Manuscript Location

University of Iowa Main Library, Special Collections, Szathmary Culinary Archive

Place of Origin

England
United States

Date of Composition

recipes ca. 1650-1670

Description

This manuscript is in three distinct parts: 32 pages of recipes; approximately 17 pages of rambling religious reflections (which include a gap of 87 blank pages in the notebook); and 3 pages of accounts. The title of the manuscript assigned by the library is based on the accounts, which include dates in the 1750s and 1760s and list purchases of Indian meal (cornmeal) and corn, both American products. However, the recipe section is of the seventeenth century and was likely compiled in England.

The approximate date of the recipe section is determinable both by the beautiful hand, which is of the seventeenth century, and by the many recipes in the book that were little made after 1700. These include marchpane (marzipan) cakes, fruit pastes, and fruit jellies "printed" with ceramic or carved wooden molds; quiddany and quiddrink (a rare form), which are early terms for fruit jelly; buttered cheese loaves; jumbles (a sort of butter cookie) shaped as elaborate "knots" (rather than the later characteristic circlets); paste of Genoa (quince cheese with peaches); bisketello (a meringue-like sugar paste confection); preserved-orange pie; and "sodden sallet" (boiled greens with currants, butter, sugar, and verjuice, topped with hard-cooked eggs). Most of the recipes in the book were characteristically served at so-called banquets, elegant meals of sweets enjoyed by the privileged classes of Tudor and Stuart England. While various banqueting sweets did come to 17th-century North America, banqueting on the scale and sophistication implied by this book did not. Also strongly suggesting an English origin are three attributions of recipes written on the top left corner of pages 1, 3, and 4: they are to Sir Joh: Heydon, La. [Lady] Barret, and Lady Penruddock respectively.

In addition to the recipes cited above, the book includes the following: To make Past of Oranges; Observations in drying; To make a Whitepott; To preserrve Quinces white; To doe Quinces redd; To make Past; To make past of Apples; To make Marmalad of Orenges; To make Roseberry Cakes; To make Raspberry Cakes; To make Bisket Cakes; To make Marmalad of Abricots; To make Maccarones; the best kind of perfuming Cakes to Burne; The Ordinary Sort of perfuming Cakes; To make Isinglas [blancmange set with isinglass]; To make Puff Past, very double & good; To make Quince Cakes; To make Marmalad of Abricots; Marmalade of Abricots; and To preserve Cherries in Gelly.