(American) [Lee, Mrs. N. K. M.] A Boston Housekeeper. The Cook's Own Book, and Housekeeper's Register

Full title: A Boston Housekeeper.  The Cook's Own Book, and Housekeeper's Register: comprehending all valuable recipes for cooking meat, fish, and fowl...and a complete system of confectionery. To which is added, Miss Leslie's Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats. xxxv, [1], 300; 16 pp. Period calf, leather spine label. Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1835.

First published in 1832, this was "the first alphabetically arranged culinary encyclopaedia to appear in the United States" (Oxford Companion to Food, 17), and one of the most popular American cookbooks of the 19th century. The Cook's Own Book contains a compendium of of recipes compiled from diverse British and American sources as well as many of the Boston housekeeper's own recipes. The book became so popular it was published in at least a dozen different printings between 1832 and 1865. The book contains recipes for cooking meat, fish, fowl, soups, gravies, and pastries which were published or invented between 1802 and 1832; particularly the very best of those in the Cook's Oracle, Cook's Dictionary, and other systems of domestic economy. The addition of Miss Leslie's confectionery book is a delight. First published in 1828,  Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, by A Lady of Philadelphia, was one of only a handful of American cookbooks in print—most American women still cooked out of British cookbooks—and it was perhaps Leslie’s promise, in her preface, that her recipes were “in every sense of the word, American” that impelled her “little book” to enormous popularity, appearing in innumerable editions practically to the end of the nineteenth century. Rubbing to leather, faint ring to front cover, else very good, with original owner's signature (Elizabeth Drury) several times to endpapers, as if practicing a new surname.