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Cookbook owners often pasted newspaper clippings to the inside covers and blank pages of their books. These clippings frequently include recipes or practical tips for food preparation and hygiene. This one for ptomaine poison was pasted inside an 1882 edition of How to Feed the Sick by Charles Gatchell, M.D. along with several other clippings: Acetylene Cooking, Beer Diet for Anthrax, Cleansing the Oyster, Sickroom Hints (1916), Hygienic Scorecard (1916), and Food Hints (1917).
Many old cookbooks contain handwritten recipes on the endpapers or other blank pages. Recipes such as this one for jumbles cookies in an 1802 edition of The Frugal Housewife give a glimpse into the daily lives of earlier owners of the book. This recipe also demonstrates how measurements and instructions in early 19th century recipes were far less precise than in later eras.
The recipe reads: “To make jumbles, 1 of sugar, half a pound of butter, 2 of flower, 5 eggs. Jumbles: take 1 pound of flower, 3/4 of a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter mixed together, 2 eggs the white of one, 2 teaspoonfuls of rose water, beat them a quarter of an hour, a few caraway seeds, mix all together, bake them in a slow oven.”
The Frugal Housewife by Susannah Carter (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1802)
