This collection of recipes gives an insight into what was served at court at the end of the Stuart period. Its author, Patrick Lamb, began his culinary career in the Royal kitchens at just 12 years old as a humble ‘Child of the Pastry’, and went on to become Master Cook to six monarchs—a responsibility that required him to prepare not only daily meals but also feasts for grand occasions. Published two years after Lamb’s death in 1708, Royal Cookery contains 87 of his recipes from soups, terrines, and pies to jellies and cakes, as well as a calendar of suggested menus ‘for Every Season in the Year’. It also includes nearly forty copper engravings representing Lamb’s arrangements for extravagant feasts, many of which are not merely exemplary but were taken from real events, such as the ‘Lady Arrans Daughters Wedding Supper, June 6 1699’. These feasts were the most extravagant part of Lamb's work: the coronation feast of William III and Mary II in 1689, for instance, cost £4931, equivalent to almost £500,000 today. Many of the recipes are still recognisable to a modern cook (pea soup, eggs Florentine and rice pudding), whereas others (calf's brain pâté and pigeons à la tartare), are a little less familiar.

Lamb was famous in his own day for being an English cook in a field dominated by the French, and may well be considered the first ‘celebrity chef’ of the British Isles. The anonymous editor of Royal Cookery described Lamb as ‘so well known and establish’d in all the Courts of Christendom that I need observe no more of him, than that he liv’d and dy’d a very great Rarity’. Royal Cookery itself was the first book of its kind to be published in England; immediately and enormously popular, it went through several editions from its first printing, reappearing in 1716, 1726, and 1731. It may be possible however, as was believed by some contemporaries, that Lamb's name was simply added to the text as a marketing ploy to help increase sales and that the recipes were not his own.