Amelia Simmons Fills a Need: American Cookery, 1796

Abstract

T ONG after Stephen Day had begun the operation of a printing press in the infant Massachusetts Bay colony, the American who J sought printed guidance in almost any branch of temporal affairs was still forced to rely upon European works. Those that walk mournfully with God might turn to Richard Standfast's Little Handful of Cordial Comforts for Fainting Souls,1 printed in Boston, or to any of the numerous sermons that flowed from colonial American presses; but the man who needed to know the best time to plant his wheat and the housewife whose receipt for syllabub was not completely to her taste could find help only in imported books. For aid in such mundane matters, the English-speaking colonist might bring with him Thomas Tusser's Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, first printed in I573 and frequently reissued. This work was doubly desirable because it also contained a section devoted to Huswiferie.2 The rhymed advice in Tusser's appealing book covered every aspect of life on the land and in the house, from sowing peason and beans, in the wane of the moone, to marking new blankets and sheets. However, from the housewife's point of view, it was in many ways too general. For example, it contained no recipes for the pancakes, wafers, seed cakes, pasties, and frumenty that he recommended to her for use on such special occasions as Shrove Tuesday, sheepshearing, or harvest home. Unless she was illiterate or unusually shiftless, the homemaker of course had her own written collection of receipts, medicinal as well as culinary, gathered from family and friends. A surprising number of early English manuscript receipt books, many of them beautifully written, have