Maine Manuscript Cook Book (mid-late 1800s)

Hello friends! What I’m sharing today is something totally different than the usual recipe, recreated from the pages of a published 19th century cook book.

This is something I’ve been wanting to share with you for a while. Below, I’m sharing the full text of a small treasure that I became the caretaker of, quite a few years ago. This tiny little manuscript cook book came to me from an estate right here in Maine, so it’s extra dear to my heart!

It’s a volume that, to me, seems to date from the mid to late 1800s. (As I share each page, I’ll point out the clues that lead me to this conclusion.)

The first clue of course, is the book itself. The small brown card-covered volume is of a type common during that era, and the cotton stitching would be consistent with that dating.

Now, before I jump in with the photos, I’d love to ask for your help.

A reason I’ve held off sharing this, is because I wanted to type up a tidy transcription of each recipe, on each page, to make it more accessible for those with impaired eyesight, and folks who may not feel confident reading older handwriting.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve dealt with everything from rabies vaccines to a rock through my windshield, to a phone catching on fire, to multiple appliances taking early retirement, and a kid breaking his toe. We’re honestly all fine here, but what this season has reminded me is that there’s never extra time. I’m a solo parent raising two busy kids, and I need to remember that we have community for a reason!

SO, would you all like to help me transcribe this darling little manuscript?

Let’s make a community project of it! To make it even more fun, I’m going to offer an 1800s copy of Miss Neil’s Every Day Cook Book to one contributor who helps with the transcription effort. (Send me proof you’re over 21, and I’ll even include a bottle of that delicious Raspberry Cordial we made this summer!)

How to do this:

1. Check the comments below to see what recipes have already been transcribed.
2. Choose one that still needs to be done, and write out the recipe from the photo.
3. Copy your transcription into a comment right on this page, along with the name of the recipe and the page number it’s from. Please include your email address on your comment submission (it’s only visible to me from the back end, not everyone viewing the site). This is how I’ll contact you if you win!

On October 1, I’ll randomly select one comment as the winning entry. Please transcribe as many recipes as you like. Put them in separate comments so that each recipe counts as an entry. The more recipes, the more entries! Make sense? Sound like fun? I hope so!

I’ll update the site as we go, so that the transcribed recipes will sit beneath each photographed page, making our community manuscript cook book project as easy to read as possible, for anyone to enjoy. Thanks in advance for your help on this!

No more blathering from me, here’s our little Maine manuscript cook book!

See that recipe for “Bethel Sponge Cake”? That’s not cake name you commonly see. This book came from a Maine estate, and the town of Bethel is just 30 minutes from me. My hunch is that this was a recipe known locally by connection with that town.

Gold cake and silver cake recipes almost always appeared one after the other, in 1800s cook books.

Throughout the book are clippings that are pasted right over earlier pencil-written recipes. My guess is that these were pasted in some time later, perhaps as much as a few decades after the original writing. Again, I’m not an authority, this is my personal guess.

There appears to have been a Mrs. H. B. Crosby living on Lexington Street, mentioned in a 1919 publication. The original writing, receipts, and paper seem older than that to me, but this would be consistent with more recent marginalia being pasted in, over time.

See that recipe for Bridgton Gingerbread? This is again, not a widely known cake name, but there does happen to be a town of Bridgton (with that exact spelling), right here in Maine. It’s half an hour from me, in the opposite direction from Bethel.

Lemon pies were so very popular in the 1870s through the 90s. When I see a book with multiple lemon pie recipes, my mind immediately suspects that it may originate from those decades.

You can see that this recipe for “good gingerbread” was pasted directly on top of the earlier recipe for “delicate cake”. There’s actual paste residue under there, which let go with age, so it’s possible to see both recipes.

Once upon a time though, someone decided that delicate cake recipe wasn’t meant to see the light of day. Don’t you love a “living” volume like this, that clearly changed over time?

Berwick Sponge Cake. See that recipe up at the top with the “X” next to it? First of all, it’s worth noting that Berwick is a town right here in Maine. Unlike the Bethel Sponge Cake, and Bridgton Gingerbread, this recipe was popularly known through the second half of the 1800s.

This thread on the Civil War Talk forum dates it to 1845. Most of the information there doesn’t link directly to primary sources, so there’s a bit of digging to do for accurately citing this, but it’s a jumping off point.

There’s also an interesting mention of this cake in Kate Wiggin’s 1912 memoir, A Child’s Journey With Dickens. She mentions seeing him on the North Berwick train platform in 1868, as she observed him “wave away laughingly a piece of the famous Berwick sponge cake”.

One of these days, I’d love to do a deep dive, and see if I can find any mention of a Mrs. J. A. Brown that could be the one mentioned here.

Westbrook, the location of the contributor in the clippings, is a Maine town that’s about an hour southeast of here.

There’s another recipe under that Spice Cake clipping, but I have no idea what it is, though the ingredients seem to hint at another cake recipe.

There was a Marcia Ann Flanders born in 1847 in Merrimack, NH. That appears to be her maiden name though, so the “Mrs.” doesn’t quite fit the idea of her being the contributor of that bottom clipping. It’s intriguing though, and certainly an invitation for more sleuthing.

Don’t you love that drippy, circular stain? It just makes this feel like it was a well-loved, much-used volume.

The measuring in “spoonfuls” really makes me feel even more solid about dating this pre-1900, if I weren’t feeling quite sure of that already.

I really want to make those Spice [Cakes] from the second page. Don’t those sound good?

That Rhubarb wine is intriguing to me! I recently came across a Civil War era newspaper clipping with a nearly identical recipe for Rhubarb Wine, with a plea for people to make up batches of this wine and forward them to the local Sanitation Commissioner, for use in treating diarrhea and dysentery among the Northern soldiers that were fighting in Southern states, since they were much beset with those ailments.

This was a commonly copied recipe during that time, and immediately following, but it’s not a recipe I see as often toward the close of the century. It’s just another clue that makes me want to put this in the mid-late 1800s. Not conclusive by any stretch, but fascinating, for sure.

These final pages are quite stuck together, and I did my best to photograph them without damaging the book.

That last handwritten notation says “The Congress Cook Book, D&L Spade + Co, Boston”. I was able to find an image of the cover of that book, the second edition of which was published in 1894. If this handwritten book were filled over time, and if the Congress Cook Book” were newly published when that final entry was made, it would certainly help establish the dating of this.

I haven’t been able to find scans of the entire Congress Cook Book online, but would love to examine a museum copy one of these days.

---

Do you have any thoughts or theories about this little handwritten gem? I’d love to hear any insight you might have! If you try any of the recipes, please do let me know how they turn out.

Don’t forget that you can enter the drawing for an 1800’s copy of Miss Neil’s Every Day Cook Book, every time you submit a transcription for one of the recipes in this book. The drawing closes on October 1, so every recipe transcribed and submitted as a comment below, counts as an entry! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email me. I think this will be a fun community project!

---

Some other 1800s recipes you might enjoy: