This recipe book comprises two manuscripts that have been bound together in a single volume. The inside front cover is inscribed “Osborn Parsons, Hudson,” and he compiled pages 1 through 59, while Sarah Ashley, of Hudson and Stockport, New York, compiled pages 60 through 86. The book contains 130 culinary recipes, twenty-six remedies, and nineteen recipes for brewing, winemaking, household products, and dyes. Two recipes contain dates: Mrs. Child's Recipe for "To Kook Tomatoes for Sauce to Eat with Roast Beef," page 50, is dated 1841, and a recipe for Potato Yeast, page 85, attributed to Miss Fenelia Fitch, is dated 1/10/1894. At least ten recipes call for leavenings that were largely outmoded by 1850, eight for pearl ash, a form of baking soda, and two for emptins, a liquid yeast byproduct of brewing.
The culinary recipes include Washington Cake, New Years Cakes, Election Cake, Commencement Cake, Administration Cake, Bath Cakes, Bread Cake, Connecticut Nut Cakes, and Republican Cake; How to Pickle Butternuts; Soft Waffles; Plum Puffart; Oly Cooks; Crullers or Wonders; Soft Cake in Smole [small] Pan; Alum Gingerbread; Usquebaugh Cordiall; and cures for ham and bacon. A recipe for "Ointment for a Stiff Cond." says to take "3 or 4 grene froges out the water and Boyle them in hoges lard..." The recipes for New Years Cakes, Oly Cooks (doughnuts of a sort), Plum Puffart (similar to modern coffee cake), and Soft Waffles are Dutch-American and suggest that the compilers of the book may have been partly of Dutch descent.
Tipped into the book is a recipe for "White Cake, Miss Hope S. Mosley's recipe," with the poignant note, "Written April 20, 1865 The fast day for the great National Calamity. Evening."
