Image: Hannah Woolley · Public domain
The Queen-Like Closet
- Year
- 1670
- Era
- 17th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet, issued in London in 1670 under the name of Hannah Woolley (also spelled Wolley), gathers receipts for cookery, preserving, confectionery, and household physic alongside instructions in carving, candying, and domestic management. Among the earliest English household manuals openly attributed to a woman, it proved highly popular, going through several editions and continuations, and stands as a key source for late seventeenth-century gentlewomen's kitchen and stillroom practice.
Cooking from this book
To make a Devonshire White-pot
A classic seventeenth-century West Country baked pudding, ancestor of bread-and-butter pudding. Bake in a moderate oven (about 160 to 170 C) until just set, around 35 to 45 minutes.
Take two quarts of new milk, a penny white loaf sliced very thin, then make the milk scalding hot, then put to it the bread, and break it, and strain it through a cullender. Then put in four eggs, a little spice, sugar, raisins, and currants, and a little salt, and so bake it, but not too much, for then it will whey.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
The Cordial Cherry Water
A fragrant distilled cherry cordial typical of the stillroom waters that gentlewomen prepared as household medicines, intended both as a restorative and a domestic luxury.
Take nine pounds of red cherries, nine pints of claret wine, eight ounces of cinnamon, three ounces of nutmegs; bruise your spice, stone your cherries, and steep them in the wine, then add to them half a handful of rosemary, half a handful of balm, one quarter of a handful of sweet marjoram. Let them steep in an earthen pot twenty four hours, and as you put them into the alembeck to distil them, bruise them with your hands, and make a soft fire under them, and distil by degrees. You may mix the waters at your pleasure when you have drawn them all. When you have thus done, sweeten it with loaf-sugar, then strain it into another glass, and stop it close that no spirits go out. You may, if you please, hang a bag with musk and ambergris in it. When you use it, mix it with syrup of gilly-flowers or of violets, as you best like it. It is an excellent cordial for fainting fits, or a woman in travail, or for any one who is not well.
Reproduced from the public-domain text via Project Gutenberg. Spelling lightly modernised; the headnote is editorial.
