The Queens closet opened. Being incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying, &c. Which were presented to the Queen by the most experienc'd persons of the times, many whereof were had in esteem when she pleased to descend to private recreations. The tenth edition, corrected, with many new and large additions; together with three exact tables MEDICINE. COOKERY. W[alter?]. M[ontague?]

A nice copy in modern blind-ruled calfskin. Complete with the engraved frontispiece. Small stains to blank margin of portrait leaf, some very light marginal damp-staining to the outer margin of the opening gatherings, gathering E spotted, occ. small ink stains and minor soiling, last gathering with slightly darker dampstain, last leaf lightly soiled. A piece of fallen type has left its inky impression on p. 25. With two divisional title pages for "A Queen s Delight"(leaf H12) and "The Compleat Cook"(leaf N8). " The Queens Closet Opened', one of the most popular 17th-century household handbooks first printed in 1655, is a collection of medical remedies, advice on preserves, and culinary recipes claimed to be used in the royal household of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I."(Pahta) The volume includes two additional texts (as issued), each with separate title page and imprint: AQueensdelight; or, The art of preserving, conserving and candying (London, 1696) and The compleat cook: expertly prescribing the most ready ways, whether Italian, Spanish or French, for dressing of flesh and fish, ordering of sauces, or making of pastry (London, 1695). "'The Queens closet opened' advertises itself as a collection of recipes presented to the Queen Henrietta Maria and Transcribed from the true Copies of her MAJESTIES own Receipt Books, by W. M. one of her late servants . W. M. has been linked by Jayne Archer to Henrietta Maria s longtime confidante and advisor, Walter Montagu. Henrietta Maria s court did include a number of physicians, natural philosophers and apothecaries such as Theodore de Mayerne, Sir Kenelm Digby, John Evelyn and John Parkinson. Their impact is apparent in the recipes within the collection: the volume includes, for instance, A Purge by Dr. Mayerne as well as Aqua Mirabilis, Sir Kenelm Digbies way "Like both Elizabeth Grey's 'A Choice Manual' and Aletheia Howard's 'Natura Exenterata', 'The Queens closet' comprises two volumes. The first, The Pearl of Practice , is devoted to Accurate, Physical, and Chirurgical Receipts ; the second, A Queens Delight , contains recipes for confection, distillation and conserving. [This edition has a third volume added, 'The Compleat Cook', with recipes for preparing meat and fish, cooking sauces, and making pastry.] The recipes in The Pearl of Practice , like those in 'A Choice Manual', contain a mixture of Galenic, Paracelsian, magical and herbal remedies. Those in A Queens Delight follow the tradition established by Plat and Partridge In the earlier books of secrets, recipes were attributed to their makers in a way that assumed that a secret is a result of a distinctive act of making. Following this tradition, many recipes in 'The Queens closet' are ascribed to physicians, apothecaries and members of the court and gentry: Dr. Atkinsons excellent Perfume against the Plague , The Lady Worcesters Medicine for the Greensickness , Dr. Eaglestones cure for the Small Pocks or Measles "The volume also identifies its contributors by praising them as the most Experienced Persons of our Times (title page). In Aristotelian scholasticism, experience had meant that which happens all or most of the time, but for seventeenth-century English natural philosophers, it now referred to something that happens at a particular moment, in a particular place. It is this larger shift that, in the emergent experimental sciences, allows particular and artificially contrived events to become the basis of a new kind of scientific knowledge. The experiences that approve a number of these recipes refer to particular moments of efficacy: we are given A drink for the Plague or Pestilent Feaver proved by the Countess of Arundel in the year 1603 as well as A Medicine for a Dropsie approved by the Lady Hobby, who was cured her self by it . 'The Queens closet' is a courtly recipe book that both evokes a lost i