Manuscript Location

University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Kislak Center for Special Collections - Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

1705

Description

This book is inscribed near the front "D[oro] Petre Her Book [1705]." The "oro" following the "D" (perhaps Dorothy or Dorothea) and the date, 1705, were added in a different hand from the rest of the inscription.The book contains approximately sixty-five pages of culinary material written from the front and 150 pages of medical material written from the back and upside down in relation to the front.

The culinary section of the book begins with a nearly complete page index, missing only the final six or seven recipes. Approximately 67 recipes follow the index. The book was clearly a collaborative project among five or more individuals. The same hands recur several times. For example, the writer who provides a selection of dessert creams on leaves 6v-7r returns with recipes for meat pies, beef and pork collars, venison sauce, and apricot wine on leaves 10r-11r. Likewise, the writer who writes recipes for dessert creams on leaves 5v-6r reappears with recipes for dried pears and apples, French bread, an olio, boiled meat and a sauce for it, royal paste, and steak and fowl pies on leaves 11v and 12r. These same writers team up on leaves 14r-15r to write recipes for fruit and flower wines, mead, and cherry brandy. There are other instances of two or more writers collaborating to write multiple recipes for a single type of dish or preparation. In the main, however, the recipes seem to be random. Several dishes are outlined two or three times in different parts of the book.

The recipes focus on the standard nice dishes of the day: Scotch collops, fricassees, beef a la mode, meat and fish pies, potted meats, salted tongue, powdered beef, soused eels, sausages, puddings (of carrots, oatmeal, almonds, and pith), fritters, tansy, white pot, dessert creams, syllabub, posset, French bread, and wigs. There are a few recipes of special interest. The book contains yet another far-flung spelling of the then relatively new word "marinate": "To mansinate fish" (14r). The "Pettipatees" outlined on leaf 23r appear to be an early instance of the highly popular later dish called "patties," that is, a sauced food served in small individual pastry cases. The recipe titled "Plum Biskets" (leaf 26v) actually makes "plum cakes." The title may be an early example of the word "biscuit" being used in the modern English sense, as a term for any little cake (that is, cookie in American terms).