Manuscript book of food, medicinal, and domestic receipts from the American South

This nineteenth-century American manuscript, with entries and items dating from 1852-1878, includes handwritten cooking, medicinal, and domestic recipes, along with clippings of recipes, poems, puzzles and similar items.

Recipes include clippings and handwritten cookery recipes, primarily for desserts, including Sallie Lunn cake, fruit cake, huckleberry cake, jambalaya, jumbo, baked oysters, green tomato pickle, and musk melon preserves. Medicinal entries include a blood purifier, as well as cures for earache and the piles. Additional household recipes include one for the hair, a hint on preventing tin from rusting, and a "useful perfume."

In addition to recipes, the clippings include sentimental poems, prayers, humorous items, and a dictionary of musical terms on the end pastedown. There are handwritten poems, including one on page four addressed "To my dear sister" and dated 1852. Eight pressed flowers, probably pansies, are laid-in.

This volume consists of approximately forty-five filled pages of a variety of handwritten items and clippings in no discernible order. Many pages have been left blank, likely done by the owner to preserve space for later additions. The binding is bound in leather with crudely shaped ovals on front and back for inlays, with a small amount of decorative blind stamping along the borders. The spine is missing.