Pendleton Family Cookbooks, 1846-ca. 1920

View Catalog Record
[Library Title: Cookbooks (four volumes)]

Manuscript Cookbooks Survey Database ID#
1286
Place of Origin
United States ➔ Virginia
United States ➔ New York
Date of Composition
1846-ca. 1920
Description

This collection comprises four manuscript cookbooks compiled by women of the Pendleton family, likely originally of Virginia, between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The manuscripts are housed in a single custom-made protective book case.

Compiled in a notebook measuring 8 X 5 1/2 inches, the earliest manuscript in the collection is inscribed on the front cover: Mrs. Mary Jane Pendleton / Book of Receipts / January / 1846. The book is written in a single elegant hand and contains approximately fifty recipes, mostly for tea breads, puddings, and cakes. The recipes are organized under general headings, which are indexed at the front.  A number of recipes are attributed to persons explicitly or implicitly identified as members of the Pendleton family, including Cornmeal Pudding, Mrs. E. W. P. (Pendleton); Potato Pudding, Mrs. E. W. Pendleton; Soda Cake, V. A. P.; and Washington Cake, L. C. P.  Of particular note is a recipe for Tyler Pudding, which also appears, verbatim, in the unsigned, undated manuscript from this collection (see directly below).  The pudding is named for John Tyler, a Virginia planter and the tenth U. S. president (1841-1845), who is particularly known for his vigorous support of the annexation of Texas.  The pudding is outlined in a number of southern cookbooks published after the Civil War, sometimes as “Texas Pudding,” when nostalgia for antebellum southern ways was intense throughout the South. This recipe indicates that the pudding was not purely a product of that nostalgia but was contemporary with the Tyler presidency, or nearly so. Tyler pudding is baked in a pastry crust and is, in modern terms, essentially a chess pie.

Compiled in a fragile notebook measuring 7 1/2 x 6 inches, the one manuscript in this collection that is neither signed nor dated was likely compiled around the same time as Mary Jane Pendleton’s book, perhaps by a sister or other close relative of Mary Jane Pendleton given the similarity of the hands in the two books.  (The book includes a few recipes written in other hands.) The book contains approximately 100 pages of recipes, mostly for tea and breakfast breads, desserts, cakes, and pickles.  The book attributes a recipe for blancmange to Mary Randolph, author of The Virginia House-Wife (1824), which was canonical across the South, and features many recipes from English cookbook author Eliza Acton’s Modern Cooking for Private Families (1845), which was published in American edition, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale, also in 1845. The book includes a reference to “Peter Cooper’s Refined American Isinglass,” the first American sheet gelatin, which revolutionized the making of gelatin desserts in America—and which was a major source of the fortune that built Cooper Union, an arts college in New York City, where Abraham Lincoln gave his famous anti-slavery Cooper Union Address in 1860.   

A third manuscript in this collection is inscribed “E. W. Pendleton” (to whom Mary Jane Pendleton attributes several of her recipes) and is dated “Sept. 1870.” Written in a notebook measuring 6 1/2 x 4 inches, it contains the following recipes: Butter sponge cake; Cream for B. Sponge in place of jelly [cream meaning filling]; Jelly Roll Cake; Batter cakes [pancakes]; Caramel; Ice cream cakes [cakes to be eaten with ice cream]; Chocolate cake; Cup Cake [ a large cake whose batter is measured  by the cup]; Raspberry Vinegar [dated 1873]; Drop Cake [noted as “Rye Sept 1876”]; and Gingerbread [also noted “Rye Sept 1876”]. “Rye” may refer to the town of Rye, New York.

The latest manuscript in the collection is inscribed “A. P. Pendleton.” It is written on the first fifty pages of a tall ledger book measuring 14 X 8 1/2 inches, seemingly in a single hand, likely over a span of time, as the recipes are in several different colors of ink and a few are in pencil. There are about 150 recipes, a few outlining meat dishes but most focusing on sauces, pickles, and desserts. The book probably dates from around the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the recipes, such as snow pudding, apple custard, pickled oysters, and Spanish cream look back to the nineteenth century, while chili con carne, barbecue sauce, goulash, soubise sauce, frozen horseradish sauce for beef, and sugar cookies look forward to the 1910s and 1920s.