Hannah Glasse was an English cookery writer of the 18th century. Her first cookery book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, became the best-selling recipe book of that century. She later wrote The Servants’ Directory and The Compleat Confectioner, but neither book was as successful as her first.
About Hannah Glasse in brief
Hannah Glasse was an English cookery writer of the 18th century. Her first cookery book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, became the best-selling recipe book of that century. She later wrote The Servants’ Directory and The Compleat Confectioner, but neither book was as commercially successful as her first. She was born in London to a Northumberland landowner and his mistress. When she was 16 she eloped with a 30-year-old Irish subaltern then on half-pay and lived in Essex, working on the estate of the Earls of Donegall. Glasse became a dressmaker in Covent Garden, where her clients included Princess Augusta, the Princess of Wales. She ran up excessive debts and was imprisoned for bankruptcy and was forced to sell the copyright of The Art Of Cookery. Other authors plagiarised Glasse’s writing and pirated copies became common, particularly in the United States. She influenced many of the English cooks in the second part of the 20th century, including Elizabeth David, Fanny Cradock and Clarissa Dickson Wright. She also wrote the first known curry recipe written in English, as well as three recipes for pilau, an early reference to vanilla in English cuisine, the first recorded use of jelly in trifle, and an early recipe for ice cream. Her later life is unrecorded; information about her identity was lost until uncovered in 1938 by the historian Madeleine Hope Dodds.
Her family secretly married by Lord Piccadilly in 1724, but she found out about the marriage a month later, when she moved out of her grandmother’s house. By 1728 the Glasses were living in New Hall, Broomfield, Essex, the home of the 4th Earl ofDonegall, and were living as a working couple at an estate of 4th Brothfield. She did not have a good relationship with her mother, who had little input into her daughter’s upbringing; Glasse described her in correspondence as a ‘wicked wretch!’ Glasse did not regret getting married, but did not express regret for getting married at all, but said: ‘I am sorry, but the manner of it was only done, but I have only done what I have done.’ She was also the first to use the term ‘Yorkshire pudding’ in print, and wrote that it was ‘the most delicious dish in the world’. Her husband was a widower, Lord Polwarthth, and the couple had a son, Lancelot, born three years after Glasse. Allgood took Reynolds and the young Hannah back to Hexham to live, and she was brought up with his other children, but according to A. T. Robb-Smith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Reynolds was banished from Hexham for no reason is recorded.
You want to know more about Hannah Glasse?
This page is based on the article Hannah Glasse published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
