Manuscript Location

University of Iowa Main Library, Special Collections, Szathmary Culinary Archive

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

ca. 1830-1850

Description

This 25-page cookbook is written with multiple squibs, in many different handwriting moods, indicating that it was composed over a period of months or possibly years. The final five pages may well be in a hand other than that of the first twenty. The recipes include one purported to be "The original receipt for Dr. Oliver's Biscuits," which were long ago commercialized as Bath Oliver biscuits and are great favorites in the U. K. today with cheese. The book concludes with fourteen recipes for potatoes contributed by Lady Elizabeth Fortescue. The remarkable feature of these recipes is their extreme simplicity--the first recipe, occupying a full page, is "to boil potatoes"--suggesting that nineteenth-century Britons took potato cooking very seriously indeed. Among the book's other recipes are Indian pickle, Waldon sausages, gingerbread nuts, walnut ketchup, Dutch flummery (a gelatin dessert made with half a pint of mountain wine), several fruit wines, white ratifia and English noyeau (both nut-flavored liqueurs), and Chicken Panada (a sickroom pap). About a quarter of the recipes are cures or household products like soap and furniture polish.