Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England ➔ Kent

Date of Composition

1697, with a few additions ca. 1720

Description

This book was mostly compiled under the auspices of Grace Blome [Randolph] (1674-1750), who inscribed it on leaf 6: "Grace Blome her booke, December the 24th Friday anno din 1697." The book contains 159 numbered pages of culinary recipes, which are indexed at the front. The book also includes, at the end, a chronological description of the progressive distemper of Grace's father, John Blome, his treatment by Drs Fuller, Needham, and others, and a report of his 1684 autopsy (leaves 102-104v); a list of the births and deaths of John and Jane Blome and their family (leaf 105); and a Pindaric ode "On the much lamented death of that incomparable Lady the hon[erable] Lady [Elizabeth?] Oxenden . . . by Mrs. Randolph," 1696, (Foxon R110) (leaves 107-108). 

This book was a collaborate project undertaken by a number of different individuals, possibly all members of the Blome family. The alphabetical table is principally in a single handsome hand but contains a few added entries in other hands containing the recipes written from page 126 to the end. This suggests that the bulk of the book was compiled more or less consecutively and then, perhaps a few decades later, expanded. At least five of the added recipes, including the almond flummery and orange cream on page 141 and the treacle gingerbread on page 145, are likely to be of the early eighteenth century.

The book is particularly strong in recipes for preserved foods of all kinds. There are at least forty recipes for pickles and for collared, soused, and potted meats, as well as an unusual recipe for salted and smoked fowl preserved in oil, titled "To make Bacon of Any Fowle, an Arabian dish" (page 63). The pickles include vegetables (lettuce, mushrooms, turnips, artichokes, and radishes), flower buds (nasturtiums, broom buds, and elder buds), fruits (quinces and musk melons), meats (pigeons, beef tongue, turkeys, rabbits, and "fowl"), and fish (eel and oysters). There are also around forty recipes for preserved fruits, dried fruits, candied fruits, fruit jellies and marmalades, and fruit confections, including an unusually large selection of fruit "cakes" and "pastes" (somewhat similar to quince paste). 

The book features many recipes for meat dishes, including stews of beef, mutton, lamb, calf's head, calf's foot, veal breast, and lamb breast; hashes of veal, rabbit, fowl, and mutton; and various specialty beef preparations, including the highly popular "Beef Alamode," pages 103 and 130, and the far rarer "Spring Garden Beef," page 103 (which bears little resemblance to the recipe of the same name outlined in "Cookbook of Elizabeth Fowler," also in the Folger collection). There are also a number of sauces for meat and fowl, many puddings, and many meat, fowl, and fish pies, including an unusual "Swan Pye" on page 78.

There are some forty-five recipes for fruit preserving. Otherwise, sweet dishes are surprisingly few, comprising about a dozen small dessert cakes and about sixteen dessert creams, butters, custards, and gelatin jellies, most of which are standard for the period. There are three recipes for large yeast-raised cakes, including one for "A Woodstreet  Cake" (page 109; somewhat similar to the recipe in "Cookbook of Jane Buckhurst," also in the Folger collection). Room has also been found for an atypical recipe for "Portingale cakes" (page 47), a predecessor of pound cake. A recipe for making chocolate from scratch, starting with the roasting of the beans, appears on page 34.