Professed Cookery

An real 18th-century food fight. Ann Cook’s Professed Cookery is truly a unique work. Cook was a harsh critic of the popular cookbook author Hannah Glasse and she spared no words in her critique. Cook dedicated over 70 pages (including an eight-page poem) to ruthlessly call out Glasse for obvious errors found in her best-selling book The Art of Cookery. Having fallen on difficult times, Hannah Glasse had been sentenced to debtor’s prison. Glasse found relief from her imprisonment by selling the copyright of her masterpiece. It is believed that Glasse’s half-brother, Lancelot Allgood, had started a campaign of intimidation against Ann Cook. This book is allegedly in response to that campaign. In her peom, Cook wrote of Glasse: "A poor Mind, if known, might be conceal’d, Mean Poverty is shewn when its reveal’d." Cook goes on to proclaim herself as the “Teacher of the True Art of Cookery.”