Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

1689-1732

Description

Written in a 110-page notebook, this manuscript contains seventeenth-century household accounts on pages 1 through 12, recipes on pages 13 to 47, and eighteenth-century household accounts on pages 90 through 108. The remainder of the notebook is blank. The recipe section may be in several similar hands, or it may be in a single hand writing with different squibs and in different moods. The hand or hands, the phrasing, and the orthography of this section are more of the seventeenth than the eighteenth century, as are several of the recipes, especially shoulder of mutton cooked in its blood and white puddings of deer offal stuffed into sausage casings. Other recipes include quaking pudding, plain cake, cowslip wine, various fruit wines, various fruit preserves, venison pasty, potted pigeon, potted rabbit or hare, "excellent pease soup," and collar beef (beef flank corned, rolled, boiled, and kept in its liquor). A small selection of medical recipes appears following the culinary recipes, suggesting that the writer or writers of the recipe section of the manuscript considered it a complete book as written.