Elinor Fettiplace
It is now known under the title Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book, with details of recipes for dishes and meals, medical remedies and tips for running the household.
The book was passed down through her family, initially to her niece, until it was handed to the husband of the twentieth-century writer Hilary Spurling.
[1] The marriage introduced Elinor to an ancient Norman family that owned large areas of heavily mortgaged land in the Vale of White Horse.
[c] According to Hilary Spurling, Elinor's biographer, the dowry may have come with conditions that her new in-laws put their finances in order by selling some of the Fettiplace land.
[20] Fettiplace's husband died in 1615 and it appears she left Appleton Manor, giving advice to her daughter-in-law, Margaret, on how best to run it.
[1] Fettiplace returned to within her own family's orbit at Sapperton, and married a man from Gloucester, Edward Rogers, who died in 1623.
[17] Spurling concludes Fettiplace was an "efficient and practised manager" in the way she ran her household and, when her husband was absent, the family estate.
[23] To make serop of tobaccho Take a quart of water & three ounces of tobaccho, put the tobaccho in the water, & let it lie a night & a day close covered, then boile it to reduce it from a quart to a pinte, then straine it, & put to everie pinte a pound of sugar, then put in the whites of three or fowre eggs finelie beaten, then set it on the fire, & when it boiles scum it, then cover it close, & let it boile, till it bee serop.
Ladies of the Elizabethan age would often keep manuscript books with details of "receipts" for dishes, meals, medical remedies and tips for running the household.
[28] The food writer C. Anne Wilson considers it likely that the recipes were collected over several years:[29] the social historian Janet Theophano suggests Fettiplace began writing it under her mother's direction.
[32] Reviewing the work, the historian A. L. Rowse described it as "a fascinating find" that deserved "to taste of the Victorian Mrs Beeton's success as a best seller".
[25] The Appleton estate was largely self-sufficient, and the Receipt Book describes how to make various household products, including perfume, ink, toothpaste, rat poison and weed killer.
[36][j] Among the other medicinal entries included in the book were eleven remedies for a bad back, seven for insomnia, thirty-six for wound dressing, forty-five for failing eyesight, sixteen for coughs and twenty-four for stomach ache.
