This collection consists of a recipe book with 65 filled pages and 26 loose sheets. The collection comprises 111 culinary recipes and fifty recipes for remedies, household products, and dyeing. Eighteen of the recipes are newspaper clippings, fifteen of which have been pasted onto pages 61-65 of the notebook. The collection appears to span the Civil War era to the turn of the twentieth century. Some recipes call for chemical leavenings used in the antebellum kitchen, including saleratus, “saleratus the consistency of common emptyings” [?], “ammonia the size of a filbert,” and alum/soda. Other recipes call for ingredients more typical of the later nineteenth century, such as Bakers chocolate, vanilla, Maizena, and “a can of corn.” Inserted in the notebook is a program for “Jubilee Session of the Alleghenian Lyceum of Alfred Academy,” dated 1857.
The recipes include Temperance Cake, Common Cracker, Baked Milk, Apple Fruit Cake, Iceland Moss, Noodles for Soup, English Dumplings, Yeast, Caledonia Cream, Buffalo Cream Cake, Hartshorn Cookies, Ammonia Cake, Chocolate Pie, and Sorgumn [sorgum] Soft Cake.