Manuscript Location

Kentucky Historical Society, Martin F. Schmidt Research Library

Place of Origin

United States ➔ Kentucky

Date of Composition

recipes 1864-1874

Description

The bulk of this fascinating document consists of a "historical diary" kept from 1862 to 1864 by Jesse Hyde, while he was serving as a sergeant with the First Kentucky Infantry, Company H of the Union Army during the Civil War. The diary begins with a title page written on the recto of the front flyleaf of the notebook, and the dated entries are written in pencil, in a neat hand, on pages 1 through 128. Following the heading "Valuable Recipes, on page 129, recipes are written, again in a neat penciled hand, through page 148. An unpaginated two-page alphabetical index to the recipes follows. Not included in the index are a handful of recipes, mostly for drinks, that appear to be pasted onto the back flyleaf following the index, and two pages of recipes written at the front of the book. (One of these pages is glued on to the back of the front cover, and the other is written on the verso of the front flyleaf, which Hyde has scrupulously ruled in pencil.) It is not clear when Hyde wrote these recipes. The date 1864 is written at the head of the index. But written in red ink, on the back flyleaf, is the note: "108 Valuable Recipes in this book, written by J. Hyde in March 1874." My guess is that the recipes recorded in the index date from around 1864, while the recipes following the index and at the front of the book were written between 1864 and 1874.  

The bulk of Hyde's recipes are medical and practical. But there are also a fair number of culinary recipes, and many of these are of unusually high interest. "New Kind of Bread," page 131, is essentially the ancient corn griddle cakes that are often called corn dodgers. What may be "new" about this bread are the three eggs that the recipe calls for, which would tenderize and enrich these very plain cakes. (These cakes do not contain chemical leavening, nor does the "Rice Corn Bread" on page 134, which is interesting.) Also on page 131 there is a "rule," in the form of a table, which gives the boiling times and sugar amounts for canning various fruits. Home canning was a new process in 1864, introduced just a decade or so earlier. "Butter Crackers," page 147, are something like beaten biscuits but richer and different in appearance. The crackers were evidently sold commercially in Kentucky in Hyde's time, for the recipe advises, "pinch off pieces [of the dough] and roll out each cracker by itself, if you wish them to resemble baker crackers."  "Buckwheat Shortcake," also on page 147, is another unusual, perhaps regional recipe. It is simply buckwheat flour and sour milk mixed "quite thick" with soda and baked in a buttered pan in a stove oven. 

Among the drink recipes that follow the index is an ingenious one titled "Cream Soda without a fountain." First you boil up a brown sugar syrup that is flavored with nutmeg and oil of lemon and clarified with egg whites and gum Arabic. Then you strain the syrup, divide it in two parts, and add carbonate of soda to one half and tartaric acid (cream of tartar) to the other. To make a serving, you put three or four spoonfuls of each mixture into separate glasses one-third filled with water. When you combine the two mixtures in a third glass, the alkaline and acid react, producing a a fizzy soda.

Among the recipes pasted to the back of the front cover are "Jellies without fruit" (gelatins flavored with extracts, the idea behind Jell-O, introduced in the 1890s), two recipes for very plain thin cookies titled "Nice Cake without Eggs or Milk" and "Sugar Crackers," and a plain white potato pudding. The recipes written on the back of the front flyleaf include a method for preserving fresh meat by submerging it buttermilk or sour milk, an interesting recipe for tomatoes preserved in molasses, and a "Cement for canning fruit." Made by melting a pound of rosin with one ounce each of lard, tallow, and beeswax, this "cement" seems to be a predecessor of the later paraffin.