
MUFFETT (THOMAS) Healths Improvement: or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing all Sorts of Food used in this Nation, FIRST EDITION, 1655
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MUFFETT (THOMAS)
Footnotes
FIRST EDITION of this posthumously issued treatise on the food and diet of the English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was written by the entomologist Thomas Muffett (or Moffet, 1553-1604), whose stepdaughter Patience is said by some to have inspired the nursery rhyme 'Little Miss Muffett'. The work includes the important observation, made for the first time, that eating liver is beneficial to certain eye diseases. It also contains the first list of British wildfowl, and recognition of their migratory habits.
Provenance: John Borthwick of Crookstown Esquire, late eighteenth century ownership inscription on front free endpaper; some earlier annotations on blank preliminary/imprimatur leaves ("Dinner - Fried Chickens", "1. Boiled lamb 2. hard fish 3. Pancake?", "Roast Fowl Trouts Beans").