Manuscript Location

Duke University, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Place of Origin

United States ➔ New Jersey

Date of Composition

circa 1750-1850

Description

This cookbook was written by multiple members of the Stockton family from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. According to Wanda Gunning and Constance Grieff, who studied this cookbook while working with the historic Stockton homestead, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2001, one of these hands appears to be that of Annis Boudinot Stockton (1736-1801), a well-known poet who published in many leading newspapers and magazines of her day. Grieff and Gunning write, "In her later years, probably in the 1790s, Annis Boudinot Stockton had her daughters and granddaughters copy out recipes, as well as her poetry. There are two copybooks with recipes among the family papers at the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton University Library, the contents of which are not identical. The one at the Historical Society is accompanied by a letter [from Annis Stockton] to her daughter, Mary Stockton Hunter, which notes, "'I enclose to you a book of my receipts which I promised you - they are not catch penny you may depend, but collected from the experience of my mother, my own, and many of my friends.'"

The cover of this cookbook bears the name H. B. Olmstead, who was Hannah Boudinot (Field) Olmstead (1806-1880), a granddaughter of Annis Boudinot Stockton. Hannah Boudinot Olmstead was presumably one of the authors of the cookbook. Another may have been Mary Field, whose name appears on the endpaper of the cookbook. She may have been a daughter-in-law or granddaughter of Annis Boudinot Stockton. In 1894, Hannah B. Olmstead's daughter, Julia Rush Olmstead (1843-1915), married James Augustus Bryan, who seems to have been a nephew of John Heritage Bryan. The fact that the cookbook was collected in the Bryan papers suggests that the cookbook was owned for some years by Hannah Boudinot Olmstead and then passed down to her daughter Julia.

Elias Boudinot, a brother of Annis Boudinot Stockton, married Hannah Stockton, a sister of Annis Boudinot Stockton's husband, Richard Stockton. The cookbook of Hannah Stockton Boudinot is in the collection of Princeton University; see the Princeton University listings in this database.