Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

recipes ca. 1680-ca. 1725

Description

This collection of approximately 180 written pages contains mostly culinary recipes on the first 75 pages, and mostly medical recipes to the end, except for handful of culinary recipes on the final eight pages. The culinary recipes at the front of the book appear to be in a predominant hand and one or two minor hands. The remainder of the book is in a number of different hands, including likely the predominant hand of the front section, which appears to have written leaves [73v]-[81v]. On leaves [69v]-[72r] there is a copy of an 1802 court proceeding at the Old Bailey against two men, Levy Cohen and Ephraim Jacobs, charged with forging notes from the Bank of England. A recipe dated 1690 immediately follows this entry, and the remainder of the book was likely compiled no later than 1725. (The dates 1709 and 1722 occur earlier in the manuscript.) 

The recipe dated 1690, mentioned above, seems to be written in the predominant hand of the culinary recipes at the front of the book, which suggests that this entire section dates from around the turn of the eighteenth century. However, this section includes several recipes more characteristic of the middle or early years of the seventeenth century, such as "Almond Leach" (leaf 5r) and "Pottage or Broth for the Table" (17r). In this connection a pair of recipes on leaf 15r are of particular interest: "To make Jumballs My mother Anges receipt" and "My Lady Chanworths receipt for Jumballs." The former is the old-style Jumbles adapted from the Italian collation, for banqueting, during the Elizabethan era. They are firm, sugary cakes, similar in composition to springerle, worked up in fanciful knots. These old-style jumbles were largely replaced during the second quarter of the seventeenth century by jumbles like Lady Chanworth's: tender, buttery cakes, typically formed as simple rings. The recipe "To make a rare Cake" (leaf 20r) is a rare find, not so much for the cake, which seems typical of the period, at least to a modern reader, but for its clear specification of the wheat flour peck by an understood weight of 14 pounds. The first line reads: "halfe a peck of flower being 7 pound."