Though the original purpose of this volume was recording cooking recipes for things like ginger bread and short bread (two of the recipes seen above), it also ended up being a place to press ferns and a place to copy out favorite passages of poetry and prose for a teenage girl named Helen Brackenridg.  The cookbook section of the manuscript appears to have been begun in 1726, a date recorded in the front of the volume, while Helen Brackenridg’s contributions date only a little bit later: 1732.

On this final page of the cookery manuscript, Brackenridg’s writing bleeds through from the opposite side.

([Cookery manuscript and literary miscellanies], 1726-1732.  MS.1950.011)