Manuscript Location

New York Academy of Medicine, Rare Book Room

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

mostly ca. 1700-1740, with a few later additions

Description

This 216-page manuscript is in two parts: a collection of 178 culinary recipes, written at the front of the notebook, and a collection of 113 medical recipes, written from the back of the notebook going toward the center. Both sections begin with a numbered index. 

The culinary section of the manuscript is headed "Wines, Sweetmeats, and Cookery." The first 170 recipes are numbered. Recipes 1 through 103 are in one hand, recipes 104 through 170 in another. Both recipe clutches are of the early eighteenth century are written in beautiful hands full of flourishes. Eight unnumbered recipes, written in a plain hand and not entered in the index, follow recipe 170. This clutch includes a highly popular rhyming recipe for Eve's Pudding, which is first seen in English and American cookbooks in the late eighteenth century.

The bulk of the recipes in the culinary section are geared to sweets banquets, desserts, or parties: fruit and flower wines, liqueurs, and sweet waters (40 recipes): fruit preserves (19 recipes); little cakes and biskets (15 recipes); custards, creams, and dessert butters (9 recipes); large cakes (6 recipes); and drinks such as possets, caudles, and chocolate. The category "cookery" comprises somewhat fewer recipes: 15 pickled preparations of fish, meat, poultry, or vegetables; 14 puddings; 8 meat or poultry dishes; 6 small yeast-raised breads; 4 pancakes and fritters; and 2 waffles (both titled "gofers," from the French gauffres). 

The manuscript is noteworthy in containing both a recipe for bread-crumb gingerbread, which was largely archaic by the end of the seventeenth century, and a recipe for modern baked treacle (or molasses) gingerbread. (A discussion of these recipes and of Anglo-American gingerbread generally can be found here.) Also of interest is the recipe for "Mrs. Thompsons Cakes or Coffie House Cakes," which are small enriched breads with a filling of spiced, sweetened currants, something like traditional Banbury Cakes. 

The medical receipts include plasters, waters, salves, purges, and other preparations for the treatment of green sickness, burns, worms, palsy, dropsy, stones, women's complaints, and other ailments.