Recipes for the 200th Anniversary of Cookbooks in America

Recipes from a few of the most important cookbooks exhibited at the University of Michigan.

A Nice Indian Pudding
From Amelia Simmon's 1786 American Cookery

No. 1 — 3 pints scalded milk, 7 spoons fine Indian meal, stir well together while hot, let stand till cooled; add 7 eggs, half pound raisins, 4 ounces butter, spice and sugar, bake one and half hour.

No. 2 — 3 pints scalded milk to one pint meal salted; cool, add 2 eggs, 4 ounces butter, sugar or molasses and spice q. f. it will require two and half hours baking.

No. 3 — Salt a pint meal, wet with one quart milk, sweeten and put into a strong cloth, brass or gell metal vessel, stone or earthern pot, secure from wet and boil 12 hours.

A Sally Lunn Cake
From Eliza Leslie's 1837 Directions for Cookery

This cake is called after the inventress. Sift into a pan a pound a half of flour. Make a hole in the middle, and put in two ounces of butter warmed in a pint of milk, a salt-spoonful of salt, three well-beaten eggs, and two table-spoonful of salt, three well-beaten eggs, and two table-spoonfuls of the best fresh yeast. Mix the flour well into the other ingredients, and put the whole into a square tin pan that has been greased with butter. Cover it, set it in a warm place, and when it is quite light, bake it in a moderate oven. Send it to table hot, and eat it with butter.

What is called General Washington's Breakfast Cake is the same composition as the above, except that instead of a pound and half of flour, you use one pound only, and that you put in three large table-spoonfuls of yeast.

Brownies
From Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896

• 1/3 cup butter

• 1/3 cup powdered sugar

• 1/3 cup Porto Rico molasses

• 1 egg well beaten

• 7/8 cup bread flour

• 1 cup pecan meat cut in pieces

Mix ingredients in order given. Bake in small, shallow fancy cake tins, garnishing top of each cake with one-half pecan.