This volume in the American Antiquarian Cookbook Collection, published in New York in 1830, is a new version of a famous recipe collection previously published in London by William Kitchiner, adapted specifically for use by the American public.

Dr. William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle was an enormous best-seller upon publication in London in 1824, and the author developed an international reputation based on his eccentricities and the extravagance of his writing. Unlike most food writers of the day, he cooked the food himself, washed up afterward, and performed all the household tasks he wrote about. He traveled around with a “portable cabinet of taste,” a folding box containing all of his unique mustards and sauces, and he was well known for his invention of the popular Wow-Wow sauce. No wonder that an anonymous American “medical gentleman” (as asserted on the title page of this edition) chose to adapt Kitchiner’s English cookbook for American kitchens.