Lately I’ve been thinking about my great-grandmother Caroline’s cookbook “Oglivie’s Book for a Cook,” printed in Montreal in 1905. It is worn and fragile, the back cover is missing, and grease stains mark nearly every page. Some young child scribbled in it in pencil, and recipes clipped from newspapers can be found scattered throughout the pages.
But the most endearing, and meaningful, part of the book are the recipes hand-written by her in the margins – for “9 day pickles” and Butterscotch pie, baked beans, or even Chop Suey. I don’t know where she got the actual cookbook or if she ever made any of the recipes printed in it. She clearly used it as a note book where she could jot down her tried and true recipes, gifts shared from family and friends, or store new recipes that she wanted to try out like “Whole-Wheat Michigan Rocks” – cookies with nuts, dates, cinnamon, and of course, whole wheat flour.
What do personal or collected recipes (or “receipts” as they used to be known) say about a person? Or about the time in which they lived? I know that Caroline “Carrie” was a farmer who grew her own fruit and vegetables, canned and preserved them. There are no less than three recipes for chili sauce (to use up tomatoes), five recipes for various kinds of pickles, and eight recipes for different kinds of relish – corn, cucumber, or beet and cabbage relish (yuck!). Carrie’s keepsakes also give me insight into her relationship with family members – “Cora’s chili sauce” was given to her by her daughter-in-law Cora and “Christmas Cake from Rose 1929” was from her younger sister Rose.
While I have not yet tried any of the recipes myself, I just found a recipe for Green Chili Sauce with Carrie’s notation “this is my mother’s.” This means I now have a recipe from my great-great grandmother, Rosa Schoultz Macklem, who died young – just before her fortieth birthday – of tuberculosis, which she had lived with for two years. I might just have to try that one! The cookbook, a cultural artifact, is tangible evidence of a life lived. What might your old recipes say about your ancestors?
historicaresearch.com 