Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

1650-1690

Description

Written in a single seventeenth-century hand that is neat but sometimes difficult to read, this 138-page book is titled on page 1 "Recets of pastry and preserbes, wax work and limning and fruits Artificial." The book is organized, albeit with many deviations from the organizational scheme, suggesting that it was copied from previously written material. The primary categories are: milks (that is, dessert creams); pastry (meat and fish pies, fruit tarts, and puff pastry); puddings; custards; collars, pickles, souses, and potted foods; cakes, biskets, and possets; fruit and plant preserves, syrups, and quasi-medicinal confections; limning (by which is meant painting on glass, the primary instruction being the preparation of the paints); wax works, including wax fruits; and the coloring of picture frames. The pastry section includes some out-of-category recipes for little cakes (cookies), hashes, stews, preserved foods, fish dishes, and musk comfits. The book includes a number of rarely recorded recipes, particularly in the first section, which outlines atypical versions of the seventeenth-century trifle (which was rennet custard), syllabub, and berry dessert creams. The book's recipe for musk comfits--titled "musk plumbs"--is unexpected, as these confections were generally bought, not made at home. Raisin tarts, another uncommon recipe, calls for baking raisins in pastry crusts with "sweet wort," the unfermented (and thus "sweet") infusion of ground malt that is fermented to make beer. The French word "chopine" (meaning pint) and "cannal" (meaning cinnamon, perhaps of the cassia variety) are used throughout, as is seen in some other Restoration-era English manuscript cookbooks.