Another contemporary of Robert May’s, Hannah Woolley, marked a major milestone in cookbook publishing as the first bona fide female author of a book on cooking in England. The two earlier household books attributed to women authors, the Countess of Kent and the queen mother Henrietta Maria, were probably ghost-written by men. A third, disconcerting example was a satire penned anonymously by a writer clearly happy to see the end of Cromwell’s Protectorate and to have the royal family back on the throne: The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly Called Joan Cromwel, the Wife of the Late Usurper (1664) devotes almost half its pages to a vicious political attack on the Cromwell family. The rest of the little book is a collection of recipes such as pie, buttered eggs, and red quince cake, “most of them . . . common and vulgar,” according to the author. Yet another successful cookbook should perhaps be attributed to a woman, Gervase Markham’s The English Hous-wife. Markham has always had the credit, though a note on the back of the title page does say that he only “approved” the recipes, which were taken from “a Manuscript, which many years agone belonged to an Honourable Countesse, one of the greatest Glories of our Kingdome.”13
