Kislak Center Recipe Books

About

The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania houses a wide variety of recipe books among its collections. These include culinary recipes, comprising food and drink; medicinal recipes, for both humans and animals; household recipes, for cleaning supplies, inks, and other materials used in a home setting; chemical and alchemical recipes; and industrial recipes. Some of these recipes include apothecary and alchemical symbols. The recipe books selected for this transcription project cover most of these types of recipes, providing an opportunity to test out various transcription challenges associated with this material.

Works

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Arts and sciences; chemistry.

[England], 1777. Collection of recipes (numbered 1-253 with many errors) for alchemical and practical applications such as making candles, butter, varnish, many types of ink (including a recipe for "magic ink", p. 201), sealant for waterproofing shoes (p. 15), cement for mending broken china or...

255 pages: 2% indexed, 3% transcribed, 6% needs review

Recipe book :; [manuscript].

[United States], 1800-1843. Comprised chiefly of culinary recipes from the middle Atlantic region of the United States with recipes for rock fish, shad, sturgeon, crabs, and oysters, as well as recipes for preparing wild ducks, meats, pickles, preserves, cakes and biscuits, keeklings, puddings,...

211 pages: 0% indexed, 0% transcribed, 1% needs review

[Recipe book]; [manuscript].; Receipt book

[England, 1780-1850] Begins with an 18th-century, undated section of medical recipes, primarily for horses and other animals, but with some remedies for worms in children, ague, heart burn, rheumatism, etc. (p. 1-26), with a listing of the contents of this section on f. i recto. Remainder of the...

169 pages: 1% indexed, 1% transcribed, 2% needs review

Subject Categories

People, Places

Transcription Conventions

Spelling: Maintain original spelling (including u/v, i/j, and ff). Long "s" should be replaced with a regular "s". Terminal long "i" characters are transcribed as "i" not "j".
Hyphenation: Preserve hyphens (including "=" characters) at the ends of lines.
Capitalization: Maintain original
Punctuation: Add modern periods, but don't add punctuation like commas and apostrophes.
Deletions: Deleted characters and words are tagged as such and then displayed with the line through them.
Symbols: For apothecary and alchemical symbols, use these symbols followed by the meaning of the symbol in brackets: Rx [recipe]; ℈ [scruple]; ʒ [dram]; ʒs [half dram]; ℥ [ounce]; ℥s [half ounce]; ℔ [pound].
For roman numerals following symbols that indicate amount, i.e., j=1, ij=2, iij= 3, v=5, type arabic numeral in brackets following roman numeral: i [1], ii [2], iii [3], v [5].