Description
This book is inscribed on front flyleaf: Martha Smith her booke 1655. A later date is written in the margin of a recipe titled “The purging Elizar” (page 65), in the same hand as the rest of book: “I made mine thus 1697.” Another name, possibly that of a former owner, is also inscribed on flyleaf, in a different hand: Emily E Becchey [or Beechy] Hilgay Rectory Downham Norfolk. The book is 130 pages in length, comprising a medical section of 75 pages, 3 blank pages, and 52 pages of culinary recipes.
Some two-thirds of the approximately 150 culinary recipes concern articles for sweets banquets or desserts, mostly fruit preserves but also several large yeast-raised fruited cakes, at least six little cakes such as sugar cakes and jumbles, and a handful of dessert creams. Recipes for the principal courses of the meal include carrot pudding, neat's foot pudding, and an unusual orange pudding baked between two crusts ("put it into a dish between two leaves of paste which must be made with butter rubbed into the flour"). There are also recipes for many of the popular meat and fish dishes of the day: two fancy calf's head preparations, chicken fricassee, Scotch collops, lamb pie, collared beef, dressed carp, dried tongue, six ham dishes, sauces for carp and pike, and "gravy." The book's recipe for "Marrow Pasties" is very similar to the recipe called "The pety peruant" recorded in
Forme of Cury, a recipe manuscript compiled around 1396. The pasties are fried pastry turnovers filled with beef marrow, hard-cooked egg yolk, currants, and minced dates, all bound with raw egg yolk and seasoned with rose water, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, and sugar. The author says to "serve them with the second course."
Martha Smith's hand is unusually neat, and her recipes are written with uncommon clarity, thoroughness, and perceptiveness. Her advice on making the sauce for fricasseed chickens is illustrative of the care and intelligence she brings to bear throughout her book:
Two errours you are in danger to run into which are these, if you put too little of the liquor into the frying pan wth ye meat it may be too thick, if too much it will be too thinn, therefore give your proportion with discretion, for almost in all cooking discretion governs more than direction. The other errour is if your seasoning be not very hye before it goe into ye frying pan the freshness of the egs and veriuce will a little flatten it therefore you must provide against it either by giving it in the first seasoning, or put some salt to the ye the egg and veriuyce—but the first is better, one thing you must remember that motion is the soule of the Sauce.
