Our Recipe Books
The Folger Shakespeare Library holds the world’s largest collection of handwritten recipe books from early modern Britain. These books, like the one pictured here by Mrs. Knight, were often compiled by women who collected culinary and medicinal recipes from family, neighbors, and the published books of professional cooks and doctors. Passed down and added to from one generation to the next, recipe books provide a unique window into changing tastes and new ingredients.
How would you like to work with our recipe books?
Handwritten Recipe Books
Manuscript recipe books have been at the heart of our project. Hundreds of volunteers have collaborated with us to transcribe them. You can explore these books through full-text search of the images, downloadable reading copies, a text-file of the entire corpus, and resources for using transcriptions in the classroom.
Composite image of ownership marks from Folger manuscript recipe books V.a.561; V.a.456; V.a.20; W.b.668; V.a.215; V.a.397; V.a.468; V.a.450; V.a.434; V.b.301; V.a.612; W.a.317; W.a.318; V.a.600; W.a.302; V.a.619; V.a.429; V.a.430; V.a.401; V.a.561; W.a.112; V.a.680; V.a.697; V.a.396; Flourish detail from “Cookery and medicinal recipes,” V.a.429; “The History of the Old and the New Testament,” 182- 899f; Manicule from “Cookery and medicinal recipes of the Granville family,” V.a.430; “Mrs. Knight’s receipt book,” W.b.79. All images are from the collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Unless under non-Folger copyright, images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Language use changes over time, as do research interests. Please see the Folger’s Statement on Potentially Harmful Language in Collection Description for the work our cataloguers and others are doing to redress outmoded, one-sided, and exclusionary descriptions of rare materials.