Manuscript Location

New York Public Library, Schwarzman Building - Manuscripts & Archives Division

Place of Origin

United States

Date of Composition

ca. 1805-1810

Description

The first forty-eight pages of this manuscript are mostly given over to culinary recipes (a few medical recipes are mixed in), while the remaining pages comprise non-culinary material: medical remedies; formulas for dye, soap, shoe blacking, whitewash, and weather-proofing; and directions for preventing vegetables from being damaged after a frost and for protecting fruit trees from worms.

The culinary recipes are fairly evenly divided between sweet dishes, cakes, and tea breads, on the one hand, and savory dishes, on the other. Several recipes suggest that this book may be of the South: a rare recipe for yeast-raised gingerbread similar to one outlined in the 1770 manuscript cookbook of South Carolinian Harriot Pinkney Horry; an equally rare recipe for fresh fig pudding nearly identical to a recipe printed in Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife, published in 1847; and recipes for pickled shrimp, tomatoes, and peaches, which are more common in southern printed antebellum cookbooks than in those of the North. (Presumably, the compiler of this manuscript copied the fresh fig pudding from a recipe circulating in the early nineteenth century. Some decades later, Sarah Rutledge appropriated the same recipe for her book.)