Past is Present

The Acquisitions Table: Portrait of Nathaniel Bowditch

Harding, Chester, attr. Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838). Oil on canvas, [ca. 1830]

Salem navigator and mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch was also the author of several atlases and scientific publications which can be found in the AAS collection. Bowditch is perhaps most famous for his 1802 publication, The New American Practical Navigator, which went through several editions in his lifetime and is still in print. He spent many years working on an English translation of Pierre-Simon de Laplace’s Traité de mécanique céleste, a mathematically-focused tome dealing with issues of astronomy. Bowditch’s impressive personal library of over 2,500 volumes, maps and manuscripts was given to the Boston Public Library in 1858 by his descendants.

This portrait was painted towards the end of Bowditch’s life, probably in Boston where he was working in the insurance industry. Art historian Louisa Dresser has attributed this painting to Chester Harding, though further research remains to be done. Harding was in Boston at the time, and was considered one of the most fashionable painters of the era. Bowditch was an active consumer of portraits, sitting often to have his likeness made in watercolor miniature, plaster busts and easel painting. He was painted in the 1820s by James Frothingham in Salem, in 1828 by the elderly Gilbert Stuart, and in 1835 by the Salem painter Charles Osgood. Based on the sitter’s appearance, this portrait was probably painted around 1830. The artist has captured the shrewd features of the sitter with great detail, capturing the sharp-eyed look for which he was known. A biographer noted, “It was indeed wonderful with what facility Dr. Bowditch could in an instant divert his attention from any subject to another of the opposite character; at one moment engaged in the every-day detail of the business of his office, at the next abstracted from all around him by the most elevated investigations of science. . ..” This portrait was the generous gift of AAS member Karl Lombard Briel.

AAS in the news

The Society has received a lot of great press lately. Two weeks ago Worcester Magazine featured AAS as “Worcester’s hidden gem” in an article by Matthew Stepanski and last week AAS member and Telegram and Gazette columnist Al Southwick called the Society “far more than a collection of books and newspapers. The AAS has become an intellectual powerhouse of research, famed far and wide across the land and even across the ocean.”

Two AAS staff members also have received media attention recently. Lauren Hewes, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts was featured on WBUR 90.9 FM. Lauren discussed our Valentine collection and the career of Esther Howland for a special Valentine’s Day story created by Andrea Shea, the station’s art and culture reporter. Philip Lampi appeared on the front page of the Telegram and Gazette in an article written by George Barnes after he received the first Chairman’s Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This was the first such award presented by NEH Chairman James Leach to an ordinary citizen for extraordinary work in support of the humanities. Phil received this award for his life’s work researching early American voting records.

We hope to continue to garner media attention throughout this our bicentennial year.

Bibliothanatography

About two years ago, I found myself looking at an 1892 Bibliobroadsheet. It advertised the Bronson, Michigan, store of J. Francis Ruggles, the most unusual bibliopole ever working in Bronson, for sure. Michael Winship, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and an editor of the recently published five-volume series A History of the Book in America, was on fellowship at AAS and had just shared with me a photo of the broadsheet, Circularissingularis, no. 22.

I knew nothing about Ruggles at the time and was more than curious. In the broadsheet, Ruggles relates his family history (New England extraction and migration to a frontier Michigan homestead). At his Bronson “odditorium,” Ruggles said that:

with his correspondents in the principal literary centres, catalogues strewing in from all parts of the world by every mail, records of most of the works published since the origin of printing, no marvel that he is prepared to furnish any obtainable book ever printed.

When the broadsheet was printed, Ruggles had been selling books for over twenty years, rebuilt his shop after a devastating 1889 fire, and undoubtedly would have tried to provide his customers with any book ever printed.

Ruggles recently reappeared to me as I’ve been working on an inventory of AAS’s collection of booksellers’ labels and binders’ tickets. The collection ranges from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and provides just one entry point into the history of booksellers and bookstores in the U.S. The labels in the collection have not been cataloged fully, not to mention the labels still in books that have received little to no attention here at the library. Tucked into the thousand or so labels in the collection proper is an earlier label from Ruggles’s store. Dated 1875-76, the label advertises Ruggles’s ability to “supply any legitimate publication” with the aid of “representatives on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Was Ruggles superhuman or just the type of bookseller who knew what a customer needed and tried to supply it? In that, he was not unlike some of the great booksellers (the Sabins and Rosenbachs) or the less well-known (the Frank Shays [see an exhibit on Shay from the Harry Ransom Center] or Irving Ephraims [20th-century Worcester bookseller]). AAS has a number of collections that are ideal for the study of booksellers in America, including the manuscript Book Trades Collection and Isaiah Thomas Papers, and a vast number of bookdealers’ catalogs. But the bookstore is dead. The bookstore remains dead. And how shall we comfort ourselves but by the study of the history of booksellers and bookselling?

