Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

1830-1935

Description

This recipe book comprises 92 pages of culinary recipes and 20 pages of household recipes, the two parts separated by approximately 40 blank pages in the notebook. Although the household recipes are written upside-down in relation to the culinary recipes, an analysis of the handwriting shows that the household section proceeds from the center of the notebook to the end, not from the back toward the center, as was typical for recipe books whose second section was written in reverse of the first. Pages 1 through 56 and pages 61 through 63 of the culinary section of the book were written by a single individual during the second third of the nineteenth century. The remaining culinary pages alternate between two other hands. Several recipes by one of these later authors are dated 1893 and 1894; one recipe by the other later author is dated 1935. The earlier recipes mostly focus on desserts, cakes, and fruit and flower wines. They include Italian Cheese (a cream dessert thickened with acidic wine), mock ice (gelatin-thickened ice cream), velvet cream, lemon cheesecakes, plum cake, almond cake, soda cake (which marks this section as 1830 or later, when chemical leavening came to Britain), several gingerbreads, Portugal pudding, "A Praiseworthy Pudding," and wines made with carnations, cowslips, and elderberries. A recipe for parkin, or oatmeal gingerbread, calls for caraway seeds, which an added note states that the cake is "better without." There are also a few scattered savory recipes, among them pickled tongue, potted beef, Scotch woodcock, pork pies, and sauces for wild fowl.