Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

England

Date of Composition

1716

Description

Except for a few later recipes inserted in random spaces (one of which is dated 1735), this cookbook of approximately 190 pages is in the hand of Penelope Pemberton, who inscribed and dated the book at the front. The book is tightly organized, although this is not immediately apparent because Pemberton does not use headings and because some recipe groupings include dishes that seem out of category, at least to a contemporary reader, who may miss the period connections. Pemberton ordered her recipes as follows: puddings (including orange pudding, potato pudding, artichoke pudding, and common bread pudding); meat pies (including mince pie, potato "Florentine," which is a faux mince pie, and "forst meat pie," which is actually a very large pigeon pie with forcemeat); sauces (including "pig sauce," onion sauce, and "gravis," or strong stocks, of beef, veal, and shrimp); meat, poultry, and fish dishes (including the popular Scotch collops, to dress cod's head, calf's head hash, broiled pigeons, and fricassees of chicken, rabbits, veal, and salmon); vegetables (including instructions for boiling cabbage, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts); soups (including several pea soups); potted, corned, and salted meats, poultry, and fish; hams; pickles; cakes; custards, creams, and sweet gelatins; preserves; and wines.

The particular way in which the book is organized suggests that Pemberton was either copying and updating a recipe book handed down in her family or else copying recipes that she had collected on loose sheets over a span of years. The recipes in this cookbook are unusually long and detailed, and many contain close observations and perceptive insights. The author's recipe for wild or tame ducks, which are boned, stuffed with mutton forcemeat, and served in a sauce made from their poaching broth, runs around 800 words. Her recipe for Forst Meat Pie, cited above, is even longer. Very few eighteenth-century manuscript cookbook writers provide recipes for cooking vegetables, but Pemberton does, even for the lowly cabbage. She explains that the cabbage should be soaked in water and milk to rid it of snails and worms, tied in a net, boiled "prity quick" and "not too longe lest it be black," and then thoroughly squeezed to rid it of excess moisture. Pemberton serves the cabbage chopped fine and dressed as for turnips (which she outlines in a separate recipe). This cookbook is of rare quality and of great value to those studying English cooking at the turn of the eighteenth century.