The English Art of Cookery

The English Art of Cookery is a cookery book of English cuisine by the tavern cook Richard Briggs, first published in 1788.

It includes recipes for toad in a hole, mushroom ketchup and puff pastry, and examples of Anglo-Indian influence.

The title page describes Richard Briggs as being "many Years Cook at the Globe Tavern, Fleet-street, the White-Hart Tavern, Holborn, [and] now at the Temple Coffee-house."

Briggs gave the book the title The English Art of Cookery according to the present practice; being a complete guide to all housekeepers on a plan entirely new. In his preface, dated Oct. 1, 1788, he explains that his intended audience is (commanded) servants rather than aristocrats: "I presume to offer the following Sheets to the Public, in hopes that they will find the Directions and Receipts more intelligible than in most Books of the Kind. I have bestowed every Pains to render them easily practicable, and adapted to the Capacities of those who may be ordered to use them." The historian Gilly Lehmann comments that in this preface, Briggs was stressing "his simple style in terms reminiscent of Hannah Glasse". The book was expensive, its price of 7 shillings placing it at "the upper end of the market."

The book contains a high proportion of French recipes for its period, Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper in comparison having far fewer. French or partly French titles include "Poulet a la Braize", "Soup a la Reine" and "Rump of Beef a la Doube". Despite these elegant foreign dishes, Briggs felt able to include homely English foods such as toad in a hole, though it did include "beaten ginger, and a little grated nutmeg", and used a "veiney piece of beef" rather than sausages.

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