Finding Beulah

During my Folger fellowship (January-March 2025) I’ve been revisiting many of the manuscripts I’ve worked with over the past thirty years to think about how they might register the knowledge of women schoolmistresses, governesses and private tutors in seventeenth-century England. Over the course of my research career using these manuscripts, I’ve relished the challenge of trying to track down or identify those whose names might be inscribed neatly inside, or attached to recipes within. As Kimberley Connor recognises in her sleuthing to uncover who the ‘Margaret Baker’ whose name is inscribed in another Folger manuscript (V.a.619), was, this genealogical work can help situate the collection in time and space, and ‘add to a more holistic understanding of the context of recipe book production’.¹

The rabbit holes one can go down have become more plentiful with the assistance of online database tools like Ancestry and Find My Past, although with women’s names it remains challenging, especially if there are few attributions which can link the inscribed name into other families (as Connor managed to do). But occasionally, an unusual first name will provide the lightbulb moment, and so it has proved with Beulah/Bulah Hutson, whose name is written inside V.a.684.

‘Bulah’ was one of a set of female twins – both of whom remarkably survived to adulthood – born to John Higginbotham (d.1713/4) and his wife Mary Anne (née Cleaver, 1638-1713) and baptised in St Philip’s parish, Barbados in February 1679.² Beulah’s father had migrated to Barbados in or before 1652, where his father, John senior, (1609-73, d. Barbados) was already operating, and it looks like the Cleavers also had Barbados connections.³

At the time of her father’s will (dated 4 September 1713; proved October 1714), Beulah was married to one Henry Higginbotham, but she was previously married to a John Hudson/Hutson of London, ‘merchant’.⁴ They married at Manchester Cathedral, England on 4 August 1694 and she is named in Hutson’s will, made in the same year, as his wife and executrix.⁵ A ‘Bulah Hutson’ then married Henry Higinbotham in Cheshire on 2 January 1704/5, which would mean John Hutson died sometime between 1694 and the end of 1704; Beulah’s inscription in the manuscript belongs to these years. A ‘Beulah Highinbottom widow’ was buried on 26 November 1728 in Manchester Cathedral.⁶

Beulah’s other sister, Millicent, also gives us the connection to the other autograph in the manuscript, that of ‘Millicent Alexander’: Millicent had married and was widow to someone with the surname Alexander by the time of her father’s will in 1714, and produced a daughter, also Millicent. Either Millicent may be the source of the other autograph in the volume, but it is more likely to be Beulah Hutson’s niece, given the inexperienced hand.⁷

Beulah’s hand is only in evidence from p. 49 (‘To make Jelly of damsons’) onward, and she was probably only fifteen when she married John Hutson and inscribed her new married name in the manuscript in 1694. The Manuscript Cookbooks Survey has suggested that the bulk of the recipes in the collection reflect the tastes of the mid-, rather than later seventeenth century – pastryworks, conserves, banqueting ‘stuff’ – and so the first neatly written 48 pages of the manuscript could well be the work of an earlier generation: Beulah’s mother, Mary Anne, John Hutson’s mother (as yet unidentified) or even Alice (née Nusum/Newsome, d. 1672, Barbados), wife of Beulah’s paternal grandfather. The earlier elements in the compilation might then make this a ‘starter’ recipe collection, and an appropriate wedding gift from a mother or mother-in-law.

While there are no explicit references to the manuscript having been produced or compiled at any point in Barbados, there are clues in some of the contents to the Atlantic-Caribbean trading networks in which the Cleavers, Hutsons and Higginbothams surely operated. Most notably, the recipe collection includes a highly detailed discussion of the steps for clarifying and boiling sugar, the pre-eminent cash crop on Barbados by the 1670s (pp. 37–8). The six steps listed – from clarifying through thin syrup, thick syrup, ‘christle height’, ‘candy height’ and ‘casteing height’ – bear similarities with those in the so-called Martha Washington recipe collection, and in other manuscript collections, so are not unusual. They have also been copied from a text which the copier doesn’t quite understand, since they manage to render ‘manus Christi’ as ‘in a maner Christley height’, and proceed to copy the instructions to use the various types of boiled sugar ‘as the following receite directs you’, with no following recipe to that end.⁸ But the households Beulah lived in as a child and as a married woman would surely have been sugar-rich, and knowing how to manipulate this ingredient to produce the fine banquetting ‘stuff’ which fills the pages of the recipe collection would have been a key step on Beulah’s path to being a marriageable gentlewoman.

Other commodities tie the collection into the expanding transatlantic trade in New World materia medica. The recipe for ‘Mr Bannister’s purging ale’ (p. 100, recipe no. 197) uses sassafras, sarsaparilla and lignum vitae (guaiacum), a tree native to the Caribbean; ‘Mr Bannister’ may be John Baptist Banister (1654-92), a colonial minister and plant collector, based in Charles City, Virginia from 1679, where the Higginbothams also had connections.⁹ The ‘drinke for the Gout’ (p. 103), would also have proved a powerful purgative, containing as it did both sarsaparilla and jalap, a central American drug becoming common in European pharmacopoeia at this time. As Katrina Maydom has noted in her study of James Petiver’s late 17th and early 18th century apothecary practice in London, at the time that Beulah inscribed her name in the manuscript, these were still novel drugs for English consumers, but perhaps more familiar to those living and working in the Atlantic-Caribbean zone, like the Higginbothams.¹⁰

While my initial researches have not established whether Beulah spent any time in Barbados after her birth or during either marriage, finding Beulah has enriched how we can read this particular manuscript, and situate it in the knowledge and material worlds she and her enslaver family inhabited.

Beulah’s manuscript has been fully transcribed by the Folger’s wonderful community of volunteer transcribers. From here, page through the images. To view a transcription of an individual page, select “Permalink for this image” just below the viewer on the right, and then select the transcription tab in the panel below the viewer.