Keeping a Household Book: Menus, Accounts, and Records
Direct answer. A household book was a single handwritten volume of recipes, remedies, cleaning methods, preserving notes, and often accounts. Manuscript receipt books such as Elinor Fettiplace’s from 1604 show how homes stored practical knowledge in one place. The habit still works as one notebook or document everyone in the home can trust and update.
What went into a historical household book, and why one trusted record still helps?
Long before printed cookbooks and household apps, a well-run home kept knowledge in one handwritten book, added to over years and passed through a family. Historians call these manuscript receipt books or stillroom books. A single volume might hold cooking recipes, medical remedies, cleaning formulas, preserving methods, planting notes, and running accounts.
The word "receipt" once meant any set of instructions, not only food. In larger houses the stillroom was where waters were distilled, cordials made, fruit preserved, and remedies mixed. Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book (1604) records cookery, medicine, and household management from a Gloucestershire estate. Collections such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine hold many similar books from roughly 1600 to 1900. When a method had been tested, writers often marked it probatum, proven.
What changed
Printed cookbooks, packaged products, and digital notes scattered what once lived in one volume. Medicine left the stillroom for professional care, which is a gain. Household knowledge itself still fragments easily across screens and memory. What changed is the medium. The need for one trusted place for recurring home information did not disappear.
Historical Notes
Use a single notebook or shared document everyone can reach. Useful sections mirror the old books: meals you actually cook, cleaning methods that work in your home, maintenance dates, key measurements, and a simple spending record. Menu planning fits naturally here. Borrow the probatum habit: mark entries you have tested and trust, so the book becomes a record of what works rather than a pile of things you meant to try.
Sources
- Historical accounts of the stillroom and its records, including the practice of marking tested entries probatum. See period descriptions of stillroom books held by herbal and domestic-history collections.
- U.S. National Library of Medicine, Historical Collections. Handwritten recipe and receipt books, circa 1600 to 1900, and commentary on their contents (medicine, cookery, household formulas, and accounts).
- Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book (English manuscript, dated 1604), Gloucestershire. Edited edition: Hilary Spurling, Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book: Elizabethan Country House Cooking (1986).