The Lady's Assistant for Regulating and Supplying the Table (Southover Press Historic Cookery and Housekeeping)

From the Introduction by Ivan Day: 'Mrs Mason's lucidly composed English makes her delightful recipes as easy to follow today as they were in the eighteenth century, enabling the adventurous modern cook to re-create the extraordinary food of the Age of George III without a great deal of difficulty. Her fascinating bills of fare are invaluable to historians of food and dining for the insight they afford into the mores of Georgian table service.' The Lady's Assistant by Charlotte Mason is an important but much neglected eighteenth century cookery book. Unusually, the table settings show layouts for more ordinary households as well as affluent ones, and the recipes follow this pattern. In an introduction, the food historian Ivan Day discusses Charlotte Mason's innovative dishes in this most interesting work. In the first edition of 1773, the book's author was described as 'a professed housekeeper, who had upwards of thirty years experience of families of the first fashion.' She was eventually identified in the second edition of 1775 as a Mrs Charlotte Mason. Unfortunately, the families who employed this lady were not named and there are no other useful clues in the book concerning the details of her career, nor in any of the subsequent editions. Mrs Mason remains a mysterious and elusive figure.