page_title: Martha Bradley
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Martha Bradley / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: The British Housewife, Martha Bradley - "A dinner in Winter"
context_page_description: Martha Bradley was a British cookery book writer. Little is known about her life, except that she worked as a cook for over thirty years in the fashionable spa town of Bath, Somerset.
  Bradley's only printed work, The British Housewife, was released as a 42-issue partwork between January and October 1756. It was then released in a two-volume book form in 1758, where is reaches over a thousand pages. It is likely that Bradley was dead before the partwork was published. The book follows the French style of nouvelle cuisine, which makes her different from other female cookery book writers at the time, who focussed on the British or English style of food preparation. The work is well organised and the recipes taken from other authors are amended, suggesting she was a knowledgeable and experienced cook, able to improve on pre-existing dishes.
  Because of the length of The British Housewife, it was not reprinted until 1996; as a result, few modern writers have written on Bradley or her work.
context_section_description: Little is known about the life of Martha Bradley, and what there is has come from her single publication, The British Housewife. In the 1740s she worked as a professional cook in the fashionable spa town of Bath, Somerset, and had over thirty years experience in the job. The publisher of The British Housewife noted that all Bradley's papers had been stored with him; the food historian Gilly Lehmann considers this shows Bradley was dead by the time the work was published in the late 1750s. Included in the papers were a handwritten family recipe collection.
  Given the recipes shown in her work, Bradley had read several contemporary cookery books, including Mary Eales (Mrs Mary Eales's Receipts, 1718), Patrick Lamb (Royal Cookery, 1726—the third edition), Vincent La Chapelle (The Modern Cook, 1733) and Hannah Glasse (The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1747). These had all been changed and improved from the originals, showing she had been knowledgeable and able in her chosen career, according to the food writer Alan Davidson.
  The British Housewife was first published as a partwork in 42 weekly editions, possibly the first cookery book issued in this manner; the first issue was on 10 January 1756. The weekly editions comprised "four large half-sheets of printing" costing 3d. The weekly editions would have finished in October that year, and would have cost 10s. 6d in total. The partworks were advertised across Britain, including Oxford, Leeds, Manchester and Sussex. In the text of the partworks Bradley would advertise the other issues, telling readers "We have in our preceding Numbers given the Cook so ample Instruction for the roasting of all plain Joints of Meat ... that she cannot be at a loss in any of them". Petits Propos Culinaires considers that Bradley's "scheme for the education of the cook and housewife was more thorough than any that had gone before."
  The work was published in book form in 1758; its two volumes comprised over 1,200 pages. Some works show differing dates. Virginia Maclean's 1981 history A Short-Title Catalogue of Household and Cookery Books Published in the English Tongue, 1701–1800, put the publication date at 1760, while Arnold Oxford's 1913 work English Cookery Books to the Year 1850 listed it as c.1770 with 752 pages.
caption: Illustrated example of a dinner in winter, as suggested by Bradley
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