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Hannah Glasse
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Hannah Glasse (1708 – 1770) was a cookery writer of the eighteenth century. She is best known for her cookbook, The Art of Cookery, first published in 1747. The book was reprinted within its first year of publication, appeared in 20 editions in the 18th Century, and continued to be published until 1843.
ah Glasse was baptized on the 14 March 1708. She was the illegitimate daughter of Isaac Allgood, and an Irish widow named Hannah Reynolds.
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Hannah Glasse (1708 – 1770) was a cookery writer of the eighteenth century. She is best known for her cookbook, The Art of Cookery, first published in 1747. The book was reprinted within its first year of publication, appeared in 20 editions in the 18th Century, and continued to be published until 1843.
Background
Hannah Glasse was baptized on the 14 March 1708. She was the illegitimate daughter of Isaac Allgood, and an Irish widow named Hannah Reynolds. She was born in a house on Greville Street, near Hatton Garden, London. Isaac was already married to Hannah Clarke, the daughter of a London vintner, with whom he had his only legitimate heir, Hannah Glasse’s half-brother, Lancelot in 1711.
Hannah Glasse was probably brought up in Isaac’s hometown of Hexham. The Allgoods were a respected and prosperous Northumberland family who had historically been in service to the earls of Derwentwater.
Hannah Glasse’s mother, Hannah Reynolds, was also brought to live in Hexham, but was banished some time before 1713. Hannah’s relationship with her mother was an unhappy one, and she describes her as a ‘wicked wretch’ in some of her letters. In a drunken stupor Isaac had signed over all of his property to Hannah Reynolds, and although he reneged on this deal, Hannah Reynolds brought a case to court after Isaac’s death to try and reclaim some of his estate.
This meant that Hannah Glasse did not receive the £30 annual payment set out in her father’s will until Lancelot, by then a lawyer and powerful political figure, had managed to settle the case in 1740. In 1724, while Hannah was living with her father and brother, Hannah Clarke died. Isaac himself was suffering from ill health and a downturn in his economic fortunes, and so Hannah was sent to live with her grandmother in London. Life in her grandmother’s was restrictive and unhappy, leading Hannah to marry John Glasse, an army subaltern on half pay, without the consent or knowledge of her family on the 4 August 1724.
The Allgoods were furious, and immediately began investigations into John’s background. They discovered that John was Irish and had been on the staff of Lord Palworth, the Lord Chancellor of Scotland. John was probably much older than he claimed (50 instead of 30), and had been married once before in 1723, to a girl who died soon afterwards.
Hannah begged forgiveness from her family in a letter to her favourite aunt Margaret, apologizing for the secrecy of the wedding. John finally wrote to his new in-laws six months later, but gave little away. In 1725 Lancelot visited London but did not see his sister. It was not until 1728, when John and Hannah were living in New Hall in Broomfield, Essex, that relations with the Allgood family were repaired. The couple were working for the Count of Donegal, and Hannah had just had her first child. Amicable correspondence with her aunt Margaret was started once again and continued for many years.
In 1732 the Countess of Donegal died, and her husband moved back to the estate owned by his mother. This precipitated Hannah and John moving to London, where they temporarily took up lodgings in Tufton Street in Westminster. In 1734 Hannah wrote to her family explaining that the midwife who had delivered her fourth daughter had also brought with her smallpox. The family were all affected, but managed to pull through. In all, Hannah had 11 children, of whom only 5 survived. In 1738 Hannah returned with her family to live in the house on Greville Street where she had been born.
The Art of Cookery
In 1746 Hannah Glasse wrote to her aunt explaining that she had started work on The Art of Cookery. This was the third economic venture that Glasse had launched in order to keep her ever-expanding family afloat. Previously she had tried selling "Daffy’s Elixir", one of the many homemade remedies popular at the time. She also mentioned in one of her letters to Northumberland that John had bought two looms with the hope of producing cloth and making a bit of money. Neither of these plans seemed to work, but The Art of Cookery was an astounding success.
