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Recipes
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From a collection of cookery and medical recipes written by two unidentified compilers. c. 1685-c. 1725.
This lively pencil sketch of a woman at work in her kitchen sums up the interactive nature of domestic recipe books. Recipe collections grew as accumulations of knowledge passed from one generation to the next, and often reveal family ties and social networks. This drawing vividly conveys the transfer of knowledge in progress: the owner works while her
child watches and learns for the future.
Wellcome Library ref. MS.1796, f.125v
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Recipes
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‘An Hymn in Sicknesse’ From a collection of cookery receipts and medical recipes by Martha Hodges, Robert Foster and others. c. 1675-1725.
Recipe books were used to record a wide range of information in addition to recipes. This manuscript includes literary material such as poems, fairy stories, even a discussion of Virgil’s Aeneid, but religious texts predominate. In a period when expectations of health and recovery were lower than today, religious belief formed an important support during times of
sickness:
‘Altho disease infects my Breast/…
His sacred will I yet adore/
Who gives & takes away’
Wellcome Library ref. MS. 2844, f43r
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Recipes
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Grace Acton’s recipe collection. 1621
The pages of recipe books often contain a disconcerting mix of culinary and medical recipes. Here a flamboyant recipe for roasting a peacock and serving it up in its skin, feathers and all, is followed by an unappetising cure for bed-wetting involving mouse boiled in urine.
Wellcome Library ref. MS.1,
f.2r
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Recipes
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Recipes
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Recipe book of Lady Ann Fanshawe. 1651-1707
The comments scribbled next to recipes sometimes reach out across the centuries to give us a powerful sense of individual women’s lives and experiences. Ann Fanshaw’s note endorsing a red powder to be taken after miscarriage (‘I have found good experementalley of this medicin’) is all the more poignant since we know that in the twenty-two years of
her marriage she bore fourteen children and miscarried six times
Wellcome Library ref. MS.7113, f.73r
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Recipes
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Lady Ayscough’s ‘Receits of phisick and chirurgery’. 1692
In 1897 Henry Wellcome purchased his first domestic recipe book, thus laying the foundation for what is now an unrivalled collection of nearly 300 volumes spanning the early 16th to the late 19th centuries.
Wellcome Library ref. MS.1026, f.95r
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