English

Noun

cookery ‎(countable and uncountable, plural cookeries)

1. The art and practice of preparing food for consumption, especially by the application of heat; cooking.

   Henry was not very good at cookery and most of his meals ended up burned.

   • 1475, Kenelm Digby, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Kt. Opened, subtitle:

     together with excellent directions for cookery, as also for preserving, conserving, candying, &c.

2. (obsolete) A delicacy; a dainty.
   • 1839, John Espy Lovell, "Fish out of water", Rhetorical Dialogues, page 335:

     I've got a bit of cookery that will astonish him — my marinated pheasants' poults a la braise imperiale.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of R. North to this entry?)

3. (obsolete) Cooking tools or apparatus.
   • 1800, Charlotte Yonge, The Little Duke, page 3:

     She directed the servants, inspected both the cookery and arrangements of the table, held council with an old steward...

   • 1934, Gray Owl, Pilgrims of the Wild, page 101:

     ...and would not be just dead weight, as on the trail it could conveniently be filled with the cookery and other odds and ends...

4. (figuratively) Making something appear better than it is; altering or falsifying records; 'window dressing'.
   • 1871 [380 BCE], Plato, Gorgias, tr. Benjamin Jowett:

     Cookery, then, I maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine...

   • 1997, Leon Mayhew, The New Public, page 22–3:

     Yet ever since Plato claimed that rhetoric is only a knack of making the worse appear the better cause – a form of "cookery" – rhetorical theories of social order have been under attack...

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