Manuscript Location

University of Iowa Main Library, Special Collections, Szathmary Culinary Archive

Place of Origin

United States

Date of Composition

1834-1864

Description

The first 90 pages of this book contain recipes; the remaining 40 pages (approximately) are mostly given over to instructions for knitting, sewing, and the making of simple remedies and household products like whitewash and glue. The recipe section of the book is extremely interesting. The first 20 pages appear to be written in a single hand, mostly during the 1830s. The recipes in these pages are loosely organized, starting with meats and poultry and then proceeding to puddings, cakes (including four different formulas for election cake), little cakes (modern cookies), tea cakes and breads, and griddle cakes. Near the end of this section there is a detailed recipe for wedding cake, contributed by a Mrs. Coffin and dated 1834. Calling for 10 pounds each butter, sugar, and flour, 70 eggs, nearly 40 pounds of currants and other fruits, and various spices and flavorings, the recipe yields nine loaves, each of which would bake nicely in a contemporary round pan 14 inches wide and 3 inches deep. Perhaps the writer did not need quite so much cake, for the recipe notes that a half batch will make four loaves. The loaves were baked in a home brick oven, for the recipe instructs: "Heat the oven two hours with hard wood & let it cool down three quarters of an hour." The remaining 70 pages of recipes are in a number of different hands and show no particular organization. As is typical for manuscript cookbooks, most of these recipes are for desserts, cakes, and breads. While some of these recipes appear to be of the 1830s, most skew a few decades later, such as "a new receipt" for what are essentially baking powder biscuits (which are specified "for tea") and a recipe for cornstarch lemon pie, a forerunner of today's lemon meringue pie. A recipe on page 44 is dated 1853, and there is another recipe from Mrs. Coffin on page 48, seemingly in a different hand from that of the wedding cake, which is dated 1854.

The date "1934" that appears in the library title for this manuscript appears to be a simple misprint from the date "1834," which appears in the manuscript.