Manuscript Location

South Carolina Historical Society, South Carolina Historical Society Museum

Place of Origin

United States ➔ South Carolina ➔ Charleston

Date of Composition

1831

Description

"Mrs. William Timmons Receipt Book 1831" is written on the cover of this volume. She was likely Isabella (Darrell) Timmons (1771-1843), who married Charleston merchant William Timmons (1773-1838) in 1799. He is buried at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Charleston.

The book contains approximately 38 written pages, all in the same hand. It includes recipes for food and drink, remedies, and a wide range of practical items, from rat poison, to silver polish, to chicken feed. Other than a recipe for fried chicken with pan gravy, another for stewed pigeons, and a couple of vegetable pickles and condiments, there are few recipes for the principal courses of the meal.  Instead, the book focuses on cakes, puddings, dessert creams, and fruit wines. The recipes for seed cake, tansy pudding, oatmeal pudding, and mead are more typically English than American, as is some of the book's vocabulary, such as "treacle" for "molasses" in a recipe for Gingerbread Cake, "penny loaf" in a recipe for lemon pudding, and "biscuit cake" for "sponge cake." (The term "sponge cake" is also used.) Many of the recipes look back to the eighteenth century, such as the Gingerbread Cake, which is made without chemical leavening. 

This receipt book is on exhibit at the South Carolina Historical Society Museum.