Place of Origin

United States

Date of Composition

1764, with additions ca. 1786 and ca. 1840-1850

Description

This 50-page American cookbook is inscribed Sarah Fayerweather June 26,1764 at the front. It is chiefly interesting for its first thirty numbered pages, which are written in a single highly accomplished, beautiful hand, possibly that of a professional scribe but more likely that of Sarah Fayerweather, (The recipe titles are written in a wide variety of styles--Gothic, elaborate cursive, and block print--which does not seem the sort of thing a professional scribe would do.) The recipes particularly focus on cakes and puddings but include a range of dishes, including "Calf's Head Tortoise Fashion" (page 4); stuffed cod, stuffed mutton leg, and "Soop" (page 10); stewed and fricasseed chicken (page 11), and various pickled foods, pies and tarts, dessert jellies and creams, and wines. The recipe for Short Cake (page 3) calls for "oyle irodium," which is likely rhodium oil, extracted from rhodium wood and now more commonly known as rosewood oil, after its rosy scent. Also uncommon (possibly unprecedented) is the "Chocolate Pudding" (page 25), a cream custard lightly bound with pounded Naples biscuits, flavored with finely grated chocolate (apparently sweetened) and spice, and baked in puff paste, with a puff paste border, or, if desired, boiled. All, or nearly all, of the recipes are based on English precedent and would not be out of place in an eighteenth-century English cookbook.

Two or more new hands appear on the bottom of page 30 through the top of page 32, followed by yet another hand from the bottom of page 32 through page 37. The recipes in this hand include "For Consumption Complaints in the Breast" (pages 36-7), which is attributed to the August, 21, 1786 issue of the (Boston) American Herald. Page 38 begins with a recipe for Plum Cake, which is written in yet another hand and which calls for saleratus, an alkaline leavening that came into use around 1840. The remainder of the book was written by several different individuals, likely circa 1840-1850, to judge from the use of soda/cream of tartar leavening in several cakes (including one on page 39) and the recipe for "Polka Cake" on page 40.