Why read Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book?

Book cover of Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking

Book description

Brilliantly compiled and presented by the celebrated biographer, Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book has become a classic in the history of English cooking, and an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the fabric of everyday Elizabethan life.

'Hilary Spurling has done brilliantly ... Being both a scholar and a cook seems…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Lizzie Collingham

Author

In among the diaries and photographs, medal collections, old-fashioned games and mother of pearl counters that Hilary Spurling helped her husband clear from a great-aunt’s London house in the 1970s, she found the seventeenth-century, leather-bound manuscript cookbook of Lady Elinor Fettiplace. Lady Elinor lived with her husband in Appleton manor a few miles south-west of Oxford from 1589 until her death in 1647. The book is one of very few manuscript cookbooks to have survived from this time and from the marginal annotations noting timings and quantities, as well as extra ingredients, it is clear that Lady Elinor used it…

From Lizzie's list on The best books on food and history.