With so many gorgeous handwritten recipe books on display in the exhibition, it’s a struggle to pick a favourite.

I have chosen MS507, a 17th or 18th century collection of medical and culinary receipts (a word used for ‘instructions’) which contains a recipe for ‘The Lady Hewit’s Water’. I love this recipe because it reveals so much about how the recipes worked and who wrote them.

Lady Hewit’s Water contains around 80 ingredients – if you use your preferred internet search engine to find a modern recipe with more ingredients than that, please let us know! Many of the ingredients are familiar to us today, including lavender, pimpernel, parsley, rosemary, maiden hair and field daisies, to name a few. Most people living in poorer, rural communities could not afford doctors’ fees, so they treated themselves at home using ingredients from kitchen gardens or the local area. In the pre-industrial period, when transport was not easily accessible, most communities had to make do with what they could grow, or what could be gathered locally.

The instructions at the bottom of the page tell us to ‘take a handful [of each of these Herbs] when clean picked from ye stalks’. A ‘handful’ is a nicely vague unit of measurement, implying no specialist measuring equipment is required – this is clearly a recipe to be made in the home.

Remedies such as Lady Hewit’s Water were treatments based on how the virtues or intrinsic properties of plants act on the body to correct imbalances in the four humours (the theory propounded by the ancient Greek doctor Galen). Plants in particular, because of their variety and local availability, were widely used, but the remedies might also contain animal matter and imported or luxury elements, such as spices or apothecaries’ preparations…

Turn the page, and Lady Hewit’s Water starts to get interesting. Suddenly we have more expensive and exotic ingredients to source, such as ‘gallingal’ (galangal, a spice from Southeast Asia), and ‘Indian Snake root in powder’ (an evergreen shrub also from Southeast Asia). And what on earth does the recipe mean by ‘Dragons’? Snap dragons, perhaps?

Additionally, the instructions on the right-hand page describe how to prepare the recipe:

‘When ye herbs are picked shred them smal[l] mix them & put them into an earthen pot, Put ye seeds spices and drugs (being bruised in a mortar) into ye midst of ye herbs Then pour upon them as much of ye best sherry or Canary as will cover ye herbs, so let them steep twenty four hours Then put it into a limbick and from this quantity of Ingredi=ents draw three pints of water, which being mixed will be strong enough; but if you desire to have it smaller you may take a pint more from ye same stilling.’

For women, making preparations in a still room may not have felt very different to preparing the family’s meals. These activities were all part of the daily rigours and needs of everyday living. As the women of the household were responsible for the health and wellbeing of family, servants, tenant farmers, and even animals, the still room was extremely important to the running of a household.

Making waters and other medicines by distillation would have been a marketable skill, even a profession – the sheer number of recipes for waters in the recipe books suggests that this skill was widespread. 

‘The Lady Hewit’s Water’ is a recipe probably created and shared by an aristocratic woman (which would explain the use of exotic, expensive ingredients). Its inclusion in the book does not mean that the author knew Lady Hewit – recipes were shared far beyond social circles. What it does tell us is that because of their privileged position, there may have been an expectation that aristocratic women should look after their community’s health, as well as their own family’s, and sharing endorsed recipes was one way to do this.

On the final page of The Lady Hewit’s Water, the recipe states that ‘June is ye properest time to make this water ye herbs being then best’. People living in agrarian communities were closely connected to the seasons – in fact, lives often depended upon knowing when food would be available, and how it could be preserved. The recipe books are full of intricate knowledge like this, detailing when ingredients are at their best, and how they should be used to get the most out of them.

To learn more about the fascinating recipes in our collection, you can visit Healing words at the RCP’s headquarters in Regent’s Park, London, until 25 July 2025. Highlights of the exhibition can be viewed on our website, and our entire collection of manuscript recipe books can be browsed via the Internet Archive.

Please be aware, this exhibition, and some of the books linked to in this article, contain descriptions of cruelty to animals and medical procedures on children.