Handwritten Cookbooks

Many British women emigrating to the New World brought along perhaps their most precious possession, a personal cookbook, often a wedding gift, almost certainly passed down through the family, with recipes frequently written in more than one hand. Some surviving manuscripts contain an interesting combination of English and American recipes that often require detective work in order to discover the provenance. Some eighteenth-century manuscripts at first glance appear to be English, but recipes for American ingredients, such as Indian meal and cranberries, give away their true origins.