London, 1751 · Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, fourth edition
French Tricks
Hannah Glasse wrote her cookbook so that “every Servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good Cook”. Her preface, “To the Reader”, is also a polemic against fashionable cooks who would use a leg of veal and a ham just to make the sauce for one dish. She offers to prove a sauce “as rich and high” for about three shillings, and then writes it out.
The Public Domain Review quotes the start of it, with its “pigeon beat all to pieces”. Here is her stew-pan, filled in her order.
Then she covers it close, sets it over a slow fire for two or three minutes, fills the pan with boiling water and lets it stew. She strains it, puts the same ingredients back with fresh water, a fresh onion, mace and carrot, and stews them again.
The sums
Twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound; a half crown is two shillings and sixpence, or thirty pence.
“If Gentlemen will have French Cooks, they must pay for French Tricks.”
The preface turns into an attack on French cooks: a Frenchman at home, she says, would dress a dinner of twenty dishes for what he charges an English lord for one. She has heard of a cook who used six pounds of butter to fry twelve eggs, “when every Body knows (that understands Cooking) that Half a Pound is full enough, or more than need be used: But then it would not be French.”
Pigeons transmogrified
“Take your Pigeons, season them with Pepper and Salt, take a large Piece of Butter, make a Puff-paste, and roll each Pigeon in a Piece of Paste; tie them in a Cloth, so that the Paste don't break; boil them in a good deal of Water. They will take an Hour and a Half boiling; untie them carefully that they don't break; lay them in the Dish, and you may pour a little good Gravy in the Dish. They will eat exceeding good and nice, and will yield Sauce enough of a very agreeable Relish.”
The recipe the PDR's title borrows, as printed in 1751, between “Pigeons boiled with Rice” and “Pigeons in Fricandos”. The book has more than twenty pigeon dishes, including Pigeons in a Hole, baked in batter, and Pigeons in Pimlico.
One small note on the retelling: the PDR calls the stew-pan “the first recipe”. In this edition it comes before any of the recipes, inside the preface, as Glasse's worked example of how little a sauce need cost.
Sources: Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, fourth edition (London, 1751), Wellcome Collection copy on the Internet Archive (b30502287), public domain mark: the title page price, the preface “To the Reader” and the pigeon recipes. Quotations modernise the long s only. The Public Domain Review, “Pigeons Transmogrified: Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery (1751 edition)”. Wikipedia, “£sd” and “Half crown (British coin)”, for the money. The pan is my drawing; layer thicknesses are not to scale. “More than twenty” pigeon dishes is my count of pigeon headings in the book's table of contents. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.