Antiquitate Culinariae; or Curious Tracts relating to the Culinary affairs of the Old English. With a preliminary discourse, Notes and Illustrations, By the Reverend Richard Warner, of Sway, near Lymington, Hants

London: Printed for R. Blamire, Strand, 1791. Quarto, [2] lx, 137, [1 blank] pages. First edition. Illustrated with two aquatints, 'A Saxon Entertainment", and "The Peacock Feast" (the later double-paged). Engraved title page. Warner was a prominent English antiquarian and divine. This work was one of the first to examine the history of early English cookery, at the forefront of a scholarly movement that developed over the last three centuries of the Eighteenth Century. The book contains: Warner's detailed introductory notes; The Forme of Cury, copied from an ancient vellum roll thought to have been compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II; Ancient Cookery, A.D. 1381, another collection of recipes from the same vellum roll; "Ancient Cookery," a collection of recipes from a fifteenth century manuscript but which almost certainly dates from a much earlier period; Ancient Recipes to Preserve Fruits," from the mid-Seventeenth Century; and account of the enthronement feasts of George Neville as Archbishop of York in the reign of King Edward IV, and of William Warham of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1504. Nineteenth Century three quarters roan leather and boards, with gilt-lettered spine, some minor spotting throughout, some offsetting from text printing, otherwise very good. [Bitting 485; Cagle 1049; Crahan 446; Simon 1607].