Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1700, with some additions to ca. 1750

Description

The bulk of this cookbook was written by Anne Bayne Booke, who signed her name in a flowing script on the recto of the front free endpaper. A note added beneath her signature provides some clues about the identity of Anne Bayne Brooke and when she wrote. The note reads: "This receipt book belonges to my Great Aunt Rachel Bayne daughter I believe of the above Anne Bayne - Rachel Bayne died in 1799 above Seventy Years of Age- 1847 R.S. Ainslie." If Rachel Bayne was born around 1725, her mother, the author of the book, was likely born between 1685 and 1705 and so would presumably have compiled the book in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

Anne Bayne's cookbook contains an index at the front and approximately 250 recipes, nearly all of them written only the verso of the leaves. Her recipes are uncommonly detailed and clearly expressed, and they are tightly organized by type, which suggests that she copied them from an older family cookbook and/or from recipes of her own that she had collected in a notebook or on loose sheets. Following Anne Bayne's index there is a second index, written in a different hand. This index covers recipes written on the recto of some of the leaves by one primary and several secondary later authors. What is fascinating about these added recipes is that many are later (or at least different) versions of Anne Bayne's recipes on the verso. Perhaps the primary author of the added recipes was Anne Bayne's daughter Rachel, or perhaps not. In any event, the book provides a rare record of the evolution of eighteenth-century English cooking.