Hannah Glasse helped bring easy cooking to the masses when she published her book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747. In addition to including a number of traditional recipes, Glasse's book informed readers about how to pickle foods, cook for people who were sick and make delectable desserts.
Until Glasse wrote and distributed The Art of Cookery, most cookbooks weren't accessible to the majority of people. The Art of Cookery was written in plain English and included more than 900 recipes.
Google honored Glasse, who would have turned 310 this year, with an illustration on the homepage of the search engine Wednesday to celebrate her birthday. Glasse was one of the first people to publish the recipe for Yorkshire pie, an English menu staple. She also covered desserts like sugar cakes and fruit pies.
Yorkshire Christmas pie
Glasse's recipe for the Christmas-time classic, Yorkshire pudding, takes up less than a page in her book. It requires several spices including mace, nutmeg, cloves and black pepper, at least four pounds of butter and a few birds to make. She also has a recipe in the book to make the crust for the pie. See Glasse's recipe for Yorkshire pie here.
Gooseberry fool
Making this traditional dessert is easy with Glasse's recipe, which can be found here. It involves boiling the gooseberries with sugar and then mashing them before blending them with a milk and egg mixture to make for a cold creamy dessert. Modern-day recipes recommend sticking the mashed berries in the fridge for a few hours before folding them into the cream.
Apple pie
Glasse's apple pie is a classic dessert and The Art of Cookery explains the steps to make it from the peeling and coring of the apple to how to cut the crust of the pie on page 225. Glasse's recipe involves using lemon and cloves along with sugar to sweeten and give the apples some flavor.
For those who get a little more adventurous with their food, Glasse also wrote recipes for how to cook a calf's head (page 141), how to make bacon from scratch (page 259) and how to preserve pigs' feet and ears (page 108).
