Description
This extraordinarily interesting volume was manifestly compiled by group of a dozen or more persons, many of whose hands recur throughout. The book was carefully planned in advance. The pages were numbered 1 through 281 and spaces were allotted for "Savories" (mostly meat and fish dishes), "Puddings, Pies, Cakes, &c.," "To Pickle Vegetables," "Preserves," and "Wines and Sweet Liquids." As it happened, the collaborators continued to contribute recipes after all of the allotted spaces had been filled, and so the recipes appearing from pages 201 to 238 are a hodgepodge. (Unaccountably, "Wines . . ." was allotted a space of 100 pages at the outset of the project, while "Savories" and "Puddings . . ." were given only 70 pages each, making an organizational breakdown at the end of the project almost inevitable.) The pages after 238 are blank.The recipes are entered in an index at the front, written in a hand that recurs frequently throughout the book. Names appear at the end of many recipes. Since recipes in the same hands are often followed by different names, the names would appear to be attributions rather than signatures, at least in some instances.
The cuisine outlined in the book was current by the late eighteenth century, but certain recipes strongly suggest that the book was compiled after 1800, including "Cabinet Pudding" (page 114), "Mrs. Romney's School Cake" (page 117), "Everlasting Cheesecakes" (lemon curd, page 147), and "Gateau de Pommes" (page 219). The occasional use of precise weights and measures for meats and other savory ingredients, as well as the general recipe idiom, also point toward a compilation date after 1800. In connection with dating, the following remark, on page 211, bears mentioning: "Mrs. Dolphin's receipt which [Dillie?] gave me [1774?]." The handwriting of the date, if it is a date, is unclear, and of course the recipe could have been given many years before it was recorded in this book.
A particularly interesting recipe is "Miss Seward's famous Receipt to make the balls to the above Receipt" (page 218), the "above receipt" being "Hashed Calf's Head." After the recipe is written: "Miss Seward the Palace Lichfield." The Miss Seward referred to is the poet Anna Seward, who lived in Lichfield Bishops Palace from 1754 to her death in 1809. Her
cookbook is part the Lilly Library collection, and it indeed contains the same recipe, in virtually the same words, in digital image 35.
