Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

likely ca. 1750-1800, possibly a bit later

Description

This English recipe of approximately 105 written pages book contains fifty-two numbered recipes followed by perhaps half as many unnumbered recipes. The numbered recipes may be in a single hand or in two or three similar hands. The unnumbered recipes appear to be written in the same hand or hands as the numbered recipes, except for a handful of recipes at the very end of the notebook, which were clearly written by different individuals.

The first sixteen numbered recipes are medical and practical. Most of the remaining recipes, both numbered and unnumbered, are culinary, interspersed with few medical and practical formulas. The culinary recipes focus on meat dishes, pickled foods, puddings, cakes, desserts, and preserves. There are also recipes for posset, wines, and cheeses, as well as an unusual recipe for "Orange Loaf" (#32), which is whole preserved oranges stuffed with powdered Naples biscuits, minced marrow, fresh orange juice and zest, and sugar, and then baked and served with melted butter. All of the recipes in the book were current from the mid-eighteenth into the early nineteenth centuries. However, such spellings as "frigassy" (for fricassee, #23), "silly bubb" (for syllabub, #27), and "bisketts" (for biscuits, #34), as well as the use of musk and ambergris in the recipe for Mountain Cream (#29) suggest a composition date in the eighteenth century.