English recipe book containing hand-written receipts and a large number of household remedies and prescriptions written from the mid eighteenth century onwards. Place names in the Midlands and Home Counties suggest a southern English place of origin for Martha Smith of whose work around 15 remedies were published in the 1950s.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Small quarto (16.5x20.5cm) 74 pages of manuscript entries, 200 receipts, plus around pp60 blanks, ‘GR’ watermark; bound in brown paper-covered 20th century boards with a paper spine label. New endpapers followed by Smith’s calligraphic manuscript title page written at right angles to the leaf with a ‘Cuer’ for ‘the Canker in a Horses Mouth’ written below. Laid into the book is an extract from the Nursing Mirror of 1950 which prints a couple of pages of Smith’s remedies, illustrated with a picture of the manuscript and its title page. Provenance: Owned by Joyce M Winmill, Henham, Essex in 1950, antiquary and historian.
RECEIPTS & REMEDIES: Among Smith’s recipes are ‘A Carrot Pudding’, ‘To Cuer the Read Watter’, ‘To make Ointment’, ‘For the Bots Worms in Children’ and ‘Receipt for the Stone and Gravel’ as well as ‘To Cuer a Childs Sore face.’ Piles, palsey and gnat bites are all addressed as well as Cattle feed, currant wine, tooth ache, ‘Receipt for a Consumption’, cures for ‘the Hydrophobia’ and ‘The famous American recipt for Rheumatism’. There are references to Doctor Taylor’s’ rubbing bottles’ with further cures for whooping cough, the dropsy, ‘Mother Eves Pudding’ (a verse recipe) and ‘To Make Champagne’ as well as ‘Imitative Champagne... From Bells dispatch’ (a periodical). Later entries credit sources such as Sir Thomas Lander, the Saturday Magazine and The Literary Magnet with forays into other practical subjects such as ‘South American method of Building Clay Walls... From Stevensons Residence South America’ (1820s). A Labour saving soap recipe is credited to the New York Paper, Oct 6th, 1839. One of the last entries relates to a Manure used in March 1839 by ‘the Bailiff to Frederick Mangles, Esq.r of Down Farm Guildford’ which may place the manuscript in Surrey, south of London although there is also a reference to a letter ‘addressed to the Editor of the Coventry Herald’in the Midlands..