This receipt book of approximately 45 written pages is in a single hand except for a few later additions. The recipes are organized in five sections headed Dying, Pastries, Milks, Distillations, and Phisicall Receipts. The pastries section contains thirty-four recipes, some for pies and tarts and others for biskets, cakes, fruit preserves, and candies. Most of the sixteen recipes in the milks section outline sweet dishes commonly called creams. The six recipes for distillations are sweet drinks called waters, most of which are pleasant rather than medicinal. The book is paginated and there is a complete a page “table” in the back.
The book is of the second half of the seventeenth century and is manifestly of Scottish origin. (The library believes that it may have originated in the vicinity of Aberdeen.) The Scottish measures “mutchkin” (424 ml. or one scant American pint) and “chopin” (two mutchkins) are used throughout. The recipe for “Aple Tarts” (page 18) calls for “a leepy [lippie] of flower,” probably meaning around two American quarts. There are a several instances of Scottish vocabulary in recipe titles: “Minch’d Pyes” (page 18); “Carvie Cake” (caraway, page 23); “Jeal of Apples” (for jelly, page 23); and "Syrop of neeps" (turnips, page 34). Also likely Scottish is the phrase “shorn cream” (page 28), meaning clotted cream, which is shorn, or skimmed, from the top of the milk pail. In addition, there are recipes for “A Scottish Makround” (page 23), which is essentially marzipan, dropped in gobs and baked, and “Hatted Kitts after the English fashion” (page 28), a classic Scottish dish of curds and whey so named because the curds float to the top of the whey, like a hat.
The dessert with the unusual name “Parnassus Hill” (page 29) turns out to be simply lemon-flavored whipped cream heaped in a dish. “A Fowle of Cream” (page 27) is more akin to a pottage than a fool, consisting of cream, grated bread, and currants boiled until thick and served with sugar and cinnamon. “A Winter Sellet” (salad, page 29) appears to be a vinegary, salty pickle of carnation petals or other fragrant flowers.
The writer consistently writes a tilde over the letter “u,” possibly to distinguish it from the letter “v.” At the time, the letter “u” was often formed in the way we today form the letter “v.”
