This week I received a wonderful gift in the mail. My friend Lee over at Hunting and Gathering (a blog about 19th and 20th century Georgia photographers) sent me two packages of cookbooks. Receiving this collection of community cookbooks, recipe booklets, and compilations was a great way to start the week.
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| Photo by Gena Philibert-Ortega |
One of the cookbooks she was excited for me to see was Tullie's Receipts. Nineteenth Century Plantation Plain Style Southern Cooking and Living. (Compiled by the Kitchen Guild of the Tullie Smith House Restoration. Atlanta Historical Society, Inc. Atlanta, Georgia. 1976.) What a fabulous book.
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| Photo by Gena Philibert-Ortega |
The Preface explains:
Tullie's Receipts is not only a receipt book for cooking but also a historical documentation of life in the South during the nineteenth century. It has been created by the Kitchen Guild of the Tullie Smith House Restoration through research in unpublished manuscripts, nineteenth century published cook books no longer in print, individual family receipts handed down from generation to generation, newspapers, scrapbooks and diaries..."
Quite frankly they had me at unpublished manuscripts.
So this cookbook is really every genealogist's dream come true because of the rich, wonderful original (and derivative) sources they used. The bibliography attests to this. Below is just one page of it.
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| Photo by Gena Philibert-Ortega |
What's even better than having the recipes is even some copies of the handwriting in the original sources.
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| Photo by Gena Philibert-Ortega |
So needless to say this is a cookbook that I will be studying for awhile. So today I decided to feature the recipe for Watermelon Pickles.
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| Photo by Gena Philibert-Ortega |
I've never had watermelon pickles, though I would like to try them. Everytime I see them or mention of them I remember a funny blog post from another genealogy friend, Amy Urman from The Genealogy Search. You may want to see what she has to say about her family and watermelon pickles.
