The Practice of Cookery adapted to The Business of Every Day Life

1829. First Edition. Hard Cover. (Edinburgh: Cadell & Company and London: Simpkin and Marshall 1829). First UK Edition. 1 unnumbered leaf, xxxii pages, 1 unnumbered leaf, 528 pages ; (8vo). Rebound in the Twentieth Century in red cloth with gilt lettering to the spine. Minor marks to several pages at the beginning and end of the book otherwise a solid VG copy in nice, shelvable condition. In March I829, I500 copies of Mrs. Dalgairns's The Practice of Cookery were released to the public by an impatient author and her obliging publisher Robert Cadell of Edinburgh, along with his London agents Simpkin & Marshall. The cookbook, priced at 7s 6d, was an immediate commercial and critical success. In June 1829, the review in The Spectator asserted that Mrs. Dalgairns was: "far more copious than [Mrs Rundell or Dr Kitchener] are, far more various, and to us more novel." and his successors were to benefit from 30 years of steady sales of 16 editions from 1829 until 1861. In that year Mrs. Beeton's sumptuous Book of Household Management was first published, crushing the competition. Catherine Emily Callbeck Dalgairns (aka Mrs Dalgairns) was a Canadian / Scottish cookbook author. She was an upper-middle class amateur cook. Occasionally, Dalgairns is referred to as perhaps the first “Canadian” cookbook author. Her Canadian association is tenuous, though, and mostly an accident of birth. It may be more accurate to term her, as does one of her biographers (Mary F. Williamson), a ‘British North American’. or perhaps more precisely a “Scottish North American” cook, given that one of her reviewers said she demonstrated “too palpable an addiction to Scotch dishes.” Scarce. Photographs/scans available upon request.