Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1725

Description

This cookbook contains "three scoar and fourteen recpts" (by the author's count, leaf 28v) written on the rectos of 28 numbered leaves, as well as an index on the inside back cover. All are in the hand of Valert Payne, which is unusually changeable (see leaf 10r).

The recipes through leaf 13r focus on drinks and sweets, including fruit wines, mead, dessert creams, small dessert cakes and biskets, "fine Cours Gingerbread," a large yeast-raised cake with caraway comfits, and fruit preserves. The remainder of the book concerns the two principal courses of dinner: fish dishes (of which there are many), meat and poultry dishes, pickles and souses (goose, turkey, greens, pumpkin or melon "mangoes," eggs for "sallet," and cockles), hung beef and potted foods (including an entire pig), puddings, oyster loaves, and "pitty patties" (small covered tartlets with sausage meat). The author has added comments at the end of several recipes. The extraordinarily detailed, two-page recipe "To stew a carp of which a male is best and of a foot long" (leaf 15r) is touted "The finest Way in y^e World. Surely." The neat's foot pudding (leaf 21r) is judged "a good pudding indeed" and the stewed pigeons (leaf 28r) "very good."

Many of the recipes look back to the seventeenth century, two quite far back. "A Glistering Cream," (sweetened spiced butterfat served directly from the churn, with the buttermilk, leaf 3r) is Elizabethan. "To Make Italian Crust" (finger-shaped dessert biscuits with ginger) is copied almost verbatim from John Murrell's A Delightful Daily Exercise for Ladies and Gentlewomen, published in 1617. Also quite old-fashioned by the eighteenth century are the recipes for coarse gingerbread (made from pounded date stones and printed in molds), the elaborate stewed carp (which is prepared with the blood), and the rich cake with caraway comfits on leaf 7r (which closely parallels a recipe in the so-called "Martha Washington Cookbook," which is circa 1650-1675). An unusual recipe for "almond chestnutts," or spiced almond cookies made in the shape of chestnuts, is written on leaf 11r. At the end of the recipe for "Lemon Cheesecakes" (leaf 20r) the author has written "pudding the same," meaning that the same filling will serve both for individual dessert tartlets (that is, cheesecakes) and for a single large lemon pudding served in the first course of dinner.

The cookbook belonged at one time to C. L. Prince, fl. 1866. He wrote (and signed) a recipe for orange wine on leaf 27v.