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Famous Old Receipts isn’t a book of store receipts, but a book of recipes (“receipt” being an old word for “recipe”) – specifically recipes “used a hundred years or more in the kitchens of the North and South,” as the subtitle tells us. First published in 1906, the collection brings together a huge variety of recipes, some of them dating back to 17th-Century America. You can try these historic recipes for free, thanks to the volunteers at Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders.

Many of the contributors to Famous Old Receipts are from socially prominent families whose ancestors handed down their “receipt books.” The Cadwalader family of Philadelphia, for example, is represented by philanthropist John Cadwalader, who wrote the introduction, and his wife, both of whom contributed a number of recipes. Another member of the family, Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, was Edith Wharton‘s sister-in-law, herself an author and a patron of the arts, who contributed an ice cream recipe. You’ll also find a recipe for spice cake from First Lady Edith Roosevelt, and one for chili con carne from an unnamed Mexican Ambassador, contributed by a member of the Loring family (friends of the Roosevelts).

Famous Old Receipts is, of course, a product of its time and the social class of its compilers. The introduction laments that “the colored ‘Aunties’ have disappeared under the changed conditions at the South.” A cringeworthy recipe from “Aunt” Mary Sharp, described as an “old Maryland cook,” is written in what purports to be black dialect. It is painful to reflect that “Aunt” Mary was probably either enslaved or the descendant of enslaved people. At least she got some credit for her cooking.

And this was not a cookbook for the housewife on a budget. Many of the recipes involve rather expensive ingredients, like caviar, lobster, truffles, and champagne. Still, there’s something here for everyone, from breads to entrees to desserts and more. There are even home remedies, some scary, like the one for lockjaw (tetanus), which directs the reader simply to “Apply beef gall at once” – not a staple of pantries today, and certainly not a cure for a serious bacterial infection.

The most striking aspect of these recipes to the modern eye is that, as in many old cookbooks, the directions are vague, to say the least. For example, what exactly does it mean, when scrambling eggs, to “Respect their integrity to the last”? Very few recipes give pan sizes, cooking times, or precise temperatures, using instead terms like “slow fire” or “quick oven.” And while modern equivalents of some old-fashioned measurements, like a “teacup” or a “gill,” can be looked up online, items like “a suspicion of onion” are left to the imagination.

It was, therefore, with some trepidation that I tried one of the simpler recipes, for a longtime favorite of mine, Indian pudding. This New England classic – essentially sweetened cornmeal mush – can be made numerous ways, nowadays enriched with spices and eggs. But the Pilgrims who invented it in 17th-Century Massachusetts had little or no access to spices, and saved their precious eggs for more important dishes. “Mrs. Otis’ Directions for a Common Indian Pudding” reflects that economy:

“Take half pint of fine Indian meal, in a clean pan, and pour on it one quart of boiling milk. Stir it well, put one spoonful of salt, and one gill of molasses. The pan for baking must be well buttered when the pudding is put into it, and when in the pan, and ready for baking, pour on it a teacup of milk, sweetened with molasses. It must bake five or six hours, slowly.”

“Indian meal” is cornmeal, which Native Americans introduced to the Pilgrims as a substitute for scarce wheat flour. I interpreted “one spoonful” as a teaspoon. Internet sources told me that a “gill” is about 1/2 cup and a “teacup” is about 3/4 cup. To maintain authenticity, I didn’t change any of the ingredients, measurements, or methods, except that, not wanting to keep my oven on for six hours, I took the advice of a food website to try three hours at 300°F. I used a 9x9x3″ baking dish.

The result, while neither spectacular nor pretty, was not bad at all. While the pudding was baking, the aroma of molasses and corn was heavenly. I took it out after two hours and 20 minutes. It was not as moist as I would have liked, so maybe I should have baked it only two hours and at a lower temperature, and/or used a smaller baking dish.

But it was still mighty tasty with a sprinkle of cinnamon and a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

At least it couldn’t possibly have turned out as badly as would the so-called “Perfect Italian Macaroni Dish,” which directs the cook to boil the macaroni for an hour and 15 minutes. “This will be a revelation to lovers of good macaroni,” says the recipe. Indeed.

Happy cooking!

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer.

Hungry? Distributed Proofreaders volunteers have contributed over 225 cookbooks to Project Gutenberg, with recipes ranging over many centuries, many regions, and many styles. So keen is the interest that a Cookbook Lovers Team was recently formed for DP volunteers to break bread together, as it were, and talk about working on cookbook projects past, present, and future.

