Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England ➔ Bedfordshire
England ➔ Yorkshire
England ➔ Lancashire

Date of Composition

mostly ca. 1685-1725

Description

Inscribed "Anna Marie Wentworth Her Book 1725," this book contains an 8-page index at the front, followed by approximately 131 pages of recipes written on 81 numbered leaves. The book is in several hands and seems to have been compiled by several people who were related to one another: Rose Kendall (active 1682) and Ann (Kendall) Cater (b. 1651 or 1652), both of Kempstone, Bedfordshire; Elizabeth Clarke; and Anna Maria Wentworth (b. 1708) of Wolley, Yorkshire, who later married Peter Bold of Bold Hall, Lancashire, 1725/26. The recipes are mostly culinary, with some cures and a fair number of medicinal waters mixed in. Some of the recipes are attributed.

The culinary recipes focus on sweets. More than half of the book is given over to preserved fruits, fruit confections, and fruit jellies, jams, and marmalades. Most of the latter are put up in glasses or pots, to spread on bread, not printed in molds to consume as confections, which dates the recipes to after 1700. There are also some twenty recipes for dessert creams, an equal number of recipes for sweet fruit, flower, and herb wines, and some recipes for little dessert cakes and biscuits. Of the five recipes for gingerbread on leaves 61-64 three are seventeenth century types, one is a rare transitional gingerbread with honey (leaf 64r), and one is an eighteenth century household treacle gingerbread enriched with butter (leaf 61v). A few meat dishes, vegetable dishes, and pickles, as well as about a half dozen puddings are intermixed with the sweets throughout.