Published by subscription in 1747, and sold in its first print run to 202 eager readers though Mrs. Ashburn’s China Shop, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy transformed Glasse’s financial situation. As well as overseeing a second edition before the year was out, she managed to open a costumier in London’s fashionable Tavistock Street with her eldest daughter Margaret. Tragedy did strike, however, as her husband, John, died in the summer of 1747. Hannah went on after that to live above the shop on Tavistock Street.
The Art of Cookery was issued anonymously (though Glasse did register it in the entry book at the Stationer’s Hall in her own name in 1746), and was intended to assist the lower classes in cooking for their employers.
The fact that Glasse did not claim authorship of the first edition led to the erroneous claim it was in fact written by John Hill. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a dinner party is recounted in which the publisher Dilly suggests Hill was the true author. Johnson was not convinced, but the myth proceeded until Glasse’s identity was finally confirmed by the historian Madeline Hope-Dodds in 1938.
Keen that her children should be able to climb the social ladder and attain financial security, Glasse ensured that they all received an excellent education. Her three daughters (Hannah, b. 1728, Margaret, b. 1729, and Catherine, b. 1734) attended reputable local schools where they were taught Latin, French, household accounts, and writing, while her sons Isaac and George went to Eton and Westminster.
Bankruptcy and debt
Though Hannah had managed to attract business from the likes of the Princess of Wales, she had begun raising loans on the shop in 1749. On 27 May 1754 Hannah went bankrupt, with debts of over £10,000 (£10,114-8s-0d). The stock of the Tavistock Street shop was not auctioned after the bankruptcy as it was all held in Margaret Glasse’s name, but on 29 October 1754 Hannah was forced to put the copyright for The Art of Cookery up for auction.
On 17 December 1754 the London Gazette stated that Hannah would be discharged from bankruptcy (issued with a certificate of conformity) on 11 January 1755. She remained in her lodgings at Tavistock Street, but Hannah once again fell into dire financial difficulties and was consigned on the 22 June 1757 to Marshalsea debtor's prison.
Her daughter continued to pay the rates on the Tavistock Street premises, but by 1758, the house was listed as empty. In July 1757 Hannah was transferred to Fleet Prison, where she remained, probably for several months.
No record remains of her release date, but she was a free woman by 2 December 1757, as she registered shares in The Servants Directory, a new book she had written on the managing of a household. HG registered 3 shares in The Servants Directory on 12 December 1757. It was not a commercially successful venture, although its plagiarized editions were popular in the North American colonies.
In 1760 Ann Cook published Professed Cookery, which contained a 68-page attack on Hannah Glasse and her work. Ann Cook lived in Hexham, and was furious about what she claimed was a campaign of intimidation and persecution by Hannah's half-brother Lancelot to ruin her and her husband. In that same year, Hannah published her third and last work The Compleat Confectioner. It was reprinted several times, but did not match the huge success that Hannah had enjoyed with The Art of Cookery.
After her bankruptcy Hannah disappeared from her family’s records, and until her death in 1770 very little is known about the last decades of her life. The last record is an announcement in the London Gazette (copied in the Newcastle Courant) that Mrs. Hannah Glasse, (half-)sister to Lancelot Allgood, had died on 1 September 1770, aged 62. The cause of death is unknown and no will was ever found.
Of Hannah’s surviving children, her son Isaac went to Bombay in 1754, where he died, George entered the navy and was drowned in 1761 off Pondicherry. Margaret, Hannah and Catherine all assisted with the costumier business. Margaret died in Jamaica in the 1760s, Catherine married a Mr. Hart and had a son. There is no record of what happened to Hannah.
Urban cooking
In 1708 Hannah Glasse was born in to a country on the move. A revolution in agriculture meant that fresh meat was now available to all but the very poor all year round. Britain’s towns and cities expanded rapidly as the economy grew. People flooded in to London from the countryside in search of better paid jobs and opportunities. New industries encouraged the growth of the middle class, the urban group of lawyers, bankers, shopkeepers and merchants.
