[PEGGE (SAMUEL)]

The Forme of Cury, a Roll of Ancient English Cookery, 1780

Footnotes

THE IRISH ANTIQUARY LADY MOIRA'S COPY OF THE FORME OF CURY, a collection of medieval English recipes by "the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II", here first published by the Lincolnshire antiquary Samuel Pegge. Originally found on a fourteenth century scroll now in the John Ryland Library, the recipes feature the first known mention of ingredients such as olive oil, gourds, mace and cloves, and early pasta dishes.

Provenance: Elizabeth Rawdon [née Hastings], Baroness Hastings and Countess of Moira in Ireland (1731–1808), ownership signatures on title and page ix ("E. Moira Hastings" and "Moira" respectively). After early involvement with John Wesley, with whom she fell out, Lady Moira became a well-known Dublin literary patron and antiquarian. In the 1780s she befriended the young Maria Edgeworth, who used her as a model for characters in three of her novels, and after 1792 she became a keen defendant of Mary Wollstonecraft in the face of attacks from some members of the Irish clergy. As an antiquarian Lady Moira was instrumental in encouraging her husband to become one of the founder members of the Royal Irish Academy, and in 1783 she became the first woman to have an article published in Archaeologia when it printed her findings concerning the discovery of a 'bog body' on the Rawdon estate, the first properly documented report on the discovery of a human skeleton.