The Good Huswifes Jewell
Title page of 1596 edition
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| Author | Thomas Dawson |
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| Country | England |
| Language | Early Modern English |
| Subject | Cookery |
| Publisher | Edward White |
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Publication date
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1585 |
| Pages | 53 double-page spreads |
The Good Huswifes Jewell is an English cookery book by the cookery and housekeeping writer Thomas Dawson, first published in 1585. It includes recipes for medicines as well as food. To the spices found in Medieval English cooking, the book adds herbs, especially parsley and thyme. Sugar is used in many of the dishes, along with now-unfamiliar ingredients like violets and rosewater.
The book includes recipes still current, such as pancakes, haggis, and salad of leaves and flowers with vinaigrette sauce, as well as some not often made, such as mortis, a sweet chicken pâté. Some dishes have familiar names, such as trifle, but different ingredients from those used today.
The Jewell is the first English cookery book to give a recipe for sweet potatoes.
The Elizabethan age represented the period of transition from Medieval to modern. Cookery was changing as trade brought new ingredients, and fashion favoured new styles of cooking, with, for example, locally-grown herbs as well as imported spices. Cooking came to be seen as a subject in its own right, rather than being part of medicine or books of "secrets". Little is known of the book's author, Thomas Dawson, beyond the bare fact that he published several books on cooking including also his 1620 Booke of cookerie. Such books were becoming available to a wider audience than the aristocratic households of the Middle Ages, hence the "huswife" of Dawson's title.
The Good Huswifes Jewell gives recipes for making fruit tarts using fruits as varied as apple, peach, cherry, damson, pear, and mulberry. For stuffing for meat and poultry, or as Dawson says "to farse all things", he recommends using the herbs thyme, hyssop, and parsley, mixed with egg yolk, white bread, raisins or barberries, and spices including cloves, mace, cinnamon and ginger, all in the same dish. A sauce for pork was made with white wine, broth, nutmeg, and the herbs rosemary, bay, thyme, and marjoram.
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