The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook.

Brown calf binding with black title plate and gilt title on the spine.

A beautiful British edition (printed circa 1790) of the First obtainable American CookBook (The first American cookbook is only known in one copy.) With two engraved plates as frontispieces. Also with an engraved plate of table arrangements included in the pagination. Also with "Twelve bills of Fare," one for each month. There has been only one copy of the 1772 first edition and the 1792 second edition at auction in over seventy years. Overall a very good copy of a book not usually found in good condition. "The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook by Susannah Carter was the only cookbook printed in the US between 1742 and 1796, a period that included both the late Colonial and the early years of the United States.Where history books abound with battles and political maneuvering The Frugal Housewife shows the warm earthiness of home and hearth, family and friends, food and drink in the years when or forefathers established this nation.[During this time] the vast majority of the population was rural and most of them could not read or write. There was little need for cookbooks and very few were printed. In Williamsburg in 1742 a reprint of an English cookbook was printed. It was The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion by E. (Elizabeth or Eliza) Smith. [Which is unobtainable, only one copy known]. During the following fifty years-from 1742 until 1792 there was only one cookbook printed in the US. This was The Frugal Housewife or Complete Woman Cook by Susannah Carter. In 1772 it was printed and sold by Eads and Gill in Queenstreet, Boston. The date of publication has been fixed by an advertisement in the Boston Gazette for Monday, March 2, 1772. It was a long-lived title, for it appeared again in 1792, Printed for Berry and Rogers, No. 35 Hanover Square, New York." (Jean McKibbin, Introduction to the 1976 reprint of The Frugal Housewife) "In this revised and corrected edition of the Frugal Housewife, several considerable Improvements have been made, which will be obvious upon perusal. -It was also suggested by the Author, that, as the chief excellence of all Cookery consists in a perfect acquaintance with the making of Gravies and Sauces, it would be proper to place these Chapters at the Beginning of the Volume, and to prefix a Number to each; whereby, when the young Cook consults any Receipt she may want, she will not only be informed what Sauce she is to serve it up with, but will be referred to the Number and Page where that Sauce may be found. (The Frugal Housewife, To the Reader).

F.B.A. Note: The first cookbooks published in America were reprinted from English works. Susannah Carter's The Frugal Housewife, originally published in London, was one of the first cookbooks printed in America. Her work features a full alphabetical index for more than 500 recipes, providing a fascinating snapshot of mid-18th century Anglo-American culinary practice.

Susannah Carter (1765?) was the author of an early household management and cookery book, The Frugal Housewife, or, Complete woman cook. Little more is known than that Carter was from Clerkenwell in London as stated in the title page of the first edition.

Her book was first published around 1765 in London by Francis Newbery, who was based in a printing enclave around St Paul's Cathedral. He was the nephew of John Newbery, after whom the Newbery Medal for children's books was named. The book was also published in 1765 in Dublin, and was first reprinted in North America in 1772 by Benjamin Edes and John Gill in Boston, illustrated with prints made by Paul Revere.

The book strongly influenced the first cookery book by an American author, Amelia Simmons's American Cookery (1796), in parts with almost identical content. An appendix was added to the 1803 American edition, supplementing "receipts" [recipes] "adapted to the American mode of cooking", such as Indian puddings, buckwheat cakes, pumpkin pie, maple molasses, and maple beer. The appendix may have been translated from a Swedish book, Rural Oeconomy: an identical appendix appears in an 1805 edition of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (originally published in 1747).

Confusingly, a completely different book with the same title was written by Lydia Maria (Francis) Child; its popularity may be the reason why it remained in print from 1829 to 1855. Child's The Frugal Housewife was also published in London and Glasgow from 1832 to 1834. In 1832 to avoid the confusion, Child changed her title to The American Frugal Housewife. She wrote of the usefulness of Carter's book for Americans: "It was the intention of the author of the American Frugal Housewife, to have given an Appendix from the English Frugal Housewife; but upon examination, she found the book so little fitted to the wants of this country, that she has been able to extract but little."