See also:

Marge Scott’s article on Ruggles in volume 23 of the Chronicle: The Magazine of the Historical Society of Michigan.

Michael Winship’s “‘The Tragedy of the Book Industry’? Bookstores and Book Distribution in the United States to 1950”, from volume 58 of Studies in Bibliography.

The Acquisitions Table: Calathumpian Advocate

Calathumpian Advocate (Concord, NH). June 19, 1850.

This interesting political periodical could be described as rabble rousing. The term “calathumpian” is probably a colloquial Americanism relating to a society of social reformers, especially those that disrupt political events. This particular issue includes a report of the Calathumpian Fusiliers disrupting an election in Concord, ending with a list of participants, but the names are meant to be humorous, e.g. Sledge Hammer, Old Tar, Josiah Billdad, Lincom Squizzle.

Some things never change

Recently I’ve been going through some newly acquired diaries in our manuscript collection. Randomly reading diary entries can prove to be very entertaining. Sure, you could end up reading page after page of daily weather, or recaps of Sunday sermons, but once in a while you’ll find a gem. Because so many diaries are straightforward record keeping, it can be hard to find a diarist with entertaining prose, so I’m going to share a couple of entries that caught my eye.

First, we have an entry from Walter Goodrich. Walter lived in Portland, Maine, and kept a diary from January through June of 1846. While the diary doesn’t cover a long time span, his entries are lengthy (about a full page per day) and detail his life at school and in his community. In one entry, Walter recounts the all too familiar issues dog ownership –

Eight o’clock in the morning About seven o’clock this morning it looked as clear and fair and I thought it was going to be a pleasant day, but now it snows and I don’t know when it will stop. This morning Ring hearing a dog bark down on the new road somewheres thought he must put in the chorus so he began to bow wow wow the worst kind. And there then two dogs barked so much as half an hour, and this morning as I was going after the milk I met John Dunham in the road and he said he was going to kill ring he came over by my house this morning and kept barking and waking my baby up and just as sure as he comes over there again I will kill him!!

Another entry comes from a new addition to our unidentified diaries collection. The diary was kept by a school girl from Rhode Island. Another short diary, she kept daily entries for only three months, from November 1852 through January 1853. On a Thursday during the cold winter, our author writes of a promise made with a friend to get up at 5am the next morning for some exercise. And much like we still all hit the snooze button and ignore our good intentions, she too slept in –

Last night Minerva and I made an agreement to get up at 5 o’clock this morning and take a walk. So at the appointed time I was awoke but could not think of getting up out of such a nice warm bed and going out into the cold air, and perhaps have Jack Frost bite my nose. So I did not get up until the regular time. Auntie overslept herself this morning.

I love how diaries can capture these real life moments and make us realize how some of the simple things in life never change!

Both of these diaries will be up for adoption during AAS’s annual Adopt-A-Book event on April 3, 2012. [You can read about last year’s event here.] More information about this year’s event, as well as other items up for adoption, will be available on our website soon!

National Award and Standing Ovation for AAS’s Philip Lampi

The first ever Chairman’s Commendation from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was awarded to AAS staff member Philip J. Lampi in a ceremony yesterday afternoon. Local politicians, current and former AAS staff, and some of Lampi’s many friends and colleagues gathered to honor his lifetime of research into early American election returns.

Learn more by reading:

the front page story in today’s Telegram & Gazette (be sure to check out the slideshow of images from the event)
a blog post from current AAS fellow, Joseph Adelman, explaining the impact of Lampi’s work on historical scholarship

Here are quotes describing the significance of Lampi’s life work:

Back in 1987, Walter Dean Burnham referred to “the lost Atlantis of nineteenth century politics.” If that is indeed the correct description, then Phil is the Captain Nemo. — Erik Beck, A New Nation Votes project coordinator, in the AAS Annual Report for 2009-2010 [Download a PDF]

Indispensable for understanding politics in the early Republic is Philip Lampi’s monumental collection — Gordon S. Wood in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford University Press, 2009

One of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research — Jill Lepore in “Party Time,” The New Yorker, September 17, 2007

The Society issued the following press release written by director of outreach, James David Moran:

James Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, awarded Philip J. Lampi, a researcher at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a Chairman’s Commendation in a ceremony at AAS yesterday. Leach cited Lampi’s life-long research into the voting records from 1787 – 1825 and his compilation of local, state and national election data from newspapers and archives from throughout the nation. The award “commends Philip Lampi for his diligence in collecting, collating and preserving the most basic records of American democracy.”

