17th Century Recipe Book project completed

As we mentioned some time ago in a previous blog post, the Library has digitised 76 medical recipe books from its collections, and has now made available all the transcriptions of the recipe titles (transcriptions were created by Backstage Library Works). These titles are searchable via the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue. There are now tens of thousands of recipe titles containing original spelling and associated Library of Congress or MeSH subject headings to enable researchers to search within the text of these fascinating manuscripts. Individual pages and entire manuscripts are also available online in PDF format.

The following is MS 1, a manuscript of medicinal and culinary recipes (including a recipe for roast peacock, and another to cure bedwetting), from 1621. You can use Scribd to download this PDF as well. For best results, go to “More – View Mode – Slide mode” and view full screen.

MS1Acton_Grace