
VERRAL (WILLIAM) A Complete System of Cookery... A Variety of Genuine Receipts, for the author, 1759
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VERRAL (WILLIAM)
Footnotes
Sole edition of this recipe book by the 'Master of the White-Hart Inn in Lewes' (title-page), a hotel and restaurant on the High Street frequented by Thomas Paine the following decade, and still in existance. "The recipes offer an illuminating glimpse of French 'nouvelle cuisine', with its light, simple dishes, as it was practised in England in the 1730s and 1740s... Today Verral is remembered for his cookery book, one of the very few to give a true picture of French cookery in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Verral's recipes are clear and well explained, with comments on the relative merits of French and English cookery, and on the success of particular dishes. Such a balanced discussion of the two cuisines is extremely rare among the mass of xenophobic comment which characterizes English cookery books of the period" (ODNB).