First published in England in 1747, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy was probably the best-known and most widely used cookbook in both England and the American colonies in the eighteenth century. The book went through a…

In this letter to her Philadelphia friend Elizabeth Powel, Martha Washington refers to her search for additional slaves to assist in the kitchen at Mount Vernon. It is notable especially for a paragraph alluding to the suspect trustworthiness of…