Manuscript Location

Place of Origin

Date of Composition

Description

Written in a notebook bound in brown cloth and blue paper, this cookbook comprises 81 pages of recipes and an index with handwritten letter tabs at the back, all written in the same hand. It was kept by Elizabeth Welsh Horner Eppes (1832-1905), the second wife of Dr. Richard Eppes, at Appomattox Manor, a plantation in present-day Hopewell, Virginia. Located on lands first patented to the Eppes family in 1635, Appomattox Manor comprised 2,300 acres at the time of the Civil War. The manor house and surrounding land were donated to the National Park Service by the Eppes family and are now open to the public.

The recipes include: Soft ginger bread, Composition cakes, Milk Biscuit, Plumb pudding, Jumbles, Washington Cake, Cherry Bounce, Lady Cake, Ginger nuts, Cranberries Preserved, Flannel Cakes, Rolls - French, Muffins, Macaroons, Apees, Jelly Cake, Lady Madison’s Whim, Crullers, Wafers, Gingerbread Pound Cake, Preserved Pears, Croquets, Yeast, Oyster Pie, Plumb Cake, Cup Cake, Scallop Oysters, Rice Fritters, Rice Milk, Charlotte Russe, Chocolate Custard, Trifle, Moss Blanc Mange, Cottage Pudding, To Pot Herring, Mush Cakes, Jelly of Gelatin, Dried Yeast Cake, Soda Soap, Foster Cakes, Lye, Sponge Cake, Moss Jelly, Potatoe Water for cleaning cloth, Lady Fingers, French Tea Cakes, Peach Bavaroise, Brandied Green Gages, Sugar Candy, Vinegar, Calves Feet Jelly, New York Cooky, York biscuit, Racahout des Arabes [drink made with acorns], Mince Pies, Toffee, Whips, Sally Lund, Egg Tea, Beef a la mode Birmingham, Beefs Liver, Tripe, Calf’s Head, Ochra Soup, Wine, and Rusk. There are two recipes for walnut catsup on page 56, one of which is crossed out and annotated “condemned.”

A recipe for “Bed Bug Bane,” page 11, reads “take twenty five cents worth of mercury and the whites of five eggs beat them for five hours until they unite. Anoint the beds with a feather.” A table of weights and measures and liquid conversions appears on page 23.

A few clipped recipes are pasted onto the inside front cover of the book, and a few loose recipes are tucked in the very back pages. One of these reads: “Patisserie froide pour trois personnes” or “Cold Pastry for three people” Hotel de Russie Naples February /51 obtained from the old [illegible].

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