Description
This book is inscribed on the verso of the front flyleaf: Reciepts Confectionary &c. Collected by Dorothea Dashwood Anno Dom 1718. The book consists of an index with entries through page 84 on four unnumbered pages, followed by recipes on pages numbered 1 through 84, followed by 14 unnumbered pages of recipes written on the rectos of the leaves. The index entries through page 73 and the first 73 pages of recipes appear to be written in the hand of the inscriber. The index entries for pages 74 to 84 and all recipes from page 75 onward, including the recipes on unnumbered leaves, are in several unknown hands. Page 81 contains the poem
"Receipt to Make Soup, for the Use of Dean Swift," published by Alexander Pope in 1726. Thus it seems reasonable to date the book 1718 to circa 1730. (The recipes corroborate this dating.)
The recipes in the inscriber's hand mostly focus on preserves, dessert creams and custards, biskets, and cakes, although there are also a few recipes for meat dishes, including beef a la mode, sausages, and dried tongue. The most noteworthy recipe in the inscriber's hand is "To make a Rich Cake," on page 5. The recipe outlines a yeast-raised fruited cake weighing some 55 pounds going into the oven. The recipe states that "one hour & half will bake it if ye oven be hot," which would seem implausible, except that the recipe then goes on state, "2 yds & 1 Nail make a hoop of a Good Size for this Cake." If this cake was really six feet across, as this instruction seems to say, it might be thin enough to indeed bake in just an hour and a half. But what sort of oven could accommodate a 6-foot-wide cake? The inscriber's use of the phrase "boiled custard" (page 22) is early (though not unprecedented), as are her recipes for choux paste beignets ("Dry Fritters," page 65) and "Lemon or orange cheesecakes" (page 70). The recipe "Cream Pancakes call'd a Quire of Paper" (page 70) echoes a recipe title used by Virginia cookbook author Mary Randolph in 1824. The recipe indicates a yield of 20 pancakes, providing a rough sense of the diameter of the pancakes.
The recipes in hands other than the inscriber's are somewhat less focused on preserves and sweet dishes. Particularly interesting are three consecutive recipes for tea, chocolate, and coffee creams on page 84, all of which are essentially lightly bound custards prepared in a dish with a paste border.
The book includes a handful of household and medical recipes, including "To make Cashue very good for a Cough" (page 59). "Cachou" later came to mean a breath mint, as in James Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