This burgeoning group had determined social aspirations, and this was reflected in what they ate, and how they cooked. Georgian cooking was incredibly rich. Lashings of butter were spread on everything from meat to vegetables. Though eggs were smaller than they are today, it was not uncommon for a recipe to call for a dozen egg yolks or more for a single cake or pudding. Food was also much spicier. Nutmeg, cardamom, pepper, cloves and other strongly flavoured herbs and spices were added liberally to most dishes. Hannah Glasse and her contemporaries were also very keen on mixing sweet and savoury flavours. Georgian cookery is characterised by the use of meat in sweet pies and potted meat preserved with sugar. Baking was also an area of English speciality. Tons of pies, breads and cakes were washed down in homes across the country along with gallons of tea and coffee imported from Britain’s overseas empire.
Although Glasse was determined that her audience reject extravagance and wastefulness in their cooking, the careful presentation of dishes on the table was vital. Colours and shapes were meant to compliment each other, and different dishes were always arranged symmetrically on the table. Hannah suggest that the tongue should be left inside a roasted cow’s head so that it sit ‘handsomer’ on the dish.
Her recipe for asparagus stuffed into French loaves is described as making ‘a pretty side dish at a second course’. Appearances were of the utmost importance, especially for the upwardly mobile middle class audience for whom Hannah Glasse was writing.
Recipe books before Art of Cookery
The first cookery books in Great Britain were published some 300 years before Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery hit the shelves of 18th century London. But these early books did not have Hannah’s mass readership in mind. These lavishly produced collections of recipes were bought only by a small number of aristocrats and their highly trained chefs.
The 17th century saw an upsurge in the publication of cookery books. These were mostly translations of complicated French recipes, or collections of extravagant aristocratic family recipes written out by male chefs. This tradition of convoluted and elitist publications continued well in to Hannah Glasse’s lifetime, but the clues to her success can be traced back to the growth of the cookery book market in the late 17th century.
In 1661 Hannah Wolley became the first female author to try and make money from writing and publishing cookery books and manuals on household management. Wolley’s books were stuffed full of advice on household management, etiquette, commentary on the extravagance of French chefs, and easy-to-follow recipes. Wolley’s recipes could, therefore, be cooked in more modest kitchens, and were in contrast to the ever more extravagant recipes being published and developed by male cooks. But few people could afford to buy these books, and it was not until the expansion of the middle classes overwhelming transformed the make-up of British society in Hannah Glasse’s lifetime that a true mass market for cookery books was born.
By the time Hannah Glasse published her first cookery book in 1747 the urban middle classes were almost universally literate and had cash to burn. They were also acutely aware that fortunes were easier to earn than respectability and social status. Prosperous merchants, lawyers, shopkeepers and tradesmen were desperate in the mid-18th Century to show off their new wealth and to establish themselves within society. Hannah Glasse gave them the ticket to social respectability by providing middle class women with a no-nonsense cookery books that gave them the ticket out of the kitchen and into a life of leisure. Even if the women of London’s burgeoning mercantile class could not quite replicate the life of leisure led by the gentry and nobility, they were now about to eat in the style of those much higher up the social scale. Hannah was providing a guide to life.
Between 1700 and 1789 over 500,000 copies of some 300 cookery books were published. The vogue for complicated books published by men was completely overtaken by the simple approach pioneered by Glasse and many female contemporaries. The success of the Art of Cookery is testament not only to the aspirational desires of the middle classes and the increased purchasing power of women, but also to the fact that a much wider spectrum of British society was beginning to enjoy eating. Discarding the extravagance and pomp of court food and French culinary techniques saw British cooking get back to basics – good ingredients, simple techniques, and quality dining available for all.
Miscellaneous
The direction "First catch your hare" is sometimes misattributed to Glasse. The closest to it in her Art of Cookery is the recipe for roast hare (page 6) which begins "Take your hare when it be cas'd", meaning simply to take a skinned hare.
In 1995, Prospect Books published a facsimile edition of the 1747 edition of her book, with introductory essays by Jennifer Stead and Priscilla Bain, and a glossary by Alan Davidson. ISBN 0907325580
In 1998, Applewood Books published a facsimile edition of the 1805 edition of her book, annotated by culinary historian Karen Hess. ISBN 978-1557094629
In 2006, Hannah Glasse was the subject of a BBC documentary that called her the "mother of the modern dinner party".
External links
- from the British Library (and biographical information).
- and excerpts from the text.
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