The book contains 75 recipes written on the rectos of 41 leaves, all in a single hand. A nineteenth-century inscription at the front indicates that the book originally belonged to Ann Malet, wife of Alexander Malet, the rector of Combe Florey, Somerset, and was subsequently handed down in the Malet family until it came into the possession of T. H. W. Malet (born 1859), who wrote the inscription. The library has dated the manuscript as circa 1661-1685 on the basis of a watermark known to have been in use in 1661. However, some of the recipes suggest that it was written in the early eighteenth century (see below). If this is the case, Ann Malet, born Ann St. Lo in 1704, may have been the book’s author.
The manuscript can be aptly described as an early eighteenth century dessert book. It is primarily given over to recipes for fruit preserving (leaves 3r through 35r) and biskets and cakes (leaves 36r through 42r), the primary constituents of the usual early eighteenth century dessert table. A few recipes for pickles, which fit within the preserving theme, are tacked on at the end (leaves 43r and 44r). The preserving recipes comprise candied fruits, fruits preserved in syrups, fruit pastes and marmalades, fruit jellies, and clear cakes. Included are instructions for ‘recovering’ old wet sweetmeats that have lost their red color and sweetness and for preserving garlic in sugar syrup. (Presumably, the latter was a remedy, perhaps for colds, not a dessert article, although there are otherwise no medical recipes in the book.) The biskets are divided between those that are essentially dropped sponge cakes and those that are permutations on meringue, such as almond puffs (38r), quince biskets (39r), lemon biskets (40r), and gooseberry biskets (42r). The cakes include macaroons and Shrewsbury cakes (both 37r), little seed cakes (38r), and Almond Cleare Cakes (39r), an uncommon recipe whose name suggests that the cakes were meant to be candied on the outside and translucent (or “clear”) within, as for the usual clear cakes, which were made with fruit.
Many of the recipes for biskets and cakes likely date from the first quarter of the eighteenth century or later. The recipes for almond biskets (36r) and “Saovy Bisketts” (Savoy, 40r), which are both sponge biskets, call for beating the eggs and sugar to a stiff froth and then gently stirring in flour, a French technique not seen in seventeenth-century English bisket recipes. Fruit biskets, likewise, were eighteenth-century developments. Finally, the recipe “To Make All Maner of Wafears” (page 41r) suggests an eighteenth century date in two respects. First, these “wafers” are baked in an oven, not in an iron, as wafers were always understood to be prior to 1700. Second, these wafers are tinted various colors by the addition of lemon peel, chocolate, and food dyes, and both the fashion for colored wafers and the idea of coloring foods with chocolate emerged in the eighteenth century.
