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The perennial British argument over the best way to make a cup of tea dates back to at least the 17th century, when a cookbook warned that the water is to remain upon it no longer than whiles you can say the Miserere Psalm very leisurely. Published in 1677, The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digby Kt also contains at least 50 recipes for making metheglin, a type of mead made with herbs and spices, as well as ones for stepony, a raisin wine; bragot, an ale flavoured with honey and spices; and a somewhat less tempting tea made with eggs. The 350-year-old volume is part of a large collection of antiquarian cookbooks owned by Ruth Watson, presenter of television programmes The Hotel Inspector and Country House Rescue, which are due to be sold at Bonhamsin London on 19 August. Watson put the collection together over nearly 40 years, and it also includes a handwritten recipe and household book kept by the Croft family of Stillington Hall in Yorkshire, from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries. The Crofts recorded family recipes including directions for preserving a whole pineapple, making raisin wine , as well as Mrs Haslers receipt for a thick cream cheese, which involved taking the mornings milk of 7 cows & the nights cream of 7 cows. In a rare edition of an early US cookbook, from 1830, the author advocates the use of American ingredients such as cranberries, corn, turkeys and watermelon, rather than the English, French and Italian methods of rendering things indigestible. These evils are attempted to be avoided. Good republican dishes and garnishing, proper to fill an every day bill of fare, from the condition of the poorest to the richest individual, have been principally aimed at, notes the author of the lengthily titled The Cook Not Mad, or Rational Cookery; Being a Collection of Original and Selected Receipts, Embracing not only the Art of Curing Various Kinds of Meats and Vegetables for Future Use, but of Cooking,