Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1770

Description

This manuscript is in several parts. The portion that is of principal interest is a cookbook that is inscribed on the recto of the front free endpaper: Miss Ann Kenwrick 27th June 1770. The cookbook begins with a 6-page index and contains approximately 250 culinary recipes on 154 numbered pages. The recipes are in a single beautiful hand, which is different from that of the inscription, and are tightly organized by type, suggesting that the book was compiled from a previous collection of written recipes. The book covers most of the usual dishes of eighteenth-century elite English cooking as well as a few unusual ones. Among the latter are Shrewsbury Jumballs and Dumb Pudding, which prove to be, respectively, macaroons (of a sort) and oatmeal pudding; Olive Horridine, a pot pie of veal and bacon roulades; To Malarate Soles, which is an escabeche; A Hogoo, which appears to be a whole cabbage stuffed with mutton forcemeat and shaped as a duck; and A Monastick, a very large dish of rice cooked to a pap, with a stuffed pullet within. Following this cookbook there are some 35 pages of additional recipes, many of them medical, written in multiple undistinguished hands. Starting from the other end of the notebook, written upside-down in relation to the cookbook, is an account book written some decades earlier.