A book of choice receipts collected from several famous authors a great part in monasteries and often experimented as to a great number of them, ca. 1675

View Online

Manuscript Location
Folger Shakespeare Library, Manuscripts
Holding Library Call No.
V.a.452
Manuscript Cookbooks Survey Database ID#
81
Place of Origin
England
Date of Composition
ca. 1675
Description
This volume contains 466 numbered pages of recipes, arranged roughly alphabetically, with an index at the end. Most of the recipes are medical, but there are a few dozen culinary, household, and practical recipes mixed in, particularly after page 407, which is headed "An appendix of some things omitted."  The culinary recipes focus on fruit preserving (apricots, cherries, damsons, gooseberries, grapes, quinces, and green plums). There are also recipes for chocolate, cider, raspberry ale, and "An Artificiall wine like claret, but much better and brisker" (page 410), which is made from cider and raisins. Bread crumb "Gingerbread" (page 409) is made with rose water rather than the customary red wine or ale. The recipe for "An Apollonia Pudding" (page 408) is rare (and seemingly out of place in this collection). It is a bread pudding with herbs and currants that is boiled in a calf's or lamb's caul. 

The author, Thomas Sheppey, O.S.F.S., often mentions his sources, several of them well known physicians of this time and earlier, such as Dr. [Gideon?] Harvey, [Robert?] Floud, Sir Theodore Mayerne and Sir Kenelm Digby. One of his chief sources is a manuscript of Lady Byron. Sheppey sometimes gives the cost of the ingredients of a remedy and contrasts it with the price charged by the apothecaries "as much as they can." At the end he adds a list of the names of the chief Rosicrucians. Some individual loose leaves of recipes in a later hand, ca. 1750, are inserted in random places.