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MARTHA BRADLEY
fl.c 1736- 1756, writer on cookery and household management.

BIOGRAPHY
We know very little of the life of Martha Bradley, and most, maybe all, of what we do know is contained in her book, The British Housewife (1756)|. The frontispiece advertises that she is ′late of Bath′, is, or has been, a married woman, and she has ′upwards of Thirty Years Experience′. This latter assertion would imply that she was, say 50 in 1756. The book was ′deduc’d from Practice′ but we do not know at what level – she may have been a successful cook-housekeeper, a higher servant, or she might have been a middle-class woman who had, during a long marriage supervised her cook and other servants. Gilly Lehmann, in her introduction to a facsimile edition of The British Housewife, concludes, from close examination of the book, that Martha Bradley was a professional cook used to presiding over a large kitchen staff. She also speculates that Martha may have been dead when the book was published- a footnote comments that ′Mrs Bradley’s papers′ were now in the hands of her publishers- would she have relinquished these during her lifetime? Alternatively, she may have died in 1784. In that year a will was proved of Martha Bradley, widow, of Devises, a town 21 miles from Bath. This woman, living comfortably with one servant from short-term annuities yielding £60 a year, may have been our author in retirement.

Martha Bradley's reputation rests on her sole printed work., The British Housewife, which was published in 1756. Early in that year the work was published in weekly parts at 3d. an issue. Introducing didactic books as part-works was not uncommon at the time – Sarah Jackson’s The Director: Or Young Woman’s Best Companion had been serialised in 1754. The books of William Ellis, a contemporary agricultural writer, appeared in parts, as did an edition of Philip Miller’s Gardeners’ Dictionary. Bradley’s work was a substantial tome in two volumes of 742 and 469 pages respectively. With no preface, the book launches straight into a series of month by month instructions. These cover provisioning, cookery, food presentation and bills of fare, preserving, brewing and alcoholic drinks in general, confectionery, gardening, family health, and farm animal management. This was wide-ranging in comparison with most contemporary cookery books but Bradley was maybe trying to compete with the family encyclopaedias of the time, books such as  Salmon’s Family Dictionary, which, on title page advertised advice on – Cookery, Pastry, Confects, Potable Liquers, Perfuming, Husbandry, And Preparations Galenick And Chymick, or the Dictionarium Domesticum, which covered a similar range but included beekeeping. The successful Complete Family-Piece, was maybe a model for Mrs. Bradley. In three parts it covered cookery of all types, preserving, surgery and physic, hunting, shooting, and fishing, a detailed gardeners’ calendar, and all aspects of farming and estate management. These works were themselves published versions, for the emerging middle-classes of the family recipe books handed down from generation to generation in many gentry families.