This recipe book suggests an unusually complicated compilation history, which can be at least partly puzzled out through the index at the back. At bottom, the book is in two parts. The earliest part, inferably, is a set of twelve preserving recipes, written in a single hand on the rectos of the leaves at the front of the book. Subsequently, another, much longer cookbook was written from the back of the notebook, upside down in relation to the preserving recipes. In its original iteration, the recipes in this second recipe book, too, were written only on the rectos of the leaves, as the rectos would be perceived writing from the back of the notebook, upside down in relation to the front. This second cookbook is in multiple hands, some recurring, and is clearly collaborative. One of the authors of this second recipe book numbered the leaves of the notebook 1 to 61 from back to front and wedged a 1-page index to the second recipe book on a blank verso near the back of the notebook, that is, at the beginning of the second recipe book.
Now things got complicated. It seems (inferentially) that after this index was compiled, additional recipes were added from the front of the notebook following the set of preserving recipes and these recipes continued far into the blank versos of the second recipe book. This prompted the same author of the original index to compile a second index, this one covering all of the recipes written from the front of the book as far toward the back of the book as the newly added recipes extended. This index is also wedged into a blank verso in the back of the notebook, on a separate page from the first index. Of course, it was tricky to assign leaf numbers to the recipes in the second index. What the indexer did was number the first leaf of the front-to-back recipe book 61 (the last leaf in the book numbering from back to front) and then to proceed forward in foliating the recipes newly added from the front. The collision happens between “Green Oyntment” (leaf 17r in the library’s foliation) and Hartshorn Jelly (leaf 17v). Evidently, the ointment was an addition to the front-to-back recipe book because it appears on leaf 76. But the jelly, which appears on the next leaf proceeding from front to back, was part of the original back-to-front cookbook because it appears on leaf 44. The two foliation systems intermingle until the front-to-back recipes end with leaf 99.
Finally, to add still more complications, additional writers evidently added still more recipes to the book after both indexes were compiled, finding spaces on leaves that were still blank. A few of these added recipes have been entered in a different hand at the end of the second index. But others are missing from both indexes.
The book is mostly given over to recipes for food and drink, and the greater part of the recipes outline dessert creams, cakes, preserves, and sweet wines and waters. The imbalance toward sweets is more marked in the recipes of the second index than in those of the first, which do cover a number of meat dishes, meat pies, preserved meats, and puddings.
