One of my favorite old books in my collection is a handwritten notebook started by Mrs. Emma W. Reed on March 14, 1868, that I won at auction. This book is filled with receipts, many written with directions that make no sense to the modern cook. In the book, Mrs. Reed simply calls this recipe “Cookies” and listed only the ingredients; no instructions. Over 150 years later, we can bring it back to life.

There’s just something special about an old handwritten recipe book. Someone at some point in time thought enough of a particular recipe that they took the time to carefully write it down to use it in the future; often many times over. Maybe they had eaten the best pound cake ever at the recent church dinner and they just had to get the recipe then and there, so they used the closest scrap of paper they could find. Maybe a lady just setting up house recalled her mother’s pickles and wrote to her for the recipe, which was sent back. Or maybe she carried that book around to visit family and friends with a particular intent to leave with the instructions to make dishes they had made for her.

I know that’s how it is with me. We had a dear lady in my church, Mrs. Pat Eaton, who could make the best pound cakes you’ve ever tasted. It never failed–folks would watch to see what kind of plate she brought the pound cake on, and the word would quickly pass around which plate belonged to Mrs. Pat, and that was usually the first to disappear, even before the fried chicken.

Mrs. Eaton passed over to Heaven in February of this year. I know I can speak for myself along with my church family when I say we all miss her smile, her laugh, her beautiful voice in the choir, her friendship, her care, and her pound cake.

A few weeks ago, her husband brought a tin pie plate wrapped in foil to my office. He said that he had been practicing on her pound cake recipe and he thought he was finally starting to get close to how she made it, and he thought that we in the office might enjoy sharing it with him, so he had brought us some slices. It was so good to once again taste that cake, and it is so good that particular part of her legacy can live on for us.

That’s why I love old recipes! They carry so many memories and traditions through the generations.

Here in the South, food plays such an important part of our lives. When a baby is on the way, certain ladies are known for making certain finger foods, and it just doesn’t seem like a baby shower’s been thrown properly without those particular plates being there. If someone’s just come home from the hospital or if there’s been a death, there’s a certain lady who we know will have a particular chicken casserole, green bean casserole, or deviled egg plate. If it’s a church dinner on the grounds, we’re looking for Ms. Gail’s sugar-free Hershey’s chocolate cake, or Mrs. Frances Saunders’ deviled eggs. Ladies around here usually always try to have certain ingredients on hand to whip up something real quick-like if sudden company drops by, because we pride ourselves in hospitality. Not the kind of “I picked this up in the grocery store deli” kind of hospitality (although when in a pinch, we all admit it’s better than nothing!), but the kind of “your comfort is important to me, so I made this myself from scratch by hand from this family recipe for you” kind of hospitality. Traditional Southerners proudly carry this stereotype.

Sadly, these priceless heirlooms of handwritten recipes are being lost to the ages. Most folks of my generation(whatever we are called–I just missed the official window of the “Millennials” since I was a 1987 baby) have forsaken anything that takes time and work: no more handwritten anything, everything is pre-packaged, and you’re lucky if the average 20-30-something female knows how to properly boil an egg. It’s a cryin’ shame. Folks rather throw away Grandma Elizabeth’s scratchy recipe cards because they clutter up the counter, and traditional cooking takes too much effort. There’s just something about handwriting that’s so much more personal than type.

In my family, we don’t have any written recipes past that of my grandmother’s, to my knowledge. My grandmother and mom remembers the ladies of previous generations of our family cooking by eye and memory. They didn’t measure; they just grabbed a handful of flour or a pinch of some spice and cooked their food on wood stoves. Some folks in my family still cooked in an open hearth as recently as the turn of the century, as my great-aunt recalls someone in the family falling into a huge colonial-style fireplace and dying from their burns. The Bennett side of my family was literally dirt poor. Writing things down wasn’t just something that was done, sad to say.

Mrs. Emma W. Reed’s “Receipts” book

I used my grandmother’s cookie cutter for these

Receipts from over 150 years ago

Simple, organic ingredients

That’s why I was so excited to recently come across this beauty! This old notebook was started by Mrs. Emma W. Reed on March 14, 1868. I believe most of the recipes in this book date from right around that time frame because of the consistency of the style of writing, but the last few entries are likely from the mid-1870s. One of the last written recipes is for Parker House Rolls, which became wildly popular at that time. The oldest printing of this recipe dates from an April 1874 issue of the New Hampshire Sentinel. Mrs. Reed lived in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, so perhaps she took this recipe down from one of the early newspaper prints. You can tell which recipes in this book were most popular in her household based on the amount of wear and splatters on certain pages. Amazingly, recipes written on scraps of paper still remain safely tucked in the pages of the book, along with a handwritten genealogy of some of her husband’s ancestors. I have started a tree on Ancestry in the hopes of tracking down any of her living descendants so I can give them the opportunity of having photocopies of her recipes, should they choose to have them.

I plan to cook every single thing that I can from the recipes in this book and share them with you here. As some of them don’t have standard units of measure, it’s going to take some improvising, but I think we will have a good time bringing these 150-year-old recipes back to life from a bygone era.

1868 Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of sugar
• 1 cup of butter
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoonful of soda
• Flour to make stiff enough to roll out (in my experience, this was three slightly heaped cups of flour)

Directions

• Pre-heat oven to 350 F.
• Combine sugar and soda, then add egg and softened butter.
• Add flour as specified above.Mrs. Reed didn’t list a specific amount of flour, but as stated I found that three slightly heaped cups of flour was about right. When adding the flour, keep in mind that the dough will be easier to roll if you chill it slightly before rolling. I have personally found it best to spread the cookie dough up onto the sides of my Paula Deen enamel bowl then put the bowl in the freezer for about 3-5 minutes to allow the dough to chill a little bit. Spreading the dough like this helps it chill faster, which makes the dough easier to work with. That softened butter adds heat to the dough, which can make it a pain to roll out and cut with a cookie cutter. Trust me on this one.
  Liberally flour the surface you will use to roll out the cookie dough, as well as your rolling pin and cookie cutter. I like to use my countertop for this as I have plenty of room. Roll out cookie dough evenly with well-floured rolling pin. I rolled mine out to an approximate thickness of 1/4″.
• Cut dough with well-floured cookie cutter. Place cut dough on ungreased cookie sheet, approximately 1 1/2″ apart.

• Bake cookies for about 9 minutes. Promptly remove cookies from cookie sheet and place on rack to cool thoroughly before storing.

Trivia

When I made these cookies, I passed them out to family and friends to get their opinion. When my mom took her first bite, she immediately got very excited and said these were the exact cookies her grandmother used to make, which she loved so much. When she died, she took the recipe with her as it was never written down. My grandmother even said it was the same cookie. We have now restored a bit of our family cooking.

Do you like my farmhouse kitchen towels? You can get your own similar ones in the historic reproduction pattern “Sturbridge” by clicking here!

Did you try this recipe? Please tell me how it went for you by commenting below!