"My Mother's Booke..." two works in progress

"My Mother's Booke..." is the title of a lecture I give about the legacy of the William Penn family women as revealed in the handwritten books they left behind.  In the case of the Penns, these included ledgers and account books, and an amazing cookbook/medicinal manuscript.  One of the Penn sons had this last one copied out for him before he set sail for Pennsylvania, and to our luck he chose to use the blank pages at the end of his Grandmother's recipe book, Lady Katherine Partridge Springett: an oculist and herbalist in England the 1640's.  In this way two books had come down to us, though none of that was immediately evident and had to be teased out of the clues in the book, the handwriting and usages.

These books offered me a glimpse into the stillroom of the past, the place where medicines were made, liqueurs and cordial waters compounded, poultices and fomentations prepared. It links us to these herbalists through the most basic components of life: their food and drink and medicine.  This is the reason for the title of this blog, which i hope will be your glimpse into my stillroom.






There are very few images of women in their stillrooms, but in this c1736 picture shows a well-stocked
herbal laboratory and its confident mistress.

  






































 My Mother, Maxine Rose Booth Vannais, was a wonderful cook, and after her death last year, her file boxes of recipes were lovingly saved and her worn and taped-together cookbooks added to our shelfs.
But having studied cookbooks, it got me to thinking...

So I have decided to put together a small volumn of her recipes
 ( or receipts, as they were called in the 17th century)

 which you can read more about in the sidepage
Perhaps my own version of  "MY Mother's Book"
                                                          without the 17th century "e"

By the way,
 I am giving an expanded version of
 "My Mother's Booke" a look at the herbal legacy of European women"
 at the Women's Herbal Conference this August in New Hampshire this year.
 JOIN US!
It is a wonderful fun learning space among the beauties of nature: us and the trees!

http://www.womensherbalconference.com/