Leslie, Eliza

Although Eliza Leslie’s (1787–1858) cookbooks were reprinted dozens of times, Leslie maintained that her first love was fiction, finding herself drawn to it even as a child. Born the eldest of five children in Philadelphia in 1787, she was educated primarily at home by her father, a self-taught watchmaker and mathematician, who counted Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin among his friends and fellow members of the American Philosophical Society. When he died in 1803, he left the family virtually penniless, and the sixteen-year-old Eliza and her mother opened a boardinghouse in order to support the family.