For centuries, residents of the British Isles have found culinary comfort in the mysterious golden chemistry of the Yorkshire pudding.
The versatile doughy pockets have been used as an accompaniment to a variety of dishes, but they are best known as a vital component of the traditional Sunday roast.
With their deep puffy hollows and gilded crenellations, the Yorkshire pudding’s success lies in its simple magic - wrought from nothing more than flour, eggs and milk, the batter is bunged into the oven and what emerges is a lumpen, crispy beacon of British cookery.
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They first became popular after wheat flour began to become commonly used in the production of cakes and puddings and there were various recipes from the 18th century that advised on how to create them at home. Early variations included a 1737 recipe for “dripping pudding”.
But the Yorkshire pudding surged to fame and gained its name ten years later, with the 1747 publication of the book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, the subject of today's Google Doodle.
Glasse, who has previously been described as “the first domestic goddess” and even “the mother of the modern dinner party”, saw immediate success upon the publication of her book, which was reprinted in its first year and then remained in print for almost a century in over 20 editions.
The book’s cover did not reveal Glasse as the author, but instead mysteriously stated it was “By a Lady”.
Despite the success of the work, Glasse did not prosper for long after the initial publication.
In 1754, she became bankrupt and was forced to auction her most prized asset - the copyright to the book.
In 1757, she was consigned to debtors’ prison but released later that year, whereupon she registered shares in a new book she had written in 1755, The Compleat Confectioner - it was also reprinted several times, but did not enjoy the same levels of success as The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
Glasse died in September 1770 aged 62, her contribution to the British Sunday assured.
Matthew Cruickshank/Google
Modern English cooking would be nothing without sausages and jelly and trifle (just like American cooking would be nothing with hotdogs and Jell-O and sponge cake).
But before Hannah Glasse, English cooking was little more than cabbage soup and mutton (and the occasional eel pie, if you were lucky!). The woman behind one of Britain's most popular early cookbooks, "The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy" brought simple and accessible cooking to the masses, both in Glasse's homeland of England as well as in America.
Google paid tribute to Glasse's 310th birthday in its doodle on Wednesday, celebrating her contribution to modern cookery, long before Julia Child was on our TV screens.
First published in England in 1747 (and later in America in 1805), "The Art of Cookery" was notable for its conversational language and its "plain and easy" recipes. The book brought cookery within the reach of all classes (not just those fortunate enough to have a cook to do the work for them).
The impressive list of 972 recipes in her book also included some of the first known mentions of now-famous foods, including jelly and Yorkshire Pudding.
Google's doodle, illustrated by Matthew Cruickshank, shows Glasse baking a batch of Yorkshire puddings, ready for the Sunday roast. Very British indeeed.
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Hannah Glasse, whose 310th birthday is the subject of today’s Google Doodle, is part of the reason we have The Joy of Cooking today. That’s because in 1747, Glasse popularized the modern English-language cookbook as the author of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
“I believe I have attempted a branch of Cookery, which nobody has yet thought worth their while to write upon,” the first page begins.
At the time, cookbooks were mostly for fancy professional chefs, and mostly French, but Glasse wrote her cookbook for housewives and domestic servants of the new middle class. With her help, Glasse writes in her preface, “I dare say, that every servant who can but read will be capable of making a tolerable good cook, and those who have the least notion of Cookery cannot miss being very good ones.”
That idea, plus or minus an assumption of hired help, is more or less the concept that brought us The Joy of Cooking in the 20th century: Anyone can make something edible with help, and most people can make something pretty good, as long as you have a book to show you the way. And like Joy, The Art of Cookery is essentially a household encyclopedia, clocking it at over 400 pages in its facsimile edition. Most of the recipes aren’t original — many of them were taken whole cloth from contemporary sources — but Glasse’s clean, crisp instructions rendered them usable to any literate person of her time, not just trained chefs.
Glasse doesn’t just stop at food. She also offers recipes and techniques for soaps, medicines, cosmetics, and keeping a clean and vermin-free household, all of which she approaches with salt-the-earth gusto. For bedbugs, she advises mixing mercury with egg whites and anointing the bedstead with the resulting concoction. “It is a certain cure,” she concludes, “and will not spoil anything.” (PSA: Do not smear mercury over your bed.)
