This 252-page manuscript is available in the library in photocopy. It appears to comprise an early eighteenth-century cookbook, possibly American but more likely English, to which American (specifically Virginian) additions were made in the nineteenth century. The later American additions include at least a few cooking recipes (for example, “cold slaw” and “cup cake”), but most of the American material is other. It consists of accounts 1830-1864 kept by Frances Ann (Leiper) Crouch (b. 1798) of Richmond, Va.; memoranda concerning Benjamin T. Williamson; an 1834 list of furniture at “Woodview” in Henrico County, Va.; drawings by John Twohig Temple and Benjamin T. Williamson; and autographs of John Twohig Temple and Andrewetta Hamilton Leiper Williamson. Several of these individuals appear to have been related, suggesting that the book was kept by several generations of a single Virginia family.
Recipes in the front of the book include: to collar a pigg, yeast cakes, mince pyes, brawn of hogs head, fricassee of mushrooms, giblet-pye, dowlet pye, egg pye, to stew pigeons, stove veal, pease soup (for lent or any fasting day), pot Cheshire cheese, caveech fish, pickle green peppers, pickle codlins like mangoe, pickle elder buds, to order a runnit [rennet] bag for a junket, whipt sillibub extraordinary, eggs minc’d pyes, fry’d cream, almond cream, to jelly, flummery, harts-horn flummery, orange posset, barley gruel, panada for a sick or weak stomach, chesecake meat [filling], custard, maids dish, jumballs, mackaroons, and brown pottage royall.
There are also recipes for various puddings (carrot, plum, hargrove, rice, marron, and almond), as well as instructions for preserving various fruits and for making fruit wines (currant, cherry, gooseberry, raspberry), jellies, marmalade, orange water, and candied oranges.
Additional recipes include ox tail soup, cold slaw, bread muffins, oyster fritters, chicken broth, essence of beef, pea soup, cup cake, pickling cucumbers, blanc mange, cheese cake, rusk, plane wiggs, Naples biskitts, Shrewsberry [Shrewsbury] cake, seed cake, portroyal cake, and Jews bread. The book is unusually rich in recipes for savory pies, including chicken, lamb, minced, egg, lumber, artichoke, mutton, kid, hare, hen, pidgeon, calves head, neats tongue, venison, lambstone or sweetbread, battalia, veal, turkey, and fish (carp, trout, eele, oyster).
The book also contains some medical recipes, including Dr. Skeleton’s receipt for a vomiting, dyspepsia, water against the plague, and artificial wine to keep the body soluble.
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