This award is all the more remarkable because Lampi possesses only a high school diploma. Lampi first became interested in election returns as a teenager while living in the Stetson Home for Boys in Barre, Massachusetts. When he could not get access to the television, he wandered off to discover a collection of yearly almanacs. The election statistics contained within them fascinated him as did the fact that no statistics were listed before 1825. What happened prior to that date became a lifelong obsession that took him to libraries and historical societies throughout the country. Supporting himself by various jobs including night watchman, Lampi suffered great privations including sleeping in his car in his quest of voting returns which he would discover in newspapers, deed books, and manuscripts scattered in repositories throughout the nation. Eventually his research brought Lampi to the AAS when in 1974-75 he was the recipient of an AAS Fred Harris Daniels Research Fellowship to mine the Society’s collection of over two million pre-twentieth century American newspapers. Lampi eventually joined the staff of the Society.

Today, Lampi is recognized by political scientists and historians as the most authoritative expert on early national election returns. Lampi’s research has been cited by numerous scholars including: George A. Billias, David Bohmer, James P. Broussard, David Hackett Fischer, Ronald P. Formisano, William J. Gilmore, Roy R. Glashan, Daniel P. Jordan, Kenneth Martis, Richard P. McCormick, Donald J. Ratcliffe, Andrew W. Roberston, and Jeremiah Slade, among many others.

The fruits of Lampi’s life’s work are now part of an online searchable database of early American voting records entitled A New Nation Votes created in collaboration with the American Antiquarian Society and Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives and with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Please join us in paying tribute to the remarkable achievements of this remarkable man.

‘Chasing the Dumpster’ for historic newspapers

Who knew the skill set for a successful curator of newspapers included dumpster diving abilities?

While this may not always be literally true, figuratively speaking at least AAS’s curator of newspapers has rescued some of the collection’s treasures from pretty precarious situations. Vincent Golden recently gave a talk on his “Chasing the Dumpster” activities, which you can read about on the New England Newspaper & Press Association’s website by clicking here.

As this article suggests, Vince Golden is committed to his mission of rescuing historic newspapers. How committed? Well, he’s so committed that he periodically rents a U-Haul and drives it across half the country, stopping along the way at prearranged sites to pick up newspapers that can no longer be properly housed. Just picture it: rather than a covered wagon traveling along the Oregon Trail, imagine a “Newspaper Trail” being blazed by a lone curator in a rented U-Haul. The best part, though, from our point of view is that rather than staying out West, Vince brings the newspapers back to a safe forever home at the American Antiquarian Society.

While Vince is willing to go to great lengths to successfully corral newspapers, he would probably be the first to admit that the newspaper that walks in the door by itself (or more accurately, carried by a generous donor) just may be his favorite. So if you wanted to help out by walking in your own donation of newspapers published before 1876 in the U.S. (or the West Indies) that are not yet in AAS’s collections, I’m sure you would make Vince’s day (and save some gas in the U-Haul).

On AAS’s website, you can catch a short video featuring Vincent Golden in which he describes the history and characteristics of antebellum American newspapers. Filmed in the newspapers workroom at the Society, the video features examples of various newspapers and illustrated magazines from the Society’s collection.

Antebellum American Newspapers from American Antiquarian Society on Vimeo.

More information about AAS’s newspaper collections can be found on the newspaper section of our website.

The Acquisitions Table: The Boys’ and Girls’ American Annual

The Boys’ and Girls’ American Annual: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for Young People. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1861.

This utterly charming chromolithographed winter scene of a boy feeding deer is the frontispiece to our newly acquired copy of The Boys’ and Girls’ American Annual. It is unabashedly devoted to leisure reading. The first chapter gives suggestions to its young readers on how to stage a holiday dance and charade party. Casting aside any lingering distrust of Christmas as a popish holiday, the preface proclaims, “Ring the merry bells of your hearts, my little ones, and let their clappers—your tongues—tell of joy and gladness, good cheer, good spirits, good fun, and good feelings.”

On the Radio: “The Mother of the Valentine”

As a special Valentine’s Day treat, our curator of graphic arts, Lauren Hewes, was on Boston’s NPR news station (90.9 WBUR) to talk about Worcester’s own Esther Howland and her valentines. A transcript of “The Mother of the Valentine” is up on WBUR’s website or you can click on the “Listen Now” button to hear the piece. Be sure to also view the slideshow!

To learn more, you can also read the earlier post on Past is Present or check out the AAS online exhibition “Making Valentines.” And here are some related images in AAS collections.

