Description
This receipt book is written in a single hand, on 62 numbered pages. Pages 1 through 46 comprise medical recipes; a line of musical notes is written on p. 43. The remainder of the manuscript is given over to culinary recipes, mostly for banqueting conceits, including marchpane, comfits, sugar statuary, bisket breads, little cakes, bone-stock and isinglass jellies, and fruit and flower preserves of various kinds. The name George Alleme appears at the bottom of page 57. The secretary hand of the manuscript is difficult for a nonspecialist to read. Fortunately, Elisabeth Chaghafi, a manuscript scholar and an expert in paleography, has transcribed the culinary recipes, which are available
here.
Several of the culinary recipes echo recipes appearing in printed cookbooks of the early seventeenth century. The recipe for yeast-raised "Bisket Breade" (page 48) states, "this ys the breade the comfect makers doe Commonly make," which is similar to a remark made of a similar bisket in a recipe outlined in
A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen (1608). The recipe "To make leache of Ipocrise" (page 56), a stiff isinglass jelly, suggests "when you serve yt in Cutt yt out in lumpes with a spoone," a paraphrase of the same suggestion given in
A Closet for another stiff jelly. The marchpane banqueting centerpiece outlined on page 46 is similar to John Murrell's marchpane in his book of 1623, and the "fine" jumbles with almonds on page 49 recalls Gervase Markham's 1627 recipe of the same name, although the recipes are otherwise different.
There are several unusual recipes. The imitation cloves in sugar paste (page 48) are darkened with burnt date stones. A "stove" for drying candied flowers (page 52) is improvised by setting a chafing dish of coals at the bottom of an upturned stool and balancing a sieve containing the flowers on the leg ends. Of particular interest is the recipe "To make fine white leach allmondes" (page 50), a stiff sweetened jelly of almond milk conventionally served in slices (hence the word "leach," from a French word meaning "slice"). The recipe suggests, "you may slice yt under Covers of puffed paste," meaning, presumably, that the leach could be turned out and covered with a sheet of puff paste of the same shape (likely handsomely decorated). If this interpretation is correct, this is an ingenious method of making a sort of leach tart, which would not be possible by any other means, given the nature of leach. (
Mary Hookes appears to be working with the same idea, though she executes it a bit differently.)
On page 57 the manuscript recommends Barberry sugar for preserving and Brazil sugar for jellies; gives prices for vegetable gums, coloring agents, and gold leaf of two different grades; and notes that gold leaf can be bought at the "goulde beater."
