This recipe book, one of two by Margaret Oothout Wagner (1811-1871) in the library's possession, is approximately 130 pages in length and contains 187 culinary recipes and fifty-six recipes for household products, remedies, brewing and wine-making, and knitting. One receipt is dated: “To Pickle Ripe Cucumbers or Tomatos, Mrs. P. J. Wagner, Fort Plain, Oct. 21st 1857."
The recipes include Best New Year's Cake, Empress of Russia's Brine for Ham, Bird's Nest Pudding, Chicken Salad, Cracker Pie and Pudding, Cream Soda, Currant Shrub, Economical Mode of Preserving Cherries, Eve's Pudding [poem], Excellent Gingerbread, Good Jumbles, Good Sauce, Jeanie's Mode of Cooking Cabbage, Maria Nell's Coffee Cake, Pearl Ash Cake, Potatoe Pie, Puffert, Recipe for Tomato Catsup, Soft Honey Cake, Soft Waffles, Uncle Folts Recipe for Hams, and Whortleberry Pudding.
The library’s collection of the Wagner family papers contains a diary of Margaret Oothout Wagner and her autograph albums, including one that she kept when she attended Utica Female Seminary, in 1861. The collection also includes culinary recipes written in a 20-page folio, a 38-page folio, two 10-page folios, and a 4-page folio, as well as on approximately 45 loose sheets. There are also fifteen newspaper clippings with recipes. See also Margaret Oothout Wagner Recipes, ca. 1850s-1871.