Cooking the Old Colony Cake

So the Old Colony Cake didn’t turn out too bad! While the ingredients were identical to traditional cake recipes, the ratios were a bit different. The result was very thick batter and a dense cake, but the lemon added a much needed bright flavor. Not sure which way to add the lemon, I added both a squeeze of juice and some zest, and it seemed a perfect balance.

I ended up cutting the recipe in half and had just enough batter to fill your standard cake pan. The recipe didn’t provide a cooking time, or a cooking temperature, of course. I baked it according to what I usually do with cakes – 350 degrees for about 25 minutes. However, I ended up upping the timer every time I checked it until it baked for almost an hour. The long baking time did make for a nice crispy outside and perfectly baked inside.

As I was baking the halved recipe I tried to imagine Ms. Tilgham baking this cake in 1860. Whenever I recreate these historic recipes, I’m always curious about the cooking time and temperature. While the recipes spell out the exact measurements of the ingredients, I wonder how random the actual baking was. And I wonder how many cakes were tossed out because they were over or under cooked. Perhaps this falls under the category of differing expectations, but I know I have thrown out many a cake and cookies for being baked wrong, and I have all the direction and control in the world (even adjustments for baking at different altitudes!). Perhaps a little dry or burnt on the bottom was more acceptable when there wasn’t as much temperature control.

If anyone baked along, please share your results. And I’m open for suggestions for another dish!

TV for lovers of history, art, furniture, and more

For those who may have missed David Jaffee’s talk on “Learning to Look at Early American Material Culture” when he presented it at AAS this fall (or for those who want to see it again), you’re in luck! The program will be airing on C-SPAN 3 this weekend at the following times:

Sat. 2/11 @ 11am ET

Sun. 2/12 @ 6pm ET

Mon. 2/13 @ 7am ET

Even if you don’t get C-SPAN, the presentation will be streaming live on the internet. And even if you are busy all this weekend, early next week the entire broadcast will be available to watch at your convenience in C-SPAN’s video library.

A preview is available on C-SPAN’s website now.

Synopsis of the Talk
In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? David Jaffee will talk about the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States – chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing – to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. His lecture will focus on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence.

About the Speaker
David Jaffee is Professor and Head of New Media Research at the Bard Graduate Center. Trained as a cultural historian, he has extensively studied the culture of the preindustrial northeast. His 1999 book, People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860, looked at town founders and local historians in Worcester County. He is now at work on a new project, New York as Cultural Capital, looking at how the nineteenth-century domestic interior – and the parlor in particular – was filled with furniture, displays of stereographs, plaster figures, and chromolithographs. He has held fellowships at several institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Winterthur Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the American Antiquarian Society. He is a member of the American Antiquarian Society, and he is on the board of the Society’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC).

Professor Jaffee is also interested in pedagogy and the incorporation of new media. He has published several essays on teaching and learning with new media publications, as well as directed two NEH projects to develop multimedia resources for the history classroom. He has led numerous new faculty development seminars and programs, including the NEH-supported New Media Classroom, Learning to Look with the American Social History Program and AAS’s CHAViC Summer Seminar on Interpreting Historical Images for Teaching and Images.

The Acquisitions Table: Treatise on the Imposition of Forms

Bidwell, George, d. 1885. Treatise on the imposition of forms … also, tables of signatures, etc., useful to compositors, pressmen, and publishers. New York: Raymond & Caulon, 1865.

Rare first edition of one of the few dedicated handbooks for printers on “imposition,” that is, the arrangement of text pages in the “forme” placed on the bed of a press so that, when both sides of a sheet are printed and the sheet folded, pages will fall in the proper sequence. Such information commonly appeared in printer’s manuals, but typically in far less detail than is given here. Nineteenth-century innovations in printing technology—such as the casting of stereotype plates and the invention of large, steam-powered presses—gave printers many new options for imposing a text, but rarely does a machine-press-era printed and bound book preserve the physical evidence necessary for determining the imposition scheme employed. Bidwell’s Treatise offers an important window into how mid-19^th century American printers understood imposition and what were considered the best contemporary practices. Published at the direction of the New York Typographical Society, this copy bears the March 18, 1865 ownership signature of a New York printer.

Piling On! Football in the archive

The items featured in this post were originally intended to be on display in the Reading Room of Antiquarian Hall by way of noting the Super Bowl. But the Curator of Graphic Arts instead installed archival items relating to the upcoming Leap Year in February. This is probably more fitting as, statistically speaking, Leap Year has seen fewer appearances on the calendar in the past decade than the Patriots have been contenders for the championship. And though last night didn’t work out in their favor, it may help to put the game of football in a historical perspective to ease the blow.

Football is arguably a game about reminiscences – a contact sport undoubtedly – but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who enjoys the game who is not quick to reveal their earliest memories of encountering it. What better place