A friend of mine has a treasured box of recipes handwritten on index cards by her great-aunt Della. I’ve sat in her kitchen while she juiced lemons for Della’s lemon chess pie and whipped egg whites for Della’s meringue. If there were a fire, she sometimes says, it would be the first thing she’d save (besides the cats).
Which is all well and good for housewives 150 years ago, but doesn’t help me much. Each book has a recipe for pork cake, and they’re remarkably similar—right down to the fact that neither provides any clue as to what I’m supposed to do with raw pork, raisins, sugar, molasses, milk, flour, spices, vinegar, and baking soda.
The book is arranged alphabetically, with a quote for each letter: “‘A friend should bear a friend’s infirmities’ —Julius Caesar” for A, a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII for B, and so on. Not all the pages are filled; C, P, and S are well populated—cakes, custards, pies, puddings, pickles, soups, and syrups were all common at the time—but there’s nothing under E except another Shakespeare quote (there are lots of omelet recipes, but apparently nothing for “eggs”). And the definition of “recipe” seems to have been much broader back then. In the second cookbook, nestled between the whortleberry pudding and the “Nice Mince Pies,” are a headache remedy calling for morphine, several soap recipes, bed bug poison, and a newspaper clipping advising that according to the London Milk Journal, warm milk will cure “violent diarrhea, stomach ache, incipient cholera and dysentery.”
I share the two loaves I’ve produced with friends and coworkers, and a few people even say they like it. No one asks for the recipe, though, and I suspect that it’s not destined to be passed on to future generations.
