Flavors from the past Personal cookbooks valuable window into history

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Perhaps, when Leila Livingston of Moscow married Asher Davis of Solon in 1895, her mother or best friend gave her the blank book that says “RECIPES” on the gray-blue front cover. She was 16 then and, no doubt, already knew how to fry plain donuts, roll out flaky pie crust and understood the intricacies of making mincemeat from venison.

The recipes on the first five pages of Leila Davis’ recipe book are handwritten in pencil or black ink. The first one is for Cream Cookies, to be rolled out and baked in a “quick oven.” On the third page are recipes for “Craker (sic) Pudding and Lemon Pie,” and below that on the same page a recipe for an indigestion remedy:

“Juice of one lemon, teaspoon of salt, fill the glass with cold water and drink.”

Julia Hunter of the Maine State Museum says personal recipe books were fairly common in the late 1800s and were “notebooks of useful information about housekeeping and cooking.” Their survival rate, she said, is very low because when an elderly relative decides to disperse household goods, personal recipe books are often consigned to the dump and not recognized as a family treasure.

Old recipes are important, she said, because “they connect us to the past and give us a context for being in the world.”

The state museum has personal recipe books in its collection, Hunter said, but they do not lend themselves to display because they are well-used and have not survived in good condition.

The Bangor Museum and Center for History has one personal recipe book in its collection, leather-bound and dated 1820-1840. It was kept by members of Bangor’s Dennett family and was donated by William S. Dennett in 1911. It, too, mixes food recipes with medicinal recipes, including Pain Control for Gout. It also includes a Recipe to Dye Yarn a Pink Color. The recipe book contains no recipes for cookies, but one fruit cake recipe calls for 20 eggs.

One of the first published recipe and housekeeping books available to Maine women was “The Frugal Housewife,” published in 1829, by Lydia Maria Child, a passionate abolitionist, who grew up in Norridgewock.

On the fifth page of Leila Davis’ recipe book are handwritten directions for Susie’s Spice Cake and beneath that the notation, “very good.” Other recipes in the book also have Davis’s comments written beside them. Many are “very good” or “very nice.” The yeast biscuits, however, are “not good.” The Rhubarb Date Pie earned high praise: “This is delicious.”

On the sixth page of her recipe book, Davis cut from a newspaper, possibly The Boston Globe, five recipes and pasted them on a blank page.

Thus was the cookbook’s design set – some recipes handwritten, others cut out and pasted in, recipes for food interspersed occasionally with medicinal recipes – until about midway in the book, the writing and pasting stops and recipes clipped from newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes and calendars are simply inserted between the blank pages. Perhaps that was when, as a busy mother of five sons, Davis simply had more important things to do – knitting socks, keeping house and tending her husband and boys – than scribbling or pasting recipes in her book.

Newspaper clippings from the Portland Sunday Telegram featuring Maine’s own Marjorie Standish, author of the Cooking Down East column, also were saved in the recipe book. One of the clippings predates the time the column received its name and bears only Standish’s byline. That column is about biscuits; the other is about yeast bread.

Batter stains and grease spots that splashed on the pages as Davis whipped up batches of chocolate fudge or graham rolls are mute testimony that her recipe book saw daily use.

“My mother always said,” Hunter commented, “that if you soaked one of those old pages in water, you’d have soup.”

One page of Davis’ recipe book contains a gem: Bangor Brownies. According to a Bangor Convention and Visitors Bureau handout, “the first brownies to appear in the United States were called Bangor Brownies after the city in Maine where they were discovered. The Bangor Brownie recipe first appeared in a cookbook in the early 1900s and was featured in a Gold Medal flour recipe collection in 1925.”

The Bangor Brownie recipe in Davis’ book is from a newspaper clipping headed “Cookies for the Lunch Box,” which includes, besides the brownies, recipes for brown sugar, peanut, chocolate, gingersnap and sugar cookies.

The most unusual recipes in Davis’ book are for clover wine and switchell. The clover wine recipe is written on tablet paper and folded into a small envelope yellowed with age. It calls for 2 quarts of red clover heads in the second blossom, boiling water, sugar, oranges, raisins and a yeast cake. A note at the end of the recipe says, “You have some of the very nicest wine you ever taste of and a very nice bracing tonnick for the sick. We made 20 quart bottles and this summer are going to make just twice that amount, it isn’t much work after the clover is picked.”

Switchell was commonly made in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Hunter said. It was a homemade drink concocted in pails and taken out to the fields when the menfolk were haying. The recipe calls for sugar, molasses, vinegar and ginger mixed into a gallon of “good cold spring water.” The recipe had been clipped from a newspaper and was part of a letter to an editor. The letter stated that it was “cooling, thirst-quenching and entirely satisfactory as a hot weather drink.”

The oldest published item with a date on it in Davis’ recipe book is “Fleischmann’s Booklet Devoted to the Interests of Good Baking and Containing Some Valuable Hints Pertaining Thereto.” It is dated 1910.

Davis died in 1971 when she was nearly 92 and her recipe book passed on to her daughter-in-law, Alice Chase Davis of Bingham. A newspaper clipping describing Alice Davis’ wedding to Ernest Davis is pasted on the last page of the recipe book.

Hunter said the best way to care for an antique personal recipe book is to put it in an acid-free box and put it in a drawer away from the light. And when the recipe book is used, it should be covered with plastic wrap to protect the pages from more food splashes and stains.

“Treasure it,” she said. “And make sure that it’s passed on to a family member who likes cooking and food lore.”

Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at 990-8153 and hamlin@bangordailynews.net. Readers may also write her at Bangor Daily News, P.O. Box 1329, Bangor ME. 04402. The Style Desk welcomes stories about other Maine families’ personal cookbooks and anecdotes.

Cream Cookies

2 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 cup butter

1 cup sour cream

1 teaspoon soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

Enough flour to roll out

Mix ingredients, roll out dough and bake cookies in a quick oven.

Bangor Brownies

1/2 cup butter and 1 cup sugar, creamed

2 squares of chocolate, melted

2 eggs

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

scant cup of flour

pinch of salt

vanilla, if desired

Mix ingredients and spread on buttered tin and bake in a moderate oven 20 or 30 minutes.

Switchell

“A popular drink of the Maine hayfield for a great many years.”

2 cups sugar

1 cup molasses

11/4 cups molasses

1 teaspoon ginger

Mix in a gallon of good cold spring water.

Steamed Berry Pudding

2 cups flour

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter

1 cup milk

1 cup fresh berries

Turn into buttered mold. Steam 11/2 hours.

Sauce:

1 cup sugar

1 cup hot water

1 tablespoon flour

A piece of butter

Mix butter, sugar and hot water. Thicken with flour. Flavor with anything you like, such as lemon, vanilla or almond Keep hot but do not boil.

Maple Candy

4 cups maple syrup

1/4 cup butter

1 cup cream

1 cup pecans, chopped

1 teaspoon lemon extract

Cook the maple syrup, cream and butter for 9 minutes after the boiling point has been reached. Remove from fire, add the pecans and extract and stir for 5 minutes. Pour into buttered pans and when cool, cut into squares.