This English book of approximately 215 written pages is inscribed “Miss Tyndale Her Book 1806” on the inside front cover. The book appears to be mostly in one hand, albeit in very different moods, which is presumably the hand of the inscriber, although the block uppercase characters of the inscription bear no resemblance to the cursive script of the text. Digital images 2 through 127 are numbered 2 through 219 on the pages; there are many gaps in the page numbering, including pages 83 through 162, which appear to have been torn out. Digital images 128 through the end (image 217) are unnumbered on the pages.
The book is organized in three principal parts. Numbered pages 2 through 82 are given over to recipes for sweets: fruit preserves of all sorts, dessert creams, cakes, puddings, and sweet wines. Numbered pages 163 through 260 (the final numbered page) show mostly medical and household recipes. The unnumbered pages provide recipes for meat, fowl, fish, and other dishes of the principal courses of the meal.
The sweets section outlines a number of dishes two or three times, sometimes in the same recipe and sometimes in different ones. A particularly interesting repetition is the “Charlotte Pudding” (with apples) that appears on page 53 and again on page 82. The first instance is a rough paraphrase of Maria Rundell’s 1807 recipe for the same in A New System of Domestic Cookery, the second a nearly verbatim copying of Rundell’s recipe. Rundell’s Charlotte is the first known printed recipe for this dish, although the dish is referenced in an American poem published about ten years earlier. The inclusion of this recipe in the book suggests that the date of the inscription represents the start of Miss Tyndale’s project, not its conclusion. An unusual recipe in this section is “all four Pudding” (or so the name appears), on page 30. This is a very rich boiled plum pudding that is encased in a thick cake icing.
The final section of the book includes many of the favorite English dishes of the early nineteenth century, including Dutch Beef, Pease Soup, White Soup, Gravy Soup, Harrico Mutton, Pillow (pilaf), Hung Beef, Beef a la Mode, Veal Olives, Hare Pie, and various fricassees and potted and pickled foods. An unusual recipe in this section is Lomba di Porco (digital image 128), which is pork loin marinated in Port wine and aromatics for nine days, cooked until very tender, and served with a sauce made from the marinating liquid. The modern Italian dish, lombata di maiale, is made very differently.
