This recipe book is inscribed “Mrs Beulah Hutson” at the front. The author wrote 162 culinary recipes at the beginning of the volume, followed by 60 medical recipes. Several later writers added ten recipes at the end of the culinary section and fourteen recipes, mostly for sweet wines, at the end of the medical section. Later writers also added pagination and recipe numbers.
The culinary recipes in Mrs. Hutson’s hand are clearly and concisely written and are organized as follows: pastry; meat dishes; soups; sauces; fish; “florendines”; a lengthy recipe for "Woodstreet Cake;" pickled meats and vegetables; "French bread" and two cakes; puddings; a recipe for “Court Fritters”; small cakes; preserves; sweet wines and waters; sugar boiling; banqueting conceits (biskets, macaroons, and marchpane); and thirty additional recipes for preserves. More than half of the culinary section—from the recipes for small cakes (page 23) through the end of the second set of recipes for preserves (page 49)—concerns “banqueting stuff,” an emphasis typical in books of this period.
The recipes cover most of the favorite dishes of the Restoration era: artichoke (or potato) pie, sweet chicken pie, fricassees, hashes, “Spring Garden Beef” (though this recipe is atypically plain in look), “gravy” (enriched stock in modern terms), Woodstreet cake, French bread, court fritters, and, of course, the various conceits of banqueting. Several recipes are of special interest. “Paste Royal” (page 1), a sweetened tart paste, can be made either flaky or cookie-like, a contradictory double identity that this paste was to maintain, confusingly, into the nineteenth century. “Harte Cakes” (heart cakes, page 23) is a surprisingly early recipe for individual rich cakes baked in heart-shaped pans. In the eighteenth century, heart-shaped individual cakes became great favorites under the name “queen cakes.” Florendines” (or “Florentines”) seem to have been understood as fancy tarts involving a finely chopped, minced, or pudding-like filling and a crust of puff paste or rich sweet paste. Three of Beulah Hutson’s florendines are filled with meat (rolled veal scallops, mutton steaks, and calf’s head) and forcemeat balls, the fourth with a sort of rice pudding. All have pastry covers only, of puff paste, no bottom crust. Seventeenth century bills of fare list Florentines in both the first and second course. Beulah Huston must have considered the tarts highly fashionable to have designated a separate section in her book for them.
The book’s five recipes for sugar clarifying and boiling (pages 37-38) as well as the book’s recipe for “Mackaroones” (page 39) also appear, in slightly different wording, in a late-seventeenth English manuscript cookbook handed down to Martha Washington and widely known today as “Martha Washington’s Book of Cookery,” although Martha Washington did not write any of it. These recipes may have circulated only in manuscript, for they are not found in the printed seventeenth-century cookbooks that would be likely to have them, including Hugh Plat’s Delights for Ladies, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen, Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife, either edition of John Murrell’s A Delightful Daily Exercise, The Ladies Closet Opened, A Queen’s Delight, Robert May’s Accomplisht Cook, Hannah Woolley’s The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet, or William Rabisha’s Whole Body of Cookery Dissected.
