Description
This anonymous 16-page cookbook contains thirty-five consecutively numbered recipes. The book is written in ink, in a single hand that aims for beauty but is often difficult to read. Many of the pages are burnt at the edges, compounding the difficulties. Seventeen of the recipes, or nearly half of the total, outline cakes and puddings. Eight additional recipes outline preserves and pickles. There are also recipes for alcoholic drinks, sausage meat, homemade yeast, clarifying sugar, muffins, walnut and mushroom ketchups, and vegetable "mangoes."
Whether the book was composed in England or America is difficult to determine. All of the recipes were current in both countries during the late eighteenth century, when the book was likely produced, although the particular way in which the muffins are baked (dropped on a griddle rather than corralled in muffin rings) argues for an English origin, as do the recipes for "Syringed Biscuits" and "To Preserve Damsons." (Strangely, the syringed biscuits are not actually formed using some sort of syringe, or pastry-bag-like contrivance, but are baked "in pans.") The idiom of the recipes also suggests an English origin. The complication is that two of the recipes, "Small Beer" (digital image 11) and "Gingerbread (digital image 24), call for "molasses," a word that, in England, was replaced by "treacle" over the course of the seventeenth century. It is possible that the word "molasses" remained current in some English places into the end of the eighteenth century. But this writer has not seen instances of this.
A PDF of the digital images of this book is available
here. Click on "Handwritten Cookbook, likely English, circa late 1700s.