Receipt book [manuscript].
1660
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Cover-to-cover images of Folger Shakespeare Library V.a.697
Details
Title
Receipt book [manuscript].
Created/published
England, circa 1660s - 1680s.
Description
1 volume ; 20 x 16 cm
Note
This is a PRELIMINARY RECORD. It may contain incorrect information. Please email catalog@folger.edu for assistance.
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Cover-to-cover images of Folger Shakespeare Library V.a.697
Manuscript Cookbooks Survey description of Folger Shakespeare Library V.a.697
Manuscript Cookbooks Survey description of Folger Shakespeare Library V.a.697
Genre/form
Manuscripts (documents)
Cookbooks.
Cookbooks.
Place of creation/publication
Great Britain.
Item Details
Call number
V.a.697
Folger-specific note
Purchase made possible by The Kenneth C. Hogate Acquisitions Fund. Purchase made possible by The B. F. Saul Rare Book Acquisitions Fund. From dealer's description: "Manuscript in ink, 4to (leaves measure about 202 x 160mm), written for the most part in a single hand in brown ink, with a few flourishes but otherwise undecorated; pp. [iv], 8, 13-48, [54]; presumably wanting two leaves after p. 8; collation including endleaves, some of which may be later, and blank pp. 14-15, 26, 31-2, 37-8, and most of the concluding unpaginated leaves; bound in contemporary brown sheepskin over pasteboard, covers panelled in blind using roll-tool borders (stoutly rebacked and recornered in recent times; with pastedowns, and also perhaps free endpapers, replaced). A superb manuscript book of household receipts, compiled in Scotland or northern England in the later 17th century. As so often, the manuscript is anonymous, but we can localise it from its vocabulary, usage and place references, with supporting inferences from the later additions. It seems certain to have been written by a woman of education and means, but there is no ownership inscription or identification of the scribe that I can find. Binding and paper The binding is now heavily restored, but is presumably original to the book: it is of dark sheepskin, tooled in blind with a double border made with a roll-tool, and a central ornament made up of four uses of the same floral tool; the corners of the central panel are decorated with the same tool. This is all quite attractively done, but not with any great finishing skill: it is certainly consistent with not very expensive Scottish work of the period. The watermark is hard to see because, although there are plenty of blank pages in the book, because it is a quarto the mark always appears in the gutter and is never seen whole. Nevertheless, it looks like a coronetted circle, with something in the middle and the initials 'CVH' below: one would guess it to be Dutch paper. Handwriting The manuscript is largely written by a single hand, and apparently nearly all at the same approximate date: the neat, careful hand looks for the most part very uniform, and there are gaps between the sections, which implies that the scribe intended to add to each of them. A few slight changes of ink and style would indicate that some receipts were added later. One feature of the scribe's handwriting deserves comment: she has one quirky feature, which is to put a tilde over every u - sometimes like a comma, sometimes like an acute accent, but consistently throughout the whole of the manuscript. Contents The sections are: Receipts of Dying Colours (pp. 1-8) - 22 receipts, including colours such as 'Cusheniel red, or deep Incarnate', 'English red', and 'Saddest green' Pastries (pp. 16-25) - 34 receipts, including 'Almond Bisket', 'A Scottish Makround' [ = macaroon], and 'Lemmon Tablets' Milks (pp. 27-30) - 16 receipts, including 'Hanged Cream', 'Hatted Kitts after the English fashion ', and 'Parnassus Hill' (beaten egg white, cream and lemon) Distillation (pp. 33-35) - 6 receipts, including 'Cinamon-water in a dry Stellator', 'Syrup of Oranges', and 'Cherrie water' Phisicall Receipts (pp. 39-47) - 18 receipts, including 'Ane Eye-salve', 'For the spitting of blood', and 'Present Cure for the Tooth-ache' There is also complete index to the book, which shows that one of the two leaves missing after p. 8 originally had a single receipt on it, for 'Crimson red', but this is the only one indexed that is now missing. Much later hands, late 18th or even early 19th century, have added receipts on pp. 13, 35-36, 48 and the unpaginated leaf immediately following p. 48. There are also two pages of architectural drawings in pencil immediately before the Table, which occupies 7 pages at the end of the volume, and which is in the same early hand as the main part of the book; and there are two more receipts in this hand on the final page, one for ale and the other for saffron. Origin and provenance The principal hand in this receipt book clearly dates from the late 17th century: it is very clear and upright, and the writer - presumably an educated woman - has taken care to add a few modest flourishes to the headings. The suggestion that the book originates in Scotland, and perhaps Aberdeenshire, comes from the presence of some later clues. Working backwards in time, a modern (i.e. late 20th or early 21st century) slip of paper loosely inserted, signed by P.L. Forbes, tells