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: Prospect Books, 1981. Quarto, [2] lx, 137, [1 blank] pages. One of 400 numbered copies. Facsimile of the original 1791 edition. Illustrated with two images, "A Saxon Entertainment", and "The Peacock Feast" (the later double-paged). 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 enthronment 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. A few light pencil notes to the margins, and a bit of light foxing throughout. One quarter brown calf. Near very good.