Receipt book [manuscript], late 17 century.
Items
Details
Title
Receipt book [manuscript], late 17 century.
Description
294 p.
Note
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.
Genre/form
Manuscripts (documents)
Cookbooks.
Cookbooks.
Item Details
Call number
FAST ACC 272112
Folger-specific note
Purchase made possible by The B. F. Saul Rare Book Acquisitions Fund. From dealer's description: "A Substantial Late 17th Century Manuscript Receipt Book, with some later additions. 294pp ms., the majority in a single neat hand, on both sides of 8vo leaves; a few leaves removed, large closed tear to one leaf without loss, two further corner tears. 17thC full calf, panelled in blind; rubbed & worn, with loss to head of spine & corners. Book label of E. G. Bosanquet. A fine and substantial mid to late 17th century manuscript of receipts dedicated to cookery, medicine and domestic management. The first 205 pages of manuscript entries are in a single neat hand. In this hand, the only reference to a potential provenance is a recipe (on p.127) for ‘My Lady Alling’s Water’. The recipes, culinary and medical, are in no obvious order but are written by someone with a clear knowledge and understanding of the processes involved. Medical receipts include ‘medcins’ ‘to heal burning’, ‘for young children that have wormes’, ‘for the Ague’, ‘for a prick in a sinner with a thorne’, ‘for burning with gunpowder’, ‘to provoke sleep’ and ‘a preservative against the plague’. Others include surfeit water and treatments for gout, consumption, scurvy, sore eyes, and the biting of a mad dog, amongst many others. Desserts, and the preserving of fruit and nuts, make up perhaps two thirds of the culinary recipes. Orange and cheese cakes, macaroons jumballs, sillabubs and eggshell cakes are interspersed with recipes for preserving raspberries, barberries, gooseberries, and walnuts, in addition to jams, marmalades and pickles. Culinary receipts include numerous pies (‘beatill’, oyster, ‘bullet’, ‘lettis’ and potato), ‘to stuf a shoulder of mutton’, ‘to make fresh cheese’, ‘turnip pottage’, ‘to stue a rump of beef ’, ‘sauce for a couple of boyled rabits’, ‘to hash a calves head’, ‘to pickle a goose the French way’, &c. ‘The ordering of a brawn’ lays out in two full pages, how to kill, butcher and preserve a whole pig by salting and boiling it. ‘He dies not like a common swine at the first but having once received a wound with the knife is prescribed to walk after it as long as his spirits will beare it before he receives the second wound he being dead, order him as follows cut out the prime collars first of the brest ...’ The recipe then calls for the salting of each cut, wrapping them in cloth before boiling them in rosemary water in a pot lined with straw to avoid sticking at the bottom. ‘It will keep longer then others as the condition of the flesh was when killed and the temper of the weather ...’ Written with great clarity throughout, the entries in this first unidentified hand end with an untraced two and a half page poem mourning the loss of their dear love: ‘Love decline all the day/ and like the light steal a way/ thou no words can revele/ Ile not part with my pane/ A dull freedom to gane/ life without some kind potion/ is perfect damnation/ now my dearist is gone/ I will sigh all alone ...’ The second distinctive hand (approx. pp 207-252) can be dated by receipts attributed to Shadrach Lyne and John Nicholas. Nicholas was the Warden of New College, Oxford, before becoming Warden of Winchester College in 1679, a post he held until his death in 1712. Shadrach (or Shadrack) Lyne was an apothecary from Winchester, and friend of Nicholas. Both are mentioned in John Browne’s Adenochoiradelogia; or, An anatomick-chirurgical treatise of glandules and Strumaes or Kings-Evil swellings, 1684. It relays a story, quoting a letter from Nicholas to Browne dated October 31, 1682, in which a local innkeeper, Robert Cole, is miraculously cured of the Kings Evil. A single receipt in this hand is dated 1700. These later receipts are almost exclusively medical and include additional attributions to Mr Gough of Foxeham, Mrs Sitwell, Mrs Horsey, Eliz. Nicholas, and Mrs Thistlethwait. They include: ‘Dr. Haughton’s receipt for a pain in the stomach’, ‘A pultisse for a swelling’, ‘The Lady Allen’s or the cordial Water’, ‘For a cancer & for the eye’, ‘The salve called Clowns-all-heal’, ‘For the King’s Evil’, &c. The final 40 pages are from the early 19th century with reference to Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine first published in 1826. Eustace Fulcrand Bosanquet was a collector and bibliographer of early almanacks. He published English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications, a bibliographical history to 1600 in 1917, the same year in which his book collection was sold by Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge in a six day auction." Ordered from Jarndyce, D9421, 2020-11-23. Catalogue CCXLVIII, Winter 2020-21, item #191.
Folger accession
272112