In a mixed culinary and medicinal recipe book dating from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Wellcome Library, MS 7892), I found the following poetical note:
To help my Wife to be a cook
I write receipts in this her book
and hope to taste of some of these
when ere her Ladyship doth please
Doesn’t he sound delightful? On another page he writes:
This latter part of this receit
I have writ ill, because in hast I writ
I hope my wife, she will this fault excuse
cause bad writing cant make’t worse for use
Those were recipes for food, but by a method for making snail water he writes:
This cordial water I desire to tast
when I have a pain, in stomach, or in wast
He copies out a recipe for sack posset:
Take a pint of sack [a dry white wine similar to sherry], 16 eggs, keep half the whites out, beat them very well, put your sack & eggs together, & set them over the fire & stirr them till it be as thick, as a Jelly, boyl 2 Quarts of Cream, & pour it hot upon your sack, & Eggs, pour it very high to make it froth cover it up with a dish very close, & set it over a small fire, till you send it up.
And then notes:
For nuptial nights, this Posset is most fit
it mak’s a Bridegroom brisk, tho he wants wit
It’s a little enigmatic, but I think we can work out what he means!
Eighteenth-century recipes 