Search our recipes by title

We announced in April that the Library’s 17th century recipe books have been digitised in their entirety and mounted online via the Wellcome Library Archive and Manuscript Catalogue. Now we are in the process of making the recipe title transcriptions available to enable deeper searching into the actual text of the manuscripts.

Each image has now been described in the catalogue. This comprises the fully transcribed recipe titles (using original spellings) visible on that image, and the appropriate Medical Subject Headings and/or Library of Congress subject headings.

Each record contains a link to a PDF of the image in question, which can be reused under a Creative Commons license. To see the complete cover-to-cover PDF of a manuscript, and/or the other pages contained in it, click on “See this in context” near the top of the record.

So far over a dozen manuscripts have been described in this way, with the rest coming online over the summer.

For examples, see Lady Ayscough’s Receits of phisick and chirurgery, dated 1692, including such recipes as: For the Piles being outward, For ye wormis for A child, Wind Collicke, and To expell ye Pox and preserve ye heart.