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Description

This book contains approximately 350 pages of handwritten culinary recipes, recipes clipped from newspapers, menus, household advice, and remedies. The culinary recipes include custards, puddings, cakes, cookies, terrapin, corned beef, Turkish coffee, and dressings.  In addition, the book has instructions for cleaning floors, polishing silver and floors, and making soap, as well as remedies for burns, colds, and seasickness.  The recipes are written in Helen Lincklaen Fairchild’s hand and seem to span the time from her marriage to her death.

Now operated as a Lorenzo State Historic Site, the estate known as Lorenzo was built by John Lincklaen and his wife, Helen Ledyard Lincklaen, in 1807. Upon the death of Mrs. Lincklaen, in 1847, Lorenzo was inherited by her nephew, Lincklaen Ledyard (1820-1864), who legally reversed his name to Ledyard Lincklaen. Ledyard Lincklaen and his wife, his second cousin Helen Clarissa Seymour (1818-1894), had one daughter, Helen Krumbhaar Lincklaen, who married Charles S. Fairchild in 1871 and who became the third owner of Lorenzo when her mother died in 1894. A Harvard graduate and an attorney, Charles Fairchild was elected Attorney General of New York in 1875, and served as Secretary of the Treasury under President Grover Cleveland from 1887 to 1889, after which he went into the banking and investment business in New York City. For most of their marriage, the Fairchilds summered at Lorenzo and spent their winters in Albany, Washington, DC, or New York City, depending on Mr. Fairchild’s professional positions.  The couple had no children.