Cookery & Crime in the 18th Century

Hannah Glasse's, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. (London, 1777)  
Click here to access the Hathitrust/Google digital surrogate.
Note the absence of the frontispiece in this copy.

What strikes me is the similarity in the "self-advertising" function of the transaction depicted in this detail (right) from a Newgate Calendar frontispiece published at roughly the same time. Both images are domestic and instructional, and both enact a kind of demonstration of the use-value of reading the book, as if to say, "Here's proof! It works." Once again we see how books operate as tools for class aspiration, social control, and sundry other things.