page_title: Hannah Glasse
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Hannah Glasse / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustrations of various cuts of pork, mutton, veal and beef; from the 1802 edition of The Art of Cookery.
context_page_description: 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 that century. It was reprinted within its first year of publication, appeared in 20 editions in the 18th century, and continued to be published until well into the 19th century. She later wrote The Servants' Directory and The Compleat Confectioner, which was probably published in 1760; neither book was as commercially successful as her first.
  Glasse was born in London to a Northumberland landowner and his mistress. After the relationship ended, Glasse was brought up in her father's family. 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. The couple struggled financially and, with the aim of raising money, Glasse wrote The Art of Cookery. She copied extensively from other cookery books, around a third of the recipes having been published elsewhere.
context_section_description: Information about Glasse's identity was lost for years. In 1938 Dodds confirmed the connection between her and the Allgood family in an article in Archaeologia Aeliana.
  The Art of Cookery was the most popular cookery book of the 18th century and went through several reprints after Glasse's death. With over twenty reprints over a hundred years, the last edition was well into the 19th century. Glasse's work was plagiarised heavily throughout the rest of the 18th and 19th century, including in Isabella Beeton's bestselling Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861). The words "plain and easy" from the title were also used by several others. Copies of The Art of Cookery were taken to America by travellers, and it became one of the most popular cookery books in colonial America; it was printed in the US in 1805. It is possible that Benjamin Franklin had some of the recipes translated to French for his trip to Paris. Copies of The Servants' Directory were also extensively pirated in America.
  The instruction "First catch your hare" is sometimes wrongly attributed to Glasse. The Oxford English Dictionary observes that the use is "(i.e. as the first step to cooking him): a direction jestingly ascribed to Mrs. Glasse's Cookery Book, but of much more recent origin". The mis-provenance is from the recipe for roast hare in The Art of Cookery, which begins "Take your hare when it be cas'd", meaning simply to take a skinned hare. The saying is one of around 400 of her quotations used in the Oxford English Dictionary.
  In 1983 Prospect Books published a facsimile of the 1747 edition of The Art of Cookery under the title First Catch Your Hare, with introductory essays by Stead and the food historian Priscilla Bain, and a glossary by the food writer Alan Davidson; it has been reissued several times. When Stead was asked to contribute to the 1983 printing, she examined the 1747 publication and made what Davidson and the food writer Helen Saberi described as a "truly pioneering work", studying each recipe and tracing which of them were original or had been copied from other writers. It was Stead who established that Glasse had copied 342 of them from others. In 2006 Glasse was the subject of a BBC drama-documentary presented by the television cook Clarissa Dickson Wright; Dickson Wright described her subject as the "mother of the modern dinner party" and "the first domestic goddess". The 310th anniversary of Glasse's birth was the subject of a Google Doodle on 28 March 2018.
  Glasse has been admired by several modern cooks and food writers. The 20th century cookery writer Elizabeth David considers that "it is plain to me that she is reporting at first hand, and sometimes with an original and charming turn of phrase"; the television cook Fanny Cradock provided a foreword to a reprint of The Art of Cookery in 1971, in which she praised Glasse and her approach. Craddock found the writing easy to follow and thought Glasse an honest cook, who seemed to have tried most of the recipes in the book. The food writer Jane Grigson admired Glasse's work, and in her 1974 book she included many of Glasse's recipes. Dickson Wright affirms that she has "a strong affinity for Hannah Glasse. I admire her straightforward, unpretentious approach to cookery." For Dickson Wright, "she is one of the greats of English food history."
caption: Illustrations of various cuts of pork, mutton, veal and beef; from the 1802 edition of The Art of Cookery
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