Pamela Hasbrouck Recipe Book

Here, the book is open to a page with two recipes. The recipes appear to be written in ink, which indicates Pamela was probably writing with a quill and ink, as the fountain pen wasn’t as widely available at this point. The pages are stained and ripping, but the recipes remain mostly legible.

Pamela Hasbrouck’s recipe book may seem ordinary, but it holds more than just waffle recipes and grease removal hacks. It reveals a world of record-keeping by 19th century women with the power to hold the very fabric of the New Paltz community together. 

Description:

The book consists of a small stack of yellowing, thin, fragile papers bound together by string and encased in a cover that is sturdy only in contrast to the delicate papers. Pages are stained with brown dots and smudged ink. However, the handwriting is still fairly discernable. There are rips in the pages on the outside edges, as well as where the pages are bound by the string. Still, most pages remain bound, though a few have broken off and are tucked between one another. On some pages, scraps of fabric are secured onto the paper by the use of a small pin. Pamela’s recipes include fruit cake, crackers, and instructions on how to cure smoked beef. The book fits in the palm of a hand and is both light and compact.

Provenance:

The 1826 recipe book was donated to Historic Huguenot Street by the husband of Lois Marion Hasbrouck Simpson (1933-2017). Lois was the great granddaughter of Abner Hasbrouck Sr., a descendant of Patentee, Abraham Hasbrouck. The book was passed down from the hands of Abraham himself to his son Abner. Abner then passed it down to Miton Seymour Hasbrouck, who gave it to the donor. The contents of the book were believed to be written by Pamela DuBois Hasbrouck, wife of Abner, who lived from 1812-1893. This would make Pamela as young as fourteen years old at the time the recipe book was being used.  

Narrative:

It is a crisp, glowing afternoon on Huguenot Street, and it’s time for Pamela Hasbrouck to make dinner. There’s a family to feed and a whole kitchen in which to prepare. But what’s for dinner tonight? Pamela slides her brown “receipt book” (or recipe book, as the terms are interchangeable) off the kitchen shelf. She flips through the pages, some already stained with flour and grease, deciding which recipe best lends itself to the ingredients that are already stocked on her shelves. 

“Soft waffles, almond cake, potato pudding, bread pudding, custard, to cure smoke beef, brandy peaches, pickle plums…” 

She sets the book on the table. The pages fall open to one of her newest entries: “Amulet Omelet.” For this recipe, she’ll need “one pint of milk, four eggs, a small lump of butter, as large as a butternut.” She starts reading her own directions, written clearly for herself in quill and ink, “Put your butter in the pan and melt it first so as to grease the pan…” 

Pamela has been keeping this specific recipe book for a while. She’s still adding to it now in 1826, using it to document what she’s cooking and baking consistently, how to dye and color fabrics black, blue, and green, how to “remove grease pots from,” how to make a natural cologne water (lavender, orange, lemon, and alcohol), and even to document her spending and savings, scratching penciled addition algorithms into the margins. She’s a married woman now, but her responsibilities for keeping house began at a young age following the death of her mother. This is who Pamela is: a woman responsible for having knowledge, knowledge that must stretch beyond the bounds of just bread pudding, that is. She clips newspapers and glues blurbs into her book, immortalizing how “To Cure Diphtheria” (smoking coal and tar out of a pipe), and keeping pages of her catechism pinned in the book. If someone in the house or neighborhood is bitten by a “Mad Dog,” if someone is hungry, if someone needs to remember how much money they deposited and when, they’ll surely come to Pamela and her records. The recipe book is essential, immortal, and irreplaceable. It represents the encyclopedic knowledge of Pamela and her duties as the woman of the house.  

When it comes to the difference between the words “recipe” and “receipt,” some etymology can help us decipher why the two words have been used interchangeably. According to John Rees, “The word ‘receipt’ derives from the Latin ‘recipere’ meaning ‘to receive’ or ‘to take.’ Both ‘receipt’ and ‘recipe’ originally referred to medicinal preparations. These would be either literally prescriptions with lists of ingredients, or loose instructions for mixing herbs, plant extractions, and foodstuffs. ‘Receipt’ was often abbreviated to a capital R with an X through it, becoming the ℞ symbol used by our modern pharmacies today” (Rees). In any case, the two words are rooted in record-keeping, ensuring that proper methodology and itemization is preserved. 

As Joan Fitzpatrick writes in an essay included in Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550 –1800, “Recipe books have not hitherto received the attention they deserve, yet they are important historical documents as well as being records of what and how people might have cooked” (1457). To view these recipe books as just tools from the past would be to discredit their nuance and overall storytelling capabilities. Recipe books are more than just decaying papers bound together – they're primary historical documents. To experience the handwriting of Pamela herself is to experience more than just the reiteration of a two-hundred-year-old recipe, rather it unlocks a treasure trove of cultural richness and record-keeping meant to last generations. Fitzpatrick continues to say, “Anyone interested in writings about food knows that they are almost never just about food but also signal historical and cultural phenomena” (1458). Leafing through the pages leaves a door to the world of Pamela Hasbrouck and her home on Huguenot Street open for us.  

Though Pamela’s recipe book is unique and irreplaceable in its own right, it is far from the only one of its kind. Women who kept house for their husbands, fathers, and families all over the country kept recipe books that were, on the outside, extremely similar to Pamela’s. Bertha E. Josephson’s “Notes and Documents – An Ohio Recipe Book,” physically describes a recipe book from Ohio, saying “Indeed, what was it like to live one hundred and twenty-one years ago? That is the question that comes to mind upon examining an inconspicuous, brown leather-bound booklet, five and one fourth by seven and three eighths inches, with seventy hand-sewn pages of watermarked paper’ interspersed with blotting sheets and nearly filled with neatly written cooking and baking recipes, or ‘receipts’ as they were then called” (Josephson, 98). This quote describes a book that is nearly identical to Pamela’s.  

While her experience keeping her own book and house was unique and tells a story about Huguenot Street itself, the fact that the book was kept at all tells us a larger story about the universal experience of being a woman keeping house in the early 19th century. To be a woman with a recipe book was to be a woman with the responsibility of upholding her family.

~Carlin Feck

Works Cited

Fitzpatrick, Joan. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1456–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/679885. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023. 

Josephson, Bertha E. “An Ohio Recipe Book of the 1820’s.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1949, pp. 97–112. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1895697. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023. 

Rees, John. “Digitizing Material Culture: Handwritten Recipe Books, 1600–1900 – Circulating Now from the NLM Historical Collections.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 13 Apr. 2017, https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2017/04/13/digitizing-material-culture-handwritten-recipe-books-1600-1900/