Manuscript Location

University of Texas at Austin, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Place of Origin

England
United States

Date of Composition

ca. late 1700s-ca. early 1800s

Description

This item is a typescript of a 17-page cookbook that was given to Mary Austin on March 13, 1813. The library has helpfully authenticated that the original manuscript is still extant. It is housed in box 2A163, the Series IV: 1813 folder of the library's Austin papers. (The typescript is housed in Series V.) Most of the recipes in the book are culinary, though there are a few medical and household recipes too. The culinary recipes include puddings, sausages, tea cakes, bread sauce, onion sauce, cream cheese, ham cures, a pickle for pork or beef, sauerkraut, curry powder, and a number of vegetable pickles and condiments. There are also several recipes for wines and other drinks.

It is not known who created this book, or where, or who gave it to Mary Austin. It is possible that the book, or at least the first ten pages of the book, were compiled in England. The first recipe in the book, for cucumber pickles, is credited to Mrs. Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper,  published in 1769. Many of the recipes through page 10 are attributed to Mary Slater (or to MS or MY, who was presumably the same person), who is identified as hailing from Liverpool, in a recipe for English Madeira (that is, homemade Madeira) on page 6. Joyce Slater, presumably a relative of Mary Slater, also contributed a recipe (on page 2), and two other contributors through page 10 are also identified as English. On the other hand, it is equally possible that only these particular sources were English and that the compiler was American. The many vegetable pickles and relishes outlined on pages 11 through 14 are more American than English in spirit, particularly the two unusual green tomato "marmalades," one sour and one sweet (the sour one is said to be "excellent for seasoning gravies, etc."), and the recipe for "Tomato Soy," an early version of today's tomato ketchup. 

A possible clue to the person who gave this book to Mary Austin (and who possibly may have created it) appears at the end of the book's final recipe, for Jonbridge Cake (likely a typo for "Tonbridge," that is, "Tunbridge"). The text reads: "I send you a little orange peel to put in peses [pieces?] in preserves, as it is a great varety [variety?] here, it is a little mama sent me-- My love to my own children and accept the same from your affectionate Neice [niece]" The recipe is signed "E Austin." If this text was addressed to Mary Austin, E  Austin was logically a daughter or granddaughter of one of the four brothers of Moses Austin, Mary's husband. 

Mary Brown Austin (1768-1824) was born into affluent iron mining family in Sharpsborough Furnace, New Jersey. She married Moses Austin (1761-1821) in 1785. The couple had five children, three of whom lived into adulthood. After her marriage, Mary lived in Virginia with her husband until 1798, when the business he ran with his brother failed and the family fled the state for Missouri. Moses subsequently made a fortune in lead mining in the Missouri town of Potosi, where he built a mansion named Durham Hall, after the 1746 home in Durham, Connecticut, where he was born. (This house still stands.) The family also had an imposing brick home in Ste Genevieve, Missouri. Despite their wealth, Mary found frontier life in Missouri difficult, and so she and her daughter Emily spent two years “in the East” (according to a brief biography of Mary provided by the library), from 1811 to the summer of 1813. Since the cookbook is dated March 13, 1813, it must have been given to Mary while she was in the East. In 1817, Moses’s Missouri business failed and they lost their home in Potosi and moved to Herculaneum. Amid the Panic of 1819, Moses declared bankruptcy. In 1820, he came up with a plan to colonize Spanish Texas with Anglo-American settlers. The Spanish governor of Texas accepted this plan and awarded Moses a land grant. He fell ill on the way back to Missouri and died in 1821. Two days before his death, Mary wrote her son Stephen a letter imploring him to take up Moses’s project of settling Texas, which he did. Stephen is considered “the father” of Texas and numerous Texas cities, towns, and landmarks bear his name, including Austin, Texas. Destitute and in poor health following her husband’s death, Mary supported herself making and selling bonnets. She was living with her daughter Emily when she died.