This recipe book is inscribed "[Cous?] Mascies Booke 1691 Melbury Osmond" at the front. It contains 127 numbered pages, followed by 11 unnumbered pages, then by many blank pages, and finally by an index in the back. There are gaps in the numbered pages, including four consecutive pages numbered 70, 80, 90, and 100. The index appears to contain entries for all or most of the numbered pages but omits some recipes. A poem has been copied near the end of the run of blank pages. Although the title is not written on the page, it is “Verses Wrote on Her Death-Bed at Bath, to Her Husband, in London.” This poem has long been attributed to Mary Molesworth Monck (ca. 1677-1716), but its authorship is now contested. Since the poem may be written in one of the hands of the recipe book, its authorship, if determinable, could shed further light on the date of the book.
This recipe book is in a number of hands, some of which recur repeatedly, suggesting that the book may have been compiled by a circle of friends, who passed it among themselves. Further supporting this theory, recipes attributed to Colonel Strangeway, Mrs. Strangeway, and Lady Strangeway are written in at least three different hands occurring on pages throughout the book: “Colonel Strangeways his way of Dressing a Large mullet” (page 2) and “To make Swane pyes Coll Strangeways way” (page 5) are in one hand; “To make a loaf Cheese Mrs. Strangeway" (page 34) is in a second hand; and “My Ladys Strangeways Plague Water" (page 103) is in a third hand.
The recipes are about two-thirds culinary and one-third medical, the latter sprinkled throughout the book but particularly clustered toward the end of the numbered pages. The culinary recipes comprise more or less equal numbers of recipes for the principal courses of the meal and for banquets, or desserts. Among the medical recipes are six concerning pregnancy and birth on page 21, including “To bring away a dead Child.”
