Illumination from De Villers Book of Hours 

Miscellaneous "Secrets"

Besides the health and beauty recipes, The Secretes of the Reverende Mayster Alexis of Piemount contains many recipes we have categorized as 'miscellaneous'. Food, dyes, inks, gemstones and metallurgy all make appearances throughout the volume. These instructions range from practical household tasks to more advanced work suitable for a chemistry lab.

Food

This book only has a few food recipes. They are all for sweets or jams, so it would not make a very good cookbook. There were books dedicated to cooking at the time, so it appears these were just a few recipes the author found interesting and decided to include. He includes: Spanish peaches, melon confections, candied walnuts, candied cherries and a recipe for making dishes out of sugar. By the time this book was written the price of sugar had come down significantly. A hundred years before it would have been impossible to use so much sugar in anything. [1] [2]

 Dye

 The book contains several dye recipes for bone, cloth and leather. During this time period there were sumptuary laws which dictated what a person could wear based on their social station. The only color expressly forbidden was purple, and it has been suggested that the ban applied to only a particular hue of purple. [3] Other than purple, the range of colors a person could wear was only limited by their income. Blue was popular because the woad used to make it was cheap. The book includes recipes for blue, red, crimson, yellow, blue and purple. 

Ink

There were two basic types of ink during the time this book was printed. The first was made of charcoal or soot from a lamp, and the second was a metal-gall (usually iron). Both used some type of gum as a thickener and to keep the ink on the pages. Both examples of this black ink can be found in this book along with ways to change the color of the ink to gold, silver, green red and white. These inks were used for printing, handwriting, and illumination. The printing press was in full use in Europe at the time this book was being used, and there is an ink recipe specifically for use on a printing press. Ink for writing was used much the way we use it today, appearing in business ledgers, letters, journals and so on. Illumination was a decorative technique used to enhance the pictures in books. Illumination added color and depth to the pages of books. It was used with both hand written books and with books printed on a press. 

Gemstones

There are instructions for the detection of counterfeit diamonds as well as instructions on how to counterfeit diamonds. These counterfeits would not stand up to modern scrutiny, but they appear to have been plentiful enough at the time this book was written to warrant a section on their identification. There is also a section on how to manufacture your own emeralds, rubies and sapphires. Since it could be prohibitively expensive to purchase a genuine gemstone, these techniques could generate a stone of the appropriate color and look while saving money and still achieving the desired appearance.

Metallurgy

Metallurgy is also discussed in this book. There are instructions on how to make other metals appear like gold and how to polish and protect precious metals. There are also a few sections on how to gild (decorate using thin sheets of metal) and how to get the metal to stay in place. Several gilding techniques are taught here, including a way to guild the edges of a book.