This manuscript is a handwritten near copy of a printed cookbook by Edward Kidder, a cookbook author and cooking teacher active in London between ca. 1720 and ca. 1734. Kidder gave his students blank notebooks bound with a printed title page from his cookbook. The students then copied his cookbook, nearly verbatim, into these notebooks. There are five similar Kidder manuscripts in this database, in five separate institutional collections. Four of these manuscripts can be viewed online. Additional information on these manuscripts can be found in the record of the Kidder manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania.
The printed title page of the University of Iowa manuscript lists the locations where Kidder held cooking classes between 1721 and 1722 or 1723. The copiers of this book may have been Sarah Prince and Mary Prince, whose names appear on an otherwise blank page at the front of the notebook, preceding the printed title page. Alternatively, these individuals may merely have owned the book, for the hand of the names seems not to be the hand in which the book is written.