The book provides a direct view of Elizabethan era cookery in an aristocratic country house, with Fettiplace's notes on household management.

Born in around 1570 in Gloucestershire, she married Sir Richard in 1589 at the age of 19, and became part of an ancient land owning family that had acquired large debts and mortgages, having originally become wealthy from wool.

[11] Many corrections are visible in the manuscript, from simple proof-reading to the addition of ingredients, changes to quantities and preparation times, and alternative methods.

Spurling describes the text as being clear and simple: to preserve the Elizabethan feeling of the recipes, she limits her interventions to making the minimum of corrections necessary to avoid confusion.

[6] Editions include:[27] Elinor Fettiplace provides recipes for various forms of bread, such as buttered loaves; for apple fritters; preserves and pickles; and a celebration cake for 100 people.

[28] The following recipe for dressing a shoulder of mutton calls for the use of the newly-available citrus fruits: it also illustrates the nature of Fettiplace's spellings and her individual style of writing:[29] Take a showlder of mutton and being halfe Roasted, Cut it in great slices and save the gravie then take Clarret wine and sinamond & sugar with a little Cloves and mace beatne and the peel of an oringe Cut thin and minced very smale.

[29]Fettiplace included a recipe for "White Bisket Bread", nowadays called meringue, using one and a half pounds of sugar, a handful of flour, and twelve beaten eggwhites.

The recipe is older than François Massialot's 1692 work Nouvelle instruction pour les confitures where meringues first appear in French cuisine.

[30][31] Paula Deitz, writing in The New York Times, quotes Spurling's claim that the book describes "many aspects of Elizabethan household life about which historians had no knowledge".

[7] The Oxford historian A. L. Rowse described the book as "a fascinating find",[7] and wrote that it deserved "to taste of the Victorian Mrs. Beeton's success as a best seller".

[7] The novelist Lawrence Norfolk, writing in The Guardian, described the book as containing "recipes, remedies and preserving methods ... gathered over many years, almost like annotations in a family Bible".

[1] He mentions especially "delicate cat's tongue biscuits", light sauces, and "liaisons whisked up" and describes Fettiplace's recipes as "a sophisticated cuisine but presented as typical of the time.