Place of Origin

England ➔ London

Date of Composition

ca. 1770s-ca. 1790s

Description

Sir John Baptiste Silvester (1714-1789) was born in the Netherlands to French Huguenot refugee parents. He received his M.D. degree from Leyden University in 1738 and then moved to England, where he worked as a physician at the French Hospital in London, which was founded in 1718 to serve poor French Protestant immigrants and their descendants. The hospital is still in operation today, though it is no longer located in London.

The recipe book contains 172 pages of randomly mixed culinary and medical recipes, slightly more of the former than the latter, and includes separate indexes for each in the back of the volume. The library record states that the library has dated the book circa 1777 because that date is written in one of the recipes in the collection. However, the date in the recipe at issue, which appears on page 114, is actually 1797: “The way our elder wine was made September 1797.” The date “1797” is pristine, but it is written in markedly larger script than the rest of the recipe title, suggesting that it might have been added by a later user of the book. The reason this matters is that the recipe itself is written in the predominant hand of the book, which was presumably that of John Baptiste Silvester. However, Silvester could not have written the date “1797” because he died in 1789. There is evidence of hands other than the predominant hand around page 100 and in many places from pages 124 to 172.

Whether the book was compiled in the 1770s or the 1790s, the culinary recipes are firmly of the second half of the eighteenth century. For the most part, they comprise the great favorites of the era: green peas soup, alamode beef, chicken curry, fricandeau of veal, Westphalia ham, “gravy,” fish ketchup, walnut ketchup, orange jelly, calf’s foot jelly, custard, potato pudding, carrot pudding, lemon pudding, plumb pudding, “cake” (pound cake), trifle, and various fruit preserves and sweet wines. The recipe titled “Diet Bread” (page 33), a term of many meanings in early modern cookbooks, outlines a typical eighteenth-century English sponge cake. “Ginger or hunting cakes,” page 90, are thin cookies sweetened only with sugar, not molasses, and "wet with" cream. There are two unusual 'foreign recipes': “Lombo de Porco” (pork loin), page 110, and “To make a Turkish dish called Dalma,” page 171, which calls for rolling a forcemeat in blanched cabbage leaves. Interestingly, there seem to be no recipes of French (as opposed to naturalized Anglo-French) or Dutch provenance in the book, despite Silvester’s background.

The recipe book is collected with a second volume, apparently also titled “receipts,” that provides family information on Silvester. It might shed some light on the authorship of the recipes in the first volume.