The Williamsburg Art of Cookery: a 1939 cookbook for the “accomplish’d gentlewoman”

Mrs. Helen Bullock’s cookbook was made for Colonial Williamsburg, Incorporated, and it is set in an old style, long s and all. Its title promises upwards of five hundred of the most ancient and approved recipes in Virginia cookery, then lists them: soups and sauces, flesh and fish, breads, garden stuff, pastry, preserving, confectionery, cakes, puddings, wines and punches.

The recipes are only part of it. There is a table of the garden herbs favoured in Williamsburg, an account of Virginia hospitality, short treatises on the branches of cookery, an account of drinking healths, and thoughts on keeping Christmas in Virginia, with traditional recipes for the season. Mrs. Bullock also explains how she collected the recipes and adapted them. The first plate shows the kitchen of the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg.

This is the second edition, copyrighted in September 1939 and printed by August Dietz and his Son. It is bound in tan leather with raised bands and a red label on the spine, though whether that is the publisher’s binding or a later one has not been determined. The head of the spine is chipped and split, and the endpapers have browned where the leather turns in.