Manuscript Recipe Book,

Bookseller Notes

Early nineteenth-century manuscript book of recipes and cures from Ireland. Recipes such as rules for cooking all kinds of meats and fowl (including lark and snipe), as well as potato soup, Sally Lunns, pickled lemons, rice porridge, punch jelly, Shrewsberry cakes, 'Mrs. Caine's curry powder' and - most unusually - a version of persico liqueur. The rural Irish version here makes use of redcurrants and whiskey, in place of the more conventional peach from which it derives its name. The cures include 'nettle syrup, a cure for the spitting of blood', a specific treatment - 'For M.M [presumably a Magrath] by order of Doctor Castle', and a means of distinguishing aralic acid from Epsom salts by applying ink, taken from the British Medical Observer. Many of the recipes are initialled, named or dated, the earliest being 1818. Bawn James in New Ross, Co. Wexford, was the home of several generations of Magraths.