Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1700

Description

This 36-page receipt book is in a number of different hands and was likely compiled collaboratively, at least in part. Most of the recipes are culinary or medical, with a few cosmetic and household recipes mixed in. The sources of many of the recipes are given.

The culinary recipes skew toward fruit preserving, dessert creams, cakes, gingerbreads, and sweet wines and waters. However, there are also savory dishes, including pickled oysters, dried tongue, cured pork, and scotch collops. Page 8 includes a rare recipe for the earliest type of English baked gingerbread, which was made with honey, followed by a modern English baked gingerbread made with treacle. A recipe on page 12 outlines a historic bread crumb gingerbread that is to be poured out into "dishes" or "boxes" referred to as "coffins," as for a sweetmeat. The recipe for "Plum cake" on page 9 includes the instruction "do not knead" the dough, presumably to promote a crumbly cake-like texture rather than a bread-like elastic texture in the baked cake. "To make white Scotch collops" (page 15) calls for thickening the sauce with eggs, as was done in the seventeenth century, but also adding flour, an eighteenth-century notion, "if you find it not thick enough."