Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1850-ca. 1885

Description

This 109-page book is the second of six items in the library's collection titled "John and Henry Locke Cookery Archive, 1820-1896." The inside front cover of this book is inscribed "Henry Locke Cook & Confectioner Cheltenham," but only the first 15 pages of the book, which mostly concern the heating of sugar to various stages, contain writing in his hand. Two inscriptions are written on pages 7 and 8, in different hands, indicating that John Locke died in 1833, at age 41, and Henry Locke died in 1896, at age 75. Possibly John Locke was Henry Locke's father.

The bulk of the book, which begins after page 15, is written in at least three hands other than Henry Locke's. This part of the book contains numerous professional catering menus, many of which have headings that list a location (Such-and-Such House, 4 Wesley Terrace, etc.) or a personal name as well as the type of entertainment (dinner, ball, wedding supper) and the number of persons served. Some of the menu headings also contain dates, all in the 1850s. Many of the dinner menus specify individual items as top, bottom, side, and corner dishes, indicating their arrangement on the table, and a few of the menus also include table diagrams, particularly for the dessert course. Interspersed with the menus are blocks of recipes, some quite lengthy. Most of the recipes are for biscuits and cakes and consist only of ingredients and their quantities, without instructional text. Among the more unusual recipes are Diabetes Bread, a sugarless dessert biscuit (digital page 64), and Cracknels, which, as made here, are crackers of an ancient type that are first boiled, then baked, as for bagels (digital page 103). Some of the cake and biscuit recipes are described as "fermented," which may not mean chemically leavened, as one might expect, as a cake recipe with chemical leavening is described as "unfermented" (digital page 56). It is possible, of course, that "unfermented" was a slip of the pen. In addition to menus and recipes, the book includes a lengthy chart showing the seasonal availability of a range of foodstuffs and, in a different hand, a briefer list of the same. Recipes calling for "patent flour" and "clear treacle" (presumably golden syrup), both of which first appeared on the British market in the 1880s, are written amid the 1850s menus, so the book evidently continued to be used for some decades after the bulk of it was written.