Manuscript Location

University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Kislak Center for Special Collections - Manuscripts

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1600-ca. 1630, with later additions

Description

Lady Elizabeth Talbot, born in 1582, became Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent when she married Henry Grey, 8th Earl of Kent in 1601. The couple had no children. After the Earl died, in 1639, Lady Kent shared her home with John Selden, an esteemed antiquarian who had been under her husband's patronage. It is possible that the two were secretly married. The highly educated Lady Kent was known in elite circles as a collector of medical remedies. Shortly after she died, in 1651, a medical recipe book attributed to her was published under the title A Choice Manual: Or, Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chirurgery. In the 1653 edition of this book a lengthy selection of culinary recipes was appended to the medical receipts, and the culinary recipes remained part of the book through its twenty-second and final edition, published in 1726. Meanwhile, a separate book containing the culinary recipes only was published in 1653 under the title A True Gentlewoman's Delight. 

The origin of the culinary recipes has long been a subject of speculation. It seems clear enough that they were cobbled together from several different sources because a number of dishes are outlined in two or three different recipes in different parts of the text, and groupings of like recipes (for example, stews, puddings, or preserves) are scattered throughout the text rather than appearing in a single place, as would be logical. 

This volume is manifestly one of the sources of the culinary recipes attributed to Lady Kent, although there is no way of knowing if she actually wrote it. It contains a cookbook, compiled in the early seventeenth century, on 48 leaves at the front. This cookbook consists of a table of contents followed by 79 numbered recipes written on the rectos of 46 leaves. The recipes are organized in sections: For Boil'd meats, For stewed Meats, To make Pasts (pastries), Roast Meats, Fryed Meats, Sauced Meats, To Make Tarts, and Milk Meats (including puddings). Recipes 77-79 are in a different hand from the bulk of the text and do not appear in A Gentlewoman's True Delight. The rest of the recipes do appear in the printed book, on pages 74-108 of the 1653 edition, and comprise a little more than one fifth of the book.

The order of the recipes in the printed book is just slightly altered from the order in the manuscript, the printed recipes beginning with the manuscript's third numbered recipe and the first two manuscript recipes appearing in the printed book after manuscript recipe #5. The wording of the recipes is the same in manuscript and print, although the spelling has been modernized in the printed book and there are a few random transcription errors which may have occurred during typesetting. These errors include "Court roul" for the original "carret roote" (recipe 3); "Chucks of Veal" for "Chewitts of Veale" (veal mince pies, recipe 33); "pinke it, cake it" for "pricke itt, bake itt" (recipe 37); "dry it" for "dredge itt" (recipe 44); and, most amusingly, "Bony Clutter" for "bony clabber" (recipe 71). 

Recipes of particular interest include "To Make a Sallet of all Manner of Heurbes" (recipe 12), which calls for almonds, greens, hard-boiled eggs, and "all sorts of flowers"; "To make puf past" (recipe 26), which reckons a quart of flour by an understood weight of 1 1/2 pounds; "To make an Italian puddinge," a very early baked pudding that was popular to the end of the century; "To roast a Giggett of Mutton" (recipe 47), presumably an Anglicized form of the French gigot; "To make ffritters" (recipe 52), which calls for cutting the apples "like beanes"; "To Skalde Milke after the Westerne fashion" (recipe 69), a recipe for clotted cream whose title may refer to the western county of Devon; "To make a Whitepott" (recipe 72), which is essentially a bread pudding layered with apples and currants; "To make a puddinge in hast" (recipe 73), which would become "hasty pudding" in mid-century; "To boile creame" (recipe 75), a sippet fool and proto-modern trifle; and "To draw butter thicke" (recipe 76), a very early instance of the classic English drawn butter sauce. 

Additional recipes have been written in several later hands, both in front of the book and from the back of the book, upside down in relation to the front. The library believes that some of these recipes date as late as 1825. The later recipes are medical or cosmetic, except for instructions for preserving lemons, making elder vinegar and cherry brandy, and pickling cucumbers.