This manuscript consist of a nearly complete subject index, followed by 180 consecutively numbered pages of recipes. Most of the recipes are culinary; a few are medical or practical. Although the pagination proceeds entirely from front to back, pages 141 to 180 are written from the back of the notebook, upside down in relation to pages 1 through 140. Both sections of the book are in multiple hands, many of which recur, indicating that both sections were compiled collaboratively. Although the recipes in the back section are of various kinds, recipes for sweet wines, dessert dishes, and cakes predominate, so it seems possible that the back section was originally intended to cover only sweets but lost its focus in the course of collaborative compilation.
The dealer of this book has ascertained that the leaves on which the recipes are written date from circa 1694 but that the leaves of the index were inserted into the notebook in the mid-eighteenth century, which necessitated replacing the notebook’s original spine and adding eighteenth-century endpapers. However, the recipes do not appear to be appreciably earlier than the index, despite the earlier date of the recipe leaves. While the book does contain many recipes that were current in the late seventeenth century, and while some of the book’s authors write in a seventeenth-century hand, the book skews toward the eighteenth century both in content and sensibility. Among the books characteristic eighteenth-century recipes are numerous rich cakes leavened by beating air into the batter rather than with yeast (pages 8, 24, 77, 86, 97); a seed cake “without butter,” that is, a sponge cake (page 115); two recipes titled “breakfast cakes” (pages 25 and 82); “Drinking cakes” (page 115); sago puddings (pages 14, 67, 107, 129, and 130); millet pudding (page 60): plum pudding (page 69); apple “floating island” (page 108); Indian lemon pickle (page 93); “Cake Soop” and “Veal Glews,” or solid demi-glace (pages 112 and 120); “Calves Head a la turtle” (page 134); “Muffins” (page 137); and “Pickle Lillo” (page 143). Recipes showing an eighteenth-century sensibility include the many stews, fricassees, and braised dishes thickened with flour rather than eggs, as was earlier practice (pages 27, 31, 50, and elsewhere); treacle gingerbreads heavily enriched with butter and/or baked as “drops” or nuts (pages 9, 109, and 125); extremely sweet mince pies (page 11); and the book’s many recipes for ketchups, which became a default flavoring for all manner of dishes in the eighteenth century. The main interest of the book, in fact, is that it captures elite English cuisine as it transitioned from the late seventeenth century to the age of Hannah Glasse, England’s canonical eighteenth-century cookbook author.
The book includes a rare English recipe for chicken cooked in a bladder (page 85) and an early rhyming recipe titled “A Poetical Pudding” (page 91), which outlines an oat pudding promised to be superior to rice pudding.
