Edward Kidder (1665?-1739), a renowned pastry chef in eighteenth-century London, was also a very successful teacher of the culinary arts. Kidder's scholars were able to record his recipes in small leatherbound notebooks—most likely in the 1720s and 1730s—that through careful ownership have survived the passage of time. This facsimile edition reproduces one such notebook, written in a flowing and confident hand, as well as a typeset transcription of the manuscript, a historical and culinary introduction, updated recipes for today's chefs, and a glossary which defines Kidder's once-familiar terms.

The entrepreneurial Kidder probably dictated this book with his students in mind; surely they would already know how to prepare meats from veal and venison for baking and how hot to make the fire. The notebook contains many recipes for meat "pyes" and pasties with meat, plus recipes for puddings and cakes and meat, poultry, and fish main dishes: First Dishes, Bottome Dishes, Side Dishes, For Ye Midle, Second Course, and Plates. Many recipes have surprising starting points, such as Pidgeon Peares:

Bone your pidgeons all but one leg & put that thro' ye side out at ye vent cut off ye toes & fill them with forced meat made of ye hart & liver & cover them with a tender forced meat being washd over with ye batter of egges & shape them like peares then wash them over & roul them in scalded chopt spinnage…

and then a Regalia of Cowcumbers, a Swan Pye, and a Calves head hasht. These recipes predate modern squeamishness about cooking with organ meats and consuming animal fat and display a sense of familiarity with and awareness of flesh that are no longer second nature to cooks. From the perspective of the twentieth century the language seems oddly direct, "take ye flesh of a foul beef suet & marrow ye same quantity," and personalized, as in "toss up a handfull of chopt capers."