Manuscript Location

Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1690

Description

Titled "Cookeries" on the title page, this book of 265 pages, with a complete index at the end, is written in a single beautiful hand, likely that of a professional scribe. It contains 376 culinary recipes, including five for eel and many for puddings and for pickles of meats, poultry, vegetables, and other items. A receipt for Chatham's Punch in an unknown later hand is laid in with the front endleaf.

The book is clearly of the late seventeenth century, when dishes with French insinuations had become fashionable among the English elite: "Ramekins" (page 28), "Stakes a la Mentenon" (Maintenon, page 29), "Beef alamode" (pages 53 and 126), "A Rump of Beef Doab'd" (page 134), and "How to morenatt a Neck of Veal in Cutlits the best way" (battered and fried, a French technique, page 155).  A interesting recipe for "Cabobe" (kebab) with period English touches appears on page 51. Although already familiar in England by the reign of James I, "Cavear" (page 261) is described as "a strange meat like black sope made (as is said) of the roe of a Sturgeon." Three prepartions for this "meat" are oulined, one of which (in "Cavear Another Way," page 262) is essentially the same as modern taramasalata. 

Extremely unusual for a manuscript cookbook of this era, there are almost no recipes for dessert creams, cakes, biskets, fruit preserving, confectionary, or sweet wines and waters. This suggests that a companion book containing such recipes may have been compiled contemporaneously by the same household. A note possibly relevant to this supposition appears on page 262, preceding a run of cheesecakes: "These Receipts following are took out of the Great Book." The "Great Book" may have been split into two manuscripts, one covering "cookery" and the other "banqueting stuff." 

Sources for some of the recipes are given, including Mrs. Palmer (pages 242-244), Mrs. Thorne (page 245), Mrs. Osbaldston (pages 246 and 265), Mrs. Dorothy Nevil (pages 250-251), Mrs. Atheron (page 252), Mrs. S.S. (page 256), Lady Wentworth (pages 257 and 261), Mrs. Win: (page 260), Lady Kays (page 261), Mrs. An: Byerley (page 263), Mrs. Eliz: Warton (pages 264-265). A note appears on page 121: "These receipts following were had from a kook who was five years in King of France kitchin." The recipes referred to are likely "Almond Pottage," two recipes for "Amulet," or omelet (one with parsley and the other with oysters), and "Bisk de Crawfish." The almond pottage is the distant predecessor of a favorite company soup of the nineteenth century, sometimes called soup à la reine. Queen Victoria was said to have particularly doted on it.