Manuscript Location

Brooklyn Historical Society, Exhibitions

Place of Origin

United States ➔ New York ➔ Brooklyn

Date of Composition

circa 1830 - 1850

Description

This cookbook of 42 pages, with an index at the front, was likely compiled by Maria Lott Lefferts (1786-1865) and her daughter Gertrude Lefferts Vanderbilt (1824-1902), descendants of a prominent Dutch-American family that first settled in Brooklyn, New York, in 1661. Except for a handful of recipes written in odd spaces, the entire book appears to be have been penned by a single individual in a series of closely spaced sittings. Although some of the recipes may have been collated earlier, the book cannot have been written before 1828, when one of its principal sources was published, and is likely not later than 1850, when the cuisine it describes was no longer fashionable.

The book is divided into two parts, "Cakes," which comprises fifty recipes, and "Pies, Puddings, & Custards," which contains thirty-four recipes. Despite the Dutch lineage of the family, most of the recipes are Anglo-American in origin. Many of the recipes were paraphrased from printed cookbooks. The greatest borrowing was from Eliza Leslie's Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats, first published in 1828, which supplied approximately fifteen of the recipes in the first part and nineteen of the recipes in the second part, or about forty percent of the total manuscript. The paraphrasing from print is deft, suggesting that whoever compiled this cookbook was a practiced maker of cakes and desserts. The handwriting is lovely and highly legible.