This manuscript consists of a 24-page index and 251 consecutively numbered pages of recipes. The recipes can be divided into two distinct groups. Those on pages 1 through the middle of page 200 are in a single hand and comprise a highly organized cookbook. Those on pages 200 through 251 are in a number of different hands, some of which recur, suggesting that this section of the book was composed communally. Most of these recipes are medical, with some household, pickling, and drink recipes mixed in. The index appears to be in one hand through the recipes on page 213, in two or three other hands through the recipes on page 244. (It does not include the remaining recipes to page 251.) All of the index hands are clearly different from the hand of the cookbook, but some, or possibly all, of the index hands occur in the later pages of the manuscript. This suggests that the manuscript was compiled in three distinct stages, first the cookbook, then the index and the recipes from the bottom of page 200 through page 244, and, finally, the recipes on pages 245 to 251.
What is particularly interesting about the cookbook is the broad date range of its recipes. It outlines a number of recipes that were current by the early seventeenth century, but it also includes many recipes that emerged around the time of the Restoration in 1660, such as bisk, hashes, shoulder of mutton in blood, dessert creams of various sorts, lemon sallet, honeyed baked gingerbread, and the nutted biscuit called bean bread. The broad date range, in tandem with the high level of organization, may indicate that the cookbook is a second- or third- or fourth-generation copy of a cookbook kept within a privileged family and successively updated over the course of the seventeenth century, each copy purging some older recipes and adding newer ones. There are a number of dates in the medical section of the manuscript: 1675 (page 221), 1680 (page 231), 1676 (page 232), 1683 (pages 244 and 247), 1684 (page 247), and 1686 (page 249). Assuming that the cookbook is indeed the earliest part of the manuscript, it must have been copied before 1675, the earliest of these dates.
The cookbook recipes are organized as follows: stews, boiled meats, and hashes, pages 1-16; roasts, pages 16-20; pies, pasties, tarts, and pastes, pages 21-41; buttered loaves, fritters, and pancakes, pages 42-46; cheesecakes, pages 46-48; white pots, pages 48-50; puddings, pages 50-60; sausages, pages 60-61; butter and cheese, pages 61-66; dessert creams, pages 67-78; fish, pages 79-85; pickling and preserving by salt and/or drying, pages 85-94; farming, household, and cosmetic recipes, pages 94-105; cakes, pages 105-113; and banqueting stuff, including fruit preserves, biskets, syrups, and waters, as well as alcoholic drinks, pages 113-210. The language of the recipes is clear and concise, the punctuation and spelling more regular than is typical for manuscript cookbooks of the time but not as regular as contemporaneous print cookbooks. This suggests that the recipes were mindfully edited, perhaps by successive copiers, and/or paraphrased from print but likely not copied from print verbatim.
