Cookbook of the Southeastern United States

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[Library Title: Handwritten Cookbook for Desserts, Beverages, and Vegetable Dishes from the Southeastern United States]

Manuscript Location
Ohio State University, Thompson Library Rare Books
Holding Library Call No.
SPEC.RARE.MMS.0324
Manuscript Cookbooks Survey Database ID#
1988
Place of Origin
United States
Date of Composition
ca. 1850s
Description
This cookbook of 10 written pages and 8 blanks is written in several different hands. It contains fifteen recipes for cakes and breakfast cakes, six recipes for puddings, four recipes for drinks, two recipes for preserving (tomatoes and peaches), and one recipe each for cream pie, blanc manger, and eggplant. The recipes for iron-baked "Corn Wafers" and cornmeal "Waffles" (both digital image 5) mark this book as southern. The recipe for "Egg Plant" (digital image 2), which is a sort of eggplant custard, is suggestive of a type of vegetable casserole favored in the South today. As is typical of nineteenth-century southern cookbooks, the book contains a mix of newly emerged recipes (like "Delicate Cake") and recipes that hearken back to an earlier style of cooking, such as "Lady Cake (without chemical leavening)," "Cream Pie" (made with a cream custard), and "Blanc Manger" (bound with isinglass rather than prepared gelatin). 

A PDF of the digital images of this book is available here. Click on "Handwritten Cookbook for Desserts, Beverages, and Vegetable Dishes from the Southeastern United States."