Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England ➔ Kent

Date of Composition

1653-ca. 1675

Description

This book of approximately 20 written pages is inscribed "Jane Buckhurst Kent in Sutton [word?] 1653." Jane Buckhurst evidently valued her book, for above the inscription she wrote: "Jane Buckhurst her booke and yf this booke Chance doo be lost and any one doe find y^e same I pray restore this booke againe to her that heare hath sette her name." Oddly, though, Jane Buckhurst wrote only five pages of recipes, all medical, in the front of the book, and one page containing a medical recipe and some memoranda on animal husbandry at the end. Her secretary hand is quite difficult to read.

Two other writers compiled recipes in the notebook, both in more easily read hands. Two of the added recipes are medical and one is for red-dying "ile" (barley awn, or bristle, per OED), perhaps for broom making. The culinary recipes are: "how to make a great paste" ("great" meaning a large batch), cherry brandy, seed cake, gooseberry cream (a fool), cherry wine, sack pudding, "To make the Woodstreete cake" (similar to the recipe of the same name in "Cookbook of Grace Blome," also in the Folger collection), green pudding (title only), an incomplete recipe (perhaps for a posset), mead, gooseberry wine, mead another way, sack posset, and puff paste. The cakes are baked in hoops (adjustable wooden rings), which came into use in England in the mid-seventeenth century.