Among the oldest surviving cookbooks from antiquity is Apicius de re coquinaria (Apicius on Cooking). If your Latin is rusty, Project Gutenberg also has an English version, Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome, with fascinating notes on the work’s provenance and history. The recipes are attributed to a 1st-Century Roman gourmet, Marcus Gavius Apicius. Much like a modern cookbook, it’s organized in sections relating to different types of foods – including exotic poultry from far-flung corners of the Roman Empire, like flamingo or parrot. There are also helpful hints, like disguising a “goatish smell” emanating from game birds that are a tad too aged with herbs, spices, vinegar, and other aromatics.

The French are famous for their haute cuisine, which goes much farther back than its 19th-Century heyday. Le viandier de Taillevent, a collection of recipes from medieval manuscripts, dates back to 14th Century. The eponymous author, whose real name was Guillaume Tirel, served as chef to Philip VI of France. His observations on the use of spices, the creation of sauces, and the presentation of dishes (like embellishing roast meats with gold leaf) are all still key to French cuisine today.

Not to be outdone, the English had their own medieval cookbook, The Forme of Cury. Compiled around 1390 by “the Master-Cooks of King Richard II,” it is the earliest known recipe collection in English. It contains common dishes like roasted meats, as well as special dishes fit for a royal banquet. It also incorporates expensive rarities for the time, like spices and sugar.

Jumping ahead to the 17th Century, we find a comparative explosion of cookbooks. Just as the ancient Romans flavored their cuisine with a dollop of imperialism, so, too, did the European nations who explored even farther-flung corners of the world, acquiring exotic foods and flavorings. Spices and sugar were still expensive, but more readily available, and seem to be incorporated, along with some odd ingredients, into as many recipes as possible. One example is The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened, a 1669 cookbook compiled by a servant of the learned and adventurous Sir Kenelm Digby. Here’s a recipe for a black (or blood) pudding:

Take three pints of Cream, and boil it with a Nutmeg quartered, three or four leaves of large Mace, and a stick of Cinnamon. Then take half a pound of Almonds, beat them and strain them with the Cream. Then take a few fine Herbs, beat them and strain them to the Cream, which came from the Almonds. Then take two or three spoonfuls (or more) of Chickens blood; and two or three spoonfuls of grated-bread, and the Marrow of six or seven bones, with Sugar and Salt, and a little Rose-water. Mix all together, and fill your Puddings. You may put in eight or ten Eggs, with the whites of two well-beaten. Put in some Musk or Ambergreece.

That last ingredient is ambergris, a waxy substance found in the digestive system of a whale and, like musk, mainly used in perfumery. Its chief merit in a dish had to have been more to add to its impressiveness than to enhance its flavor.

The 19th Century brought a wealth of cookbooks designed for the home cook of middle-class means. The best-known of these is Isabella Beeton‘s Book of Household Management, first published in book form in 1861. It is not just a cookbook, but also a comprehensive guide to managing a Victorian household, still being reprinted today. Its most memorable recipe has to be the one for turtle soup that begins: “To make this soup with less difficulty, cut off the head of the turtle the preceding day.”

Specialty cookbooks gained great popularity in the 20th Century. The First World War brought us Foods That Will Win the War. The Complete Book of Cheese tells us everything we need to know about, well, cheese, including a humorous riff on “rarebit” vs. “rabbit.” There are even cookbooks targeted at single men, like 1922’s The Stag Cook Book, and for suffragist women, like 1915’s The Suffrage Cook Book. The latter has this recipe among the real ones:

Pie for a Suffragist’s Doubting Husband

1 qt. milk human kindness
8 reasons:
War
White Slavery
Child Labor
8,000,000 Working Women
Bad Roads
Poisonous Water
Impure Food

Mix the crust with tact and velvet gloves, using no sarcasm, especially with the upper crust. Upper crusts must be handled with extreme care for they quickly sour if manipulated roughly.

Food manufacturers also got into the cookbook game. Spices take center stage in McCormick & Company’s 1915 recipe booklet, aptly titled Spices, posted to Project Gutenberg just last month. And American cultural icon Betty Crocker (a fiction of General Mills) gives us 157 easy recipes in her Bisquick Cook Book of 1956 – you can make pancakes for 25 people with just three ingredients!

This is just a tiny sampling of the tasty delights to be found at Project Gutenberg. Take a look at the Cookbooks and Cooking Bookshelf, with its many culinary contributions from Distributed Proofreaders volunteers, and find out what’s cooking.

This post was contributed by Linda Cantoni, a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer and devoted amateur cook.