Manuscript Location

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

Place of Origin

United States

Date of Composition

ca. 1730-1750

Description

This cookbook is written in a leather-bound notebook embossed with the word "Recipts" [sic]. The notebook contains 260 pages numbered in ink, but only the first 21 pages contain recipes. All of the recipes are for "cakes" as the word was understood in eighteenth-century Anglo-America: large cakes, individual cakes (cookies), biscuits, tea cakes, tea breads, and gingerbread.

Although the book was compiled in America, the recipes are essentially English. Several of the recipes were copied with only slight rewording from English cookbook author E. Smith's The Compleat Housewife, first published in 1729, and the professional phrasing and unusually precise measures of many other recipes suggest that they were at least partially derived from printed sources.

Many of the recipes, including those indebted to printed sources, contain observations and information added by the author. For example, the book's close version of E. Smith's Another Plum Cake with Almonds adds a note on the management of the oven. The recipe for White Wafers attempts to express the precise temperature of the irons ("pretty hot [but not too hot]") to ensure that wafers will be, in fact, white. The recipe for rusks specifies the exact size and shape of the free-form loaf from which the individual rusks are to be cut after the loaf is baked, as well as the exact thickness the individual rusks. The recipe then goes on to outline a technique for raising the oven heat when the rusks are returned to it to be browned and crisped. The recipe for oatcakes—unusual in any American cookbook, especially of this early date—gives a homely method of raising the batter by letting it stand overnight in a (wooden) tub or bowl that has previously contained yeast leaven.

Also of interest, this manuscript contains three rare recipes for modern English baked gingerbread in its earliest manifestations. All are without chemical leavening, which was unknown in Anglo-America at this early date. One is made with honey rather than treacle (or molasses), and another is titled "pepper cake" and is spiced with black pepper rather than ginger.

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