Looking over the book today, it can be tempting at times to try to use The Art of Cookery as a modern cookbook. Glasse’s assumption that her readers will be butchering their own animals and then thriftily using every part has a certain nose-to-tail trendiness, and quite a bit of her advice for best cooking practices holds up today. “Most people spoil garden things by over-boiling them,” she remarks. “All things that are green should have a little crispness, for if they are over-boiled, they neither have any sweetness or beauty.” Too true, Mrs. Glasse; too true.
But what makes The Art of Cookery most charming to read in the 21st century is what Anne Shirley would describe as its “scope for imagination.” You might not necessarily want to make or eat this recipe, but isn’t it fun to imagine Glasse’s “everlasting syllabub”?
Take five half pints of thick cream, half a pint of Rhenish wine, half a pint of sack, and the juice of two large Seville oranges; grate in just the yellow rind of three lemons, and a pound of double-refined sugar well beat and sifted; mix all together with a spoonful of orange-flower water; beat it well together with a whisk half an hour, then with a spoon take it off, and lay it on a sieve to drain, then fill your glasses: these will keep above a week, and are better made the day before. The best way to whip syllabub is, have a fine large chocolate-mill, which you must keep on purpose, and a large deep bowl to mill them in: it is both quicker done, and the froth stronger; for the thin that is left at the bottom, have ready some calf’s foot jelly boiled and clarified, there must be nothing but the calf’s foot boiled to a hard jelly; when cold take off the fat, clear it with the whites of eggs, run it through a flannel bag, and mix it with the clear which you saved of the syllabubs; sweeten it to your palate, and give it a boil, then pour it into basins, or what you please: when cold, turn it out, and it is a fine summery.
All those lush, colorful food words rendered unfamiliar by 300 years; those run-on imperative sentences that briskly conclude by advising the reader to “pour it into basins, or what you please”: it’s like reading a bossy tone poem, or a tiny and beautiful short story. You don’t even have to know anything about syllabub beyond the fact that it is fun as heck to say to enjoy reading it.
(Syllabub, incidentally, is an old-fashioned English dessert made by combining dairy and alcohol so that the dairy curdles. You can learn how to make a modern version here, but it seems that no one has yet improved upon Hannah Glasse’s technique of whisking by hand to get the proper texture. Maybe if you find a fine large chocolate mill that you can keep on purpose?)
The Art of Cookery can be a sheer sensuous pleasure to read — and it’s also the godmother of the books that taught the rest of us how to cook. Happy 310th birthday, Hannah Glasse, and thank you for helping us feed ourselves for all these years.
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 310th birthday of Hannah Glasse, who penned what may have been the world’s first viral cookbook and was dubbed the “mother of the modern dinner party.”
Born in 1708 as the illegitimate daughter of a London landowner, Glasse was a housewife-turned-dressmaker, but it was her recipes for English staples and not her stitching that earned her acclaim.
Glasse’s comprehensive cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, indexed 972 recipes, from cheesecake, to roasted hare to cures for wayward sea captains. Published anonymously in 1747, the book reportedly remained a bestseller for more than 100 years. But historians have claimed that Glasse ruthlessly plagiarized her recipes, lifting as many as 263 dishes from a single earlier source.
While she may not have invented her gravies, sauces and fricassees, Glasse pioneered a direct and conversational style in presenting her manual, which she intended as an instructive guide to “improve the servants and save the ladies a great deal of trouble.”
Eschewing extravagant “French tricks” popular in many kitchens at the time, Glasse focused on transcribing British foods, including one of the earliest published recipes for Yorkshire pudding. She also included one of the first British recipe’s for Indian curry, catering to the changing tastes of Brits returning from overseas.
Despite the popularity of her recipe book, Glasse declared bankruptcy seven years after its publication and was forced to auction the copyright. She was reportedly consigned to a debtors prison for several months in 1757.
Glasse penned two other works, including The Compleat Confectioner, but they did not attain the popularity of her first book. Glasse died in London 1770 at the age of 62.
Google’s Doodle depicts Glasse preparing a batch of Yorkshire Puddings, with her cookbook handy.
