Through the Photographer’s Lens

Since late 2024, I’ve digitized roughly 50 recipe manuscripts from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection. A large-scale project like this requires condition surveys, cataloging, page-level metadata creation, page-by-page digitization, quality assurance checks, and uploading images to our Digital Collections database. It also requires close collaboration with many colleagues in the Collections department, which is one of my favorite aspects. Many of the books I will highlight are available online, but others need more cataloging work before they can be uploaded (and the ones that are already online only have minimal descriptions right now). Rest assured that they will be available for perusal soon!

We call these manuscripts “recipe books”, even though they’re not exactly like modern cookbooks. They were not written for publication; they were made to preserve what people found important for their daily life. This means that, in addition to familiar recipes, we can discover any number of surprises in a recipe book, like something called “snail water”, or veterinary advice, or a spell to cure fever.

I have come across some truly wonderful, and sometimes very weird, things in these books, and I’m excited to share some of my favorite discoveries with you!

Have you been diagnosed with Consumption? Well, have I (and several of these recipe books) got a cure for you! It’s a recipe called “Snail Water”, and it’s gonna change the world.

Although there are many versions of this recipe, the one I came across first remains my favorite. First, put a quart of snails in two quarts of milk, then add the beaten yolks of forty eggs. Distill that concoction and drink the resulting liquid twice a day. If it’s too hard to stomach, sweeten with some “brown suger candy”. Eat your heart out, Mary Poppins.

You might’ve noticed some interesting spelling in the snail water recipes! Spelling wasn’t standardized in the Early Modern period, and people wrote in whatever way made sense to them. I find it reassuring; people 400 years from now will likely still get what you’re talking about, so don’t worry about it too much!

Recently, I came across my new favorite spelling of crème brûlée:

I’m often charmed to find pages dedicated to writing practice, and other miscellaneous joys.

This “Cure for a cold in Horses” was one of the inspirations for writing this post. Right out the gate, it calls for “1 quart of Ale or strong Bear” to warm up for your sniffly equine companion. I’m not sure of its effectiveness as a cold remedy but I’m pretty sure that if you want to party with your horse, this recipe is a good place to start.

These books have many recipes attributed to other people, but I usually can’t tell whether the writer knew the source personally. However, 272834 MS is full of personal connections and has become one of my favorite manuscripts. I know now that a woman named Anne Williams had friends named Catherine Jones and Mary Bennet, and I imagine them sitting around a table with their ink, pens, and paper. I imagine them trading recipes in between laughter and meandering conversation, and sometimes I imagine myself sitting with them.

Catherine is mentioned a few times, but Mary often appears throughout the book in small notes; sometimes a “Mary Bennet approved” at the end of a recipe, or simply the initials “MB”.

This note resonated with me, as someone with a Catherine in my life who often is a source of lovely recipes:

A surgeon named Hugh Napkyn compiled medicinal recipes into a book in 1631. Among these was a “charme” to cure a fever (“ague” in Early Modern parlance). The steps are quite straightforward: make a hole in an apple large enough for a sprig of rosemary to pass through, divide the apple into three pieces and cut the symbols shown into the slices, then feed the apple to the patient. Once all three pieces have been consumed, burn the rosemary. My favorite part of this spell is a trustworthy-sounding testimonial at the end: “This seldome fayleth (fails) once in three Fitts, to cure either Quotidian or Tertian AGVE, in Men, Woemen, or Children as hath often been prooved.”

Those who penned these recipe books were just people, and they suffered cooking failures like anyone else who has ever stepped foot into a kitchen with a recipe and a dream.

I’ll leave you with one last wonderful book, 271774 MS, first compiled by a woman named Sarah Jackson in 1688 and passed down through at least six hands. I often think about the hands that have turned these pages and imagine them overlapping with mine while I work.

Although the recipe book project has its challenges, I love these weird and wonderful books with all my heart. There’s so much more I could say about them, but I’ll leave my commentary here for now. I gotta get back to work photographing the rest of these manuscripts, so you can explore them yourself!