Henriette Davidis

Who was Henriette Davidis?

Henriette Davidis is the most famous classic cookbook author in Germany, and the German cuisine culture is decisively marked by her contributions. Additionally, in her work Die Hausfrau she also discussed other areas of household management, from bookkeeping to animal husbandry. Thus she is considered the German equivalent to Mrs Beeton.

Davidis was born in Westfalen, Wengern on the Ruhr river, today a part of the city of Wetter, as the tenth of thirteen children to the minister Ernst Heinrich Davidis and his Dutch wife Katharina Litthauer.

The first edition of her classic cookbook Praktisches Kochbuch für die gewöhnliche und feinere Küche was published in 1844 and there were at least seventy-six editions published by 1963.

For a nineteenth-century woman, she had an unusual life story. Not all of her activities can be traced, and her 1874 written autobiography was unpublished and is now lost.

Today there is a Henriette-David Museum in Wetter-Wengern. The German Cookbook Museum in Dortmund dedicates much of their exhibits to the work of Henriette Davidis, who lived in Dortmund from 1856 to 1876.