Image: After Gerhard von Kügelgen · Public domain
The Widowes Treasure
- Year
- 1585
- Era
- 16th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English pre-1800
The Widowes Treasure, first published in 1585, is an Elizabethan compendium of household receipts encompassing cookery, the preserving of fruits and meats, and a substantial body of medicinal and physick remedies. Issued anonymously, it belongs to the formative tradition of English domestic manuals aimed at the housewife, blending kitchen instruction with practical healing. Reprinted several times into the seventeenth century, it remains a valuable witness to Elizabethan culinary and pharmaceutical practice.
Cooking from this book
Marchpane
Signature dishFew confections capture the Elizabethan still-room better than marchpane, the gilded almond and sugar centrepiece that crowned banquet tables of the period. The Widowes Treasure sits firmly in that tradition of household manuals where cookery, preserving and physic mingled on the same page, and its inclusion of such a showpiece sweetmeat reflects the dual role of the Tudor housewife as both confectioner and healer. Marchpane endures as the emblem of this little book's domestic world.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
