cookery

From Middle English cokerie, kokery, equivalent to cook +‎ -ery.

• IPA^(key): /ˈkʊkəɹi/

• Audio (Southern England):

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cookery (countable and uncountable, plural cookeries)

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

   Synonym: 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”, in Rhetorical Dialogues, page 335:

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

3. (archaic) 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. (archaic) A place where cooking is done.
   • 1836 March – 1837 October, Charles Dickens, “(please specify the chapter name)”, in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, London: Chapman and Hall, , published 1837, →OCLC:

     Mr. Weller produced upon the little dining-table, a roast leg of mutton and an enormous meat-pie, with sundry dishes of vegetables, and pots of porter, which stood upon the chairs or the sofa bedstead, or where they could, everybody felt disposed to do justice to the meal, notwithstanding that the meat had been purchased, and dressed, and the pie made, and baked, at the prison cookery hard by.

• (art of preparing food): See culinary art

• cookery book

cookery (plural cookeries)

1. Obsolete form of kukri.