AN Irish manuscript cook book with recipes from 1755 onwards comes up at Bonhams Fine Books and Manuscripts auction in London on August 19. Lot 43, titled Rosconnel, February 25, 1755 / Receipts and cookery, includes 236 numbered recipes in several hands. There are 26 further pages of un numbered recipes including “A Friday Pudding”, “To make a Runnet”, “Dutch Beef, The Right Receipt”, “To Dry Cherrys in Bunches”, “To make Hartshorn Flumery”, “To dress Snails”, “Leg of mutton a la Daube”, “Pigeons in night gowns”, “Sauce for Wild Fowl”, “To Brew and distill Whiskey”, “To make a Devonshire Squab” , “Portable Soop”, “The famous Sally Lunn’s Breakfast Cakes” (“…by the time you have made three or four your hand will be in…”).
One of the first mentions of the famous Sally Lunn bun comes in 1776 in a poem about Dublin by the Irish poet William Preston and the first recorded mention of the bun in Bath, where it originated, is in Captain Philip Thicknesse’s 1780 guidebook to taking the waters at Bath. The recipe became enormously popular and the Sally Lunn bun can still be sampled at Bath’s eponymous tea shop.
The auction features Ruth Watson’s collection of Antiquarian Cookery Books. Lot 30 is a manuscript recipe book originally from the collection of the renowned Chicago food writer and restauranteur Arnold Shircliffe, including recipes “Written down for me by my Irish cook Margaret Berry 1854 – as done at their House”.
