Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent

Portrait of Elizabeth Grey by Paul Van Somer, ca. 1619

Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent (née Lady Elizabeth Talbot) (1582 – 7 December 1651) was the wife of Henry Grey, 8th Earl of Kent.

She was a daughter of Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury and Mary Cavendish.

She married Grey on 16 November 1601, at St Martin's-in-the-Fields. They had no children, and the Earl died in 1639.^[1] Afterwards she is thought to have married the writer, John Selden, who had worked for the Earl.

After her death, her collection of medical recipes was published as A Choice Manual, or Rare Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery Collected and Practised by the Right Honourable the Countess of Kent, late deceased. It was an interest she shared with her younger sister, Alethea Howard, Countess of Arundel.

A book published in 1653 by W. J. Gent A True Gentlewomans Delight is considered to be her personal recipe collection, although there is speculation that the cookbook was written by the countess's chef Robert May, or by the publisher himself.^[2]

Notes and references

1. Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 76th ed. p. 823, (London and New York, 1914).
2. Willan, Anne & Mark Cherniavsky, Mark (2012). The Cookbook Library: Four Centuries of the Cooks, Writers, and Recipes That Made the Modern Cookbook. University of California Press. p. 133. ISBN 9780520244009.

Bibliography

•  "Grey, Elizabeth". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
• Spiller, Elizabeth. (2008). Seventeenth-century English recipe books: cooking, physic and chirurgery in the works of Elizabeth Talbot Grey and Aletheia Talbot Howard. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-7546-51963.