Manuscript Location

New York Public Library, Schwarzman Building - Manuscripts & Archives Division

Place of Origin

United States ➔ Massachusetts ➔ Amesbury

Date of Composition

Vol 1, 1839; Vol. 2, ca. 1865

Description

This material comprises two separate manuscripts that have been bound together. Volume 1 is inscribed Mary Merrill and dated 1839. It begins with a two-page recipe describing in brief how to make a number of puddings; this is followed by recipes for two pudding sauces. The remaining recipes in this volume are mince pies, pumpkin and squash pies, custard pie, pie crust, jumbles, boiled pudding, Indian cake, iced cake, and graham cake. Damaged pages, of which there are many, contain a number of recipe fragments. The volume is interesting primarily for its many borrowings from Lydia Maria Child's The American Frugal Housewife, first published in 1829.

The second volume is anonymous. It is mostly given over to desserts and cakes that were in their heyday in the two decades leading up the Civil War. (Most of the cake recipes call for saleratus, the common chemical leavening of the 1840s and 1850s.) However, the book also contains recipes that did not become popular until the 1860s or later, such as mock mince pie (with crackers), cream pie (as in Boston cream pie), and caramels. A page marked "old recipes" contains recipes for macaroons, jumbles, and kisses, which are indeed hundreds of years older than most of the other recipes in the book although still current in post-Civil War America. There are several pasted-in printed recipes as well as several tipped in pages. Except perhaps for one or two recipes at the end, the collection appears to be the work of a single writer.