Description
This tiny book (13 cm.) is in two parts, each of which appears originally to have been composed on separate sheaves, which were subsequently bound together. The first part consists of an 8-page index (incomplete), followed by 86 pages of recipes (the first 84 of which are paginated), followed by one page containing a note on “salves." Except for the “salves,” all of this material is culinary and in a single small but mostly legible hand. The second part consists of 9 pages of medical recipes (which are paginated 1-6 and 15-17, with no indication of cut-out pages in between), followed by 15 pages of culinary recipes. The medical recipes are in the same hand as the first part of the manuscript; the culinary recipes are in another hand.
The book contains over 200 culinary receipts, mostly for conceits served at the elegant sweets meals called banquets. The bulk of these receipts concern fruit preserving, fresh cheeses, and dessert creams. Curiously, the book contains few recipes for the little cakes, sweet biscuits, and sweet wines and waters common at banquets, although recipes for such are plentiful in most other cookbooks focusing on banqueting stuff. Three recipes on page 59 of the first part are credited to "my ant." The recipes are generally standard for the time, with the notable exception of the recipe titled "furmaty cream," which bears little resemblance to the ancient wheat berry porridge called furmity (sometimes spelled furmaty) but is instead very thick cream hung for two days in a linen bag until it becomes nearly solid.
