Recipes

Like so much in the early nineteenth century, recipes turn a corner. A conversational, practical style becomes the norm, featuring ingredients where needed, with clear instructions for cooking them and a scattering of helpful, often personal tips. By now most authors realize the value of exact quantities when drafting their recipes. They are more consistent in giving detailed instructions, in the appropriate order of work. Of course, there are naïve (or careless) exceptions, but by and large as the nineteenth century unfolds, recipes in the vast majority of cookbooks reflect the same priorities of precision and logic that we look for today. Even in laggard America, by the 1830s cookbooks had developed from the three-line recipes of Amelia Simmons in 1796 to the orderly prose of later writers who had spread along the Eastern seaboard, up to the Great Lakes, and south to Louisiana.