Love it! Also, "Fun fact: the well known ampersand, &, was originally a ligature for “et”, meaning “and” in Latin," completely amazed me. I never knew.
The one in the second column from the left (again, bottom row) is how I write my ampersands by hand.
Also in some of the handwritten forms like this one:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ampersand-handwritin...
It's basically a 't' with the cross-bar curled over to form something like an 'e'.
I don't have any citations, but I'm pretty sure most of this evolution pre-dated the concept of "fonts," when all documents were handwritten manuscripts.
I have no definitive source, my understanding came from a conversation with a typographer 10+ years ago.
A little digging around suggests that receipt was in use in English (meaning list of ingredients) both in the culinary and pharmaceutical sense from the 14th century, and recipe was introduced a couple of hundred years later. Both, of course, from the same Latin root.
It's actually more complex than simply adding a slash to indicate you're omitting letters. Both the position of the mark and the kind of mark you make indicate exactly what letters are being omitted. It's a medieval form of shorthand, except unlike modern shorthand, it appears in all kinds of books. Back when every copy of every book had to be written by hand, it was acceptable to take shortcuts.
Oh, and the really cool part is that scribal abbreviations were the banner feature of Unicode 5.1 (you can thank MUFI for putting the work into getting these into Unicode), so you can actually use them in text now!