had a recipe: "Method of destroying the putrid Smell which Meat acquires during hot Weather." Mrs. Glasse's work, which boasts on its title page that it was a work "which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind ever yet published" is a boast well-founded, for the clarity of the recipes, the list of chapter headings, and an alphabetical index at the back, set it well above any previous publication of this type. It became an immediate and enduring best seller, reprinted as late as 1824.
The first cookbook by an American was Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, published in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796. Often referred to as a second American declaration of independence (according to Jan Longone), this was the first cookbook written for a strictly American audience. Mrs. Simmon's work, however, plagiarized English recipes for American readers, with a few concessions to the availability of ingredients in the New World. It was a step forward without being totally American. Simmons proclaimed that her work was "adapted to this country." It has the first printed recipes for corn meal -- an American contribution. It includes five receipts requiring the use of corn meal: three for Indian Pudding, one for "Johnny Cake or Hoe Cake," and one for "Indian Slapjacks." This was the first known appearance of any of those three in any cookbook. Mrs. Simmons's work would influence the contents of American culinary imprints for some years. Hers was the first cookbook to recommend the use of pearlash, a refined form of potash. Four recipes, two for cookies and two for gingerbread, specified this forerunner of baking powder. This substitute for yeasat or beaten eggs was an American innovation, not picked up elsewhere until 1799 in England.
In eighteenth-century America only four cookbook titles were published: all derivatives of English works with the exception of Mrs. Simmons's work. These were E. Smith, The Conpleat Housewife (Williamsburg, 1742); Susannah Carter, The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook (Boston, 1772); Robert Briggs, The New Art of Cookery (Philadelphia, 1792); and Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (Hartford, 1796).
In the early nineteenth century, Maria Rundell's A New System of Domestic Cookery was the cookbook of choice. The first American edition was published in Boston in 1807, soon after the first English edition, and reprinted sixteen times in the U.S. until 1844. In England, editions were published as late as 1893. This work, in the jargon of the trade, was the first "runaway" best seller. During Mrs. Rundell's lifetime or shortly after her death, it had already sold a half million copies.
It was Lucy Emerson on Montpelier who put Vermont on the nation's culinary map in 1808 by writing what food historians consider America's first regional cookbook. It's a tiny volume, entitled The New-England Cookery, or The Art of Dressing All Kinds of Flesh, Fish and Vegetables and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves and All Kinds of Cakes From the Imperial Plum to the Plain Cake. According to writers John and Karen Hess, Ms. Emerson apparently lifted most of her recipes from Amelia Simmons. "But she set the stage for countless Vermonters -- most of them women -- who contributed recipes to church and community cookbooks ...."
Karen Hess declares that the most influential American cookbook of the nineteenth century was Mary Randolph's The Virginia Housewife, "and a case must be made for considering it to be the earliest full-blown American cookbook. Randolph's heyday was in the 1790s, so that her work may be said to document the cookery of the early days of our republic. It was one of the most cherished of kitchen manuals .... The author hailed from one of the noblest families of Virginia, and she recorded the productions of her contemporaries -- in Virginia as well as Maryland; she knew what her neighbors cooked, how they did it, and she produced what scholars of American history declare is the first American cookbook. In her preface she says, "The greater part of the following receipts have been written from memory, where they have been impressed by long practice."
Cook's Choice ... compiled in 1982 by the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, cites Lafcadio Hearn's La Cuisine Creole (New York, 1885) as the "first regional American cookbook, compiled by a famous short story writer."
The first cookbook to include contributions from African Americans was Eliza Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking (Philadelphia 1854). In her preface, Leslie notes that "a large number [of the recipes] have been obtained from the South, and from ladies noted for their skill in housewifery. Many were dictated by colored cooks, of high reputation in the art, for which nature seems to have gifted that race with a peculiar capability...."
The first cookbook to be printed in the American Middle West (according to Bitting) was H.L. Barnum's Family Receipts, or Practical Guide for the Husbandman and Housewife, Containing a Great Variety of Valuable Recipes (Cincinnati, 1837). The first cookbook printed in Illinois seems to be Mrs. Crawford's The Cake Baker (Chicago, 1857).
The first French cookbook published in America: Louis Eustache Ude's The French Cook (Philadelphia: Carey, Lee and Carey, 1828). The first edition was published in London in 1813. There is no French-language edition. There is only one American edition.
The first French-language cookbook published in America: Mme. Utrecht-Friedel, La Petite Cuisiniere habile (New Orleans, 1840). A translation (see above) was published in 1846.
The first book on French cookery by an American author was Eliza Leslie's Domestic French Cookery, chiefly translated from Sulpice Barue (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1832). This appears to be the first book on French cookery by an American author, published in the U.S. A somewhat condescending work, emphasizing the importance of native American ingredients. "Many dishes have been left out, as useless in a country where provisions are abundant. On this side of the Atlantic, all persons in respectable life can obtain better articles of food than sheeps' tails, calves' ears, &c. and the preparation of those articles (according to the European receipts) is too tedious and complicated to be of any use to the indigent, or to those who can spare but little time for their cookery." The French author cited is not noted by Vicaire or any other source I have checked. He or she probably never existed.
If we may judge from the old cookbooks, the first three decades of the nineteenth century,
far from being a period of monotony and of limited resources, was one of varied foods,
prepared with ingenuity, skill, and a willingness to experiment with flavors, including
exotic ones. This seems to have been a time of solid, honest, grass-roots cooking, doomed
to be choked off abruptly by the Civil War and smothered thereafter by the urbanization and
industrialization which followed it.