[English manuscript/typescript recipe book – Murphy, R.H.]

[R.H. Murphy Cookery Book].

[United Kingdom: N.d., circa 1920s].

Quarto-sized spring-back binder (29 x 24 cm.), [10], 84 pages, numbered by hand. Detailed table of contents. Title from cover. Many leaves are carbon, with a few the original, and most leaves have a few holograph edits. Paper watermarked “Silver Line”. An illustrated advertisement for the “Rekarts Instantaneous Spring Back Binder” pasted-down to front interior binding panel. Laid-in is an original photograph (20.5 x 16 cm.), signed by the photographer "Thos. Tindall, Hancock?" (the subject of the photo is presumably the compiler, R.H. Murphy). ~ A “manuscript" cookbook with more than three hundred eighty recipes in ditto or mimeograph (alternating blue or black ink), many with holograph edits. Based on the style of edits (textual and not culinary) and the detailed Table of Contents, it seems likely this was a compilation being prepared for publication. We have not, however, been able to identify a published work that corresponds with this text. After the nine page table of contents, listing all the recipes, there are three pages of miscellaneous remarks on cooking followed by sections on soups, fish, breakfast dishes, joints and meats, sweets and puddings, iced sweets, sweets and puddings and desserts again, savouries, vegetables, sauces, liquids, juices and jams and cakes and breads. Desserts, or sweets, are the vast majority of recipes. Another section, "Knitting and Miscellaneous" though referred to in the table of contents, is missing. A range of recipes from various traditions is included (spellings original): Mulligtawn soup, palestine soup, becamel of chicken, Ketcherei with Finnan Haddock, lobster a la Neuberg, a breakfast cold chicken cream in aspic, Neapolitan eggs, hashed mutton, beef galantine, sardine fritters, devils on horseback, angels on horseback, Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Dunsmuir's Prize cake, Sally Lunn, Jessica's eggless cake, a faroli souffle, chocolate drops. Some recipes are labeled “War”, likely wartime recipes, which would at least provide an earliest date as during or post-WWI. Attributions are given for some recipes, “Alice”, “Gwen”, “Francis”, “Olivia”, “Dorothy”, “Margaret”, “Jessica”, "Mrs. Allen", “Dr. Lumsden”, “Mrs. Freeman, Plymouth”, “Miss Fyfe”, “Alice Monroe”, "Mrs. Hall”, “Nonnie Bennett”, etc. The frequent use of first names indicates a casualness not seen in most earlier compilations. ~ In a brown, pebbled cloth-covered spring-back binder, gilt-titled on the front board. Some light soil to some text leaves, and some closed tears to edges of interior folder. Light dusting to boards, other wise very good.

Price: $1,200.00