Bradley presumably was in a position to judge: a self-taught naturalist, he was an avid gardener and the first professor of botany at the University of Cambridge. Cambridge didn’t pay him, so he supported himself by writing books, among them several treatises on garden plants and The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director, a helpful compendium that included the first English recipes for pineapple.

The problem with Bradley’s “great Dainties”—then and now—is the planting instructions, which inevitably, in every century, begin “Dig a trench.” “Dig a trench as wide as you intend your Beds to be, and two feet deep,” writes Joseph Prenis of Williamsburg, Virginia, in his 18th-century directions for setting out asparagus. Martha Washington’s Book of CookeryMartha