Cookbooks: Manuscript Cookbooks: Tucked Between the Pages

Manuscript cookbooks are full of surprises. Many display newspaper clippings pasted in, but not always of recipes. Poems, prayers, household hints, almanacs, and farm information abound, as well as scribbled recipes on torn sheets of note paper tucked into the pages, waiting to be properly entered at another time. Pressed flowers drop out; checks, knitting directions, letters, menus, grocery lists—the accumulation of a housewife’s hours. A newspaper clipping of a poem, “To My Brother,” tucked into the 1833 Pittsburgh copybook of Mrs. Boggs, asks him to think of her in times of trouble and is pasted beside a newspaper story about the battleship Sumpter. A poem, “On the Loss of a Child in Infancy,” begins, “Our beauteous child we laid among the silence of the dead.”