Farley.   John    
The London Art of Cookery,
AND HOUSEKEEPER'S COMPLETE ASSISTANT. On a NEW PLAN. Made Plain and Easy to the Understanding of every HOUSEKEEPER, COOK, and SERVANT in the Kingdom. CONTAINING, Proper Directions for the Choice of all Kinds of Provisions. Roasting and Boiling all Sorts of Butchers Meat, Poultry, Game, and Fish. Sauces for every Occasion. Soups, Broths, Stews, and Hashes. Made Dishes, Ragouts, and Fricasses. All Sorts of Pies and Puddings. Proper Instruction for dressing of Fruits and Vegetables. Pickling, Potting, and Preserving. The Prepeartion of Hams, Tongues, and Bacon. The whole Art of Confectionary. The Preparation of Sugars. Tarts, Puffs, and Pastries. Cakes, Custards, Jams, and Jellies. Drying, Candying, and Preserving Fruits, &c. Made Wines, Cordial Waters, and Malt Liquors. To which is added, AN APPENDIX, Cotaining Considerations on Culinary Poisins; Directions for making Broths, &c. for the Sick; a List of Things in Season in the different Months of the Year; Marketing Tables, &c. &c. Embeliched with A HEAD of the AUTHOR, and a Bill of Fare for every Month in the Year, elegantly engraved on Thirteen Copper-plates. By JOHN FARLEY, PRINCIPAL COOK AT THE LONDON TAVERN. LONDON: The THIRD EDITION, With the Addition of upwards of One Hundred and Fifty new and elegant Receipts in the various Branches of Cookery. Printed for J. SCATCHERED and J. WHITTAKER, No.12, B. LAW, No. 13 Ava Maria Lane; and G. and T. WILKIE, St. Paul’s Church-Yard. 1785. [Price Six Shillings Bound.]
8vo. 1fep. [1] Engraved Frontispiece of Farley - Publish'd Jan 1. 1785 ---. Title page. [1] 4p Preface with facsimile signature of Farley. 2p Advertisement to the third edition. 24p Contents. 12 engraved plates of Bills of Fare with the back blank. (1)2-444. 445-448 Marketing Table. 1fep. Full mid-brown contemporary calf with a nice patina. The spine with raised bands and panels gilt lines and gilt writing. Oil stains to p255-264. Very slightly age browned, otherwise very nice internally. A good copy of an early edition.
- Farley's place of employment, The London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street was the largest restaurant and banqueting facility in the City. It held functions for up to two thousand, five hundred people at a sitting. In PPC 42 & 43, Fiona Lucraft lays out a very comprehensive and compelling piece of research that rightly condemns Farley of devious and outright plagiarism and proves that most of The London Art of Cookery has been taken straight from the cookery books of Hannah Glasse and Elizabeth Raffald. Nevertheless one gets a sense from Farley’s book that he was a very good professional cook proud of his high standards. He is one of the first English cooks to express (so typical of the French for more than a century) a continuing need for progress and improvement in the culinary arts. Farley in his introduction states with some pride that -- 'Cookery, like every other Art, has been moving forward to Perfection by slow Degrees; and, though the Cooks of the last Century boasted of having brought it to the highest Pitch it could bear, yet we find that daily improvements are still making therein, which must be the Case of every Art depending on Fancy and Taste: ---’ Farley appears to have very high standards of cleanliness and safety, repeatedly stressing in his book, the need for saucepans to be both clean and well tinned and he has an appendix on ‘culinary poisons’, particularly the risk of copper poisoning, which can happen when the tin wears down and exposes the copper underneath to foodstuffs. Whatever Fiona Lutcraft's excellent article in PPC proves, this is still an exceptional cookery book and gives a very good idea of the foods and dishes available at a highly reputed establishment.

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ref number: 11136