page_title: Elizabeth Raffald
section_title: Business career
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Raffald / Biography / Business career
caption_attribution_description: English: First page of the Manchester Street Directory, 1772
context_page_description: Elizabeth Raffald was an English author, innovator and entrepreneur.
  Born and raised in Doncaster, Yorkshire, Raffald went into domestic service for fifteen years, ending as the housekeeper to the Warburton baronets at Arley Hall, Cheshire. She left her position when she married John, the estate's head gardener. The couple moved to Manchester, Lancashire, where Raffald opened a register office to introduce domestic workers to employers; she also ran a cookery school and sold food from the premises. In 1769 she published her cookery book The Experienced English Housekeeper, which contains the first recipe for a "Bride Cake" that is recognisable as a modern wedding cake. She is possibly the inventor of the Eccles cake.
  In August 1772 Raffald published The Manchester Directory, a listing of 1,505 traders and civic leaders in Manchester—the first such listing for the up-and-coming town. The Raffalds went on to run two important post houses in Manchester and Salford before running into financial problems, possibly brought on by John's heavy drinking. Raffald began a business selling strawberries and hot drinks during the strawberry season.
context_section_description: John opened a floristry shop near Fennel Street; Raffald began an entrepreneurial career at the premises. She rented her spare rooms for storage, began a register office to bring together, for a fee, domestic staff with employers, and advertised that she was "pleased to give her business of supplying cold entertainments, hot French dishes, confectionaries, &c." Over the next few years her business grew, and she added cookery classes to the services she supplied. In August 1766 the Raffalds moved to what was probably a larger premises in Exchange Alley in Market Place. Here John sold seeds and plants, while Raffald, according to her advertisements in the local press, supplied "jellies, creams, possets, flummery, lemon cheese cakes, and all other decorations for cold entertainments; also, Yorkshire hams, tongues, brawn, Newcastle salmon, and sturgeon, pickles, and ketchups of all kinds, lemon pickles"; she also supplied the produce for, and organised, civic dinners. The following year, alongside confectionery, she was also selling:
  pistachio nuts, French olives, Portugal and French plumbs, prunellos [prunes], limes, preserved pine apples, and all sorts of dry and wet sweetmeats, both foreign and English. Also Turkey figs and other raisins, Jorden and Valencia almonds ... truffles, morels and all sorts of spices.
  In 1769 Raffald published her cookery book, The Experienced English Housekeeper, which she dedicated to Lady Warburton. As was the practice for publishers at the time, Raffald had obtained subscribers—those who had pre-paid for a copy. The first edition was supported by more than 800 subscribers which raised over £800. The subscribers paid five shillings when the book was published; the non-subscribers paid six. The book was "printed by a neighbour whom I can rely on doing it the strictest justice, without the least alteration". The neighbour was Joseph Harrop, who published the Manchester Mercury, a weekly newspaper in which Raffald had advertised extensively. She described the book as a "laborious undertaking" that had damaged her health as she had been "too studious and giving too close attention" to it. In an attempt to avoid piracy of her work, Raffald signed the front page of each copy of the first edition.
  In the introduction to The Experienced English Housekeeper, Raffald states "I can faithfully assure my friends that ... [the recipes] are wrote from my own experience and not borrowed from any other author". Like her predecessor Hannah Glasse, who wrote The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747, Raffald did not "gloss ... over with hard names or words of high style, but wrote in ...[her] own plain language". The historian Kate Colquhoun observes that Glasse and Raffald "wrote with an easy confidence", and both were the biggest cookery book sellers in the Georgian era.
  In 1771 Raffald released a second edition of The Experienced English Housekeeper, which included a hundred additional recipes. The publisher was Robert Baldwin of 47 Paternoster Row, London, who had paid Raffald £1,400 for the copyright of the book. When he asked her to change some of the Mancunian vernacular, she declined, stating "What I have written I proposed to write at the time; it was written deliberately, and I cannot admit of any alteration". Further editions of the book appeared during her lifetime: in 1772 (printed in Dublin), 1773, 1775 and 1776 (all printed in London).
  In May 1771 Raffald advertised that she had begun to sell cosmetics from her shop, and listed the availability of distilled lavender water, wash balls, French soap, swan-down powder puffs, tooth powder, lip salve and perfumes. The historian Roy Shipperbottom considers that her nephew—the perfumer to the King of Hanover—was probably the supplier of the items. The same year she also assisted in setting up Prescott's Manchester Journal, the second Mancunian newspaper.
  In August 1772 Raffald published The Manchester Directory, a listing of 1,505 traders and civic leaders in Manchester. She wrote, "The want of a directory for the large and commercial town of Manche
caption: The first page of The Manchester Directory, produced by Raffald in 1772
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