us that it came from his aunt's house in Aberdeen, adding 'Who wrote these Ancient receipts I know not'. A more relevant piece of information is found on p. 13, where an 18th c hand has added 'Lord Marischalls Receipt for making a Spanish Olio'. This must surely refer to George Keith (1692-1778), the tenth and last Earl Marischal, who fled to the continent in the aftermath of the rebellion in 1715. After a very long exile, he did eventually come back to Britain, spending some time in Scotland in the early 1760s (although he soon left, complaining of the cold): it would make sense for him to have a Spanish recipe at that point, because quite a large part of his fifty-year exile had been spent there. The family estates were in Aberdeenshire, and thus the owner of this book at that time could well have encountered him there. The vocabulary of the receipts here also suggests Scotland: although there are a few characteristic Scots usages, such as 'Take ane handfull' (p. 39), I have seen no specifically Scots spellings. Nonetheless, a few technical words clearly indicate an origin north of the border. On p. 19, a recipe for 'A Cream Tart' begins with the instruction to take 'a chopin of sweet cream' (a chopin is a Scottish liquid measure, equal to half a pint); and on p. 27 one for 'Nutmug-cream' instructs you to 'Take three mutchkens of sweet cream': a mutchken or mutchkin is a quarter of a Scottish pint, and 'nutmug' seems to be a northern English or Scottish spelling. Perhaps most conclusive of all is the receipt for 'Syrop of neeps' on p. 34 - 'neeps' is the Scots word for turnips, and is used to the present day. As well as this, some unusual names make an appearance which strongly point to Scotland: a receipt on p. 29 which involves gooseberries, butter, sugar and eggs (perhaps a sort of gooseberry fool) is called 'A dish of Wamphray' - there is a place called Newton Wamphray, close to Dumfries and not far north of Carlisle. Amongst the 'Phisicall Receipts' there is one for 'Tippermallo's Unguent' (p. 43) - the unusual word Tippermallo seems to be found only as the name for what, even in the late 17th c, must have been a very small hamlet, some miles west of Perth (it now survives only as the name for a house and some cottages). I wonder if the name here is intended to refer to a person, the laird of the place, as Scottish usage so often does. Two more very specific references seem to offer further clues as to date, although not to location. On p. 45 there is a receipt for 'M. Daffie's Elixir Salutis' - this remedy, the invention of Thomas Daffy (d. 1680), had an extremely long life, surviving into the 19th century, but it was first propagated in the 1640s and its heyday was in the later 17th century. Interestingly, after giving the directions for its manufacture (a principal ingredient was aniseed), the writer adds: 'In taking of it, use M. Daffie's own printed Directions'. Thomas Daffy never published his own directions for taking it, but a younger relative, Anthony, did advertise the Elixir Salutis from the 1670s onwards. Another even more promising reference is on p. 40: 'M. Lucatella's Balsom, Taken from his own mouth' - this not only offers the directions for making it (involving wax, Venice Turpentine and other things), but also a list of diseases it can cure: '1. It helpeth the King's Evil'; '4. It cures the byting of a mad dog, or any other venemous creature'. Lucatella's Balsam is attested in several places in 17th century Britain - for instance, John Evelyn applied it to his son in 1654, and a footnote to E.S. de Beer's edition states that it had been invented by Luigi Locatelli, who died in 1637 (see Evelyn, Diary, III p. 146n). However, there may have been an Italian named Matthew (originally, one assumes, Matteo) Lucatella in Britain in the later 17th century: a receipt book of one Margaret Baker, dating from around 1675, has several references to him (https://emroc.hypotheses.org/ongoing-projects/the-baker-project), one of them calling him 'an etallian newly arived'. It is possible that Matthew Lucatella was able to make a living in Britain by trading on his family connexion with (or just having the same name as) the original inventor of the remedy. Whatever the truth, there is no reason to doubt that the writer here is telling the truth when she says that the receipt is 'taken from his own mouth', and it may provide evidence that Lucatella came as far north as Scotland. The final receipt in this MS shows that not all the remedies were herbal or rooted in common sense, and that some elements of superstition remained. A receipt for 'the Convulsion fitts' recommends taking the powder of a human skull (a woman's skull for a man, and vice versa to treat a woman), and infusing it in ale which is then drunk. 'The Scull of a person strangled, or put to any violent death, is much better than theirs who dye of any disease'. This relates to an old superstition that a hanged man's skull had important curative powers; it survived into the 19th century, and is seen in mutated form in Thomas Hardy's story The Withered Arm (1888), in which a young woman believes that touching the neck of a hanged man will cure her arm." Ordered from Christopher Edwards, D9204, 2018-05-17, email quote.
Folger accession
270298