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Frontispiece and title page of The British Housewife
Martha Bradley (fl. 1740s–1755) was a British cookery book writer. Little is known about her life, except that she published the cookery book The British Housewife(pictured) in 1756 and worked as a cook for more than 30 years in the fashionable spa town of Bath, Somerset. The British Housewife was released as a 42-issue partwork between January and October 1756. It was published in a two-volume book form in 1758, and is more than a thousand pages long. It is likely that Bradley was dead before the partwork was published. The book follows the French style of nouvelle cuisine, distinguishing Bradley from other female cookery book writers at the time, who focused on a British style of food preparation. The work is carefully organised and the recipes taken from other authors are amended, suggesting she was a knowledgeable and experienced cook, able to improve on existing dishes. Because of the length of the book, it was not reprinted until 1996; as a result, few modern writers have written extensively on Bradley or her work. (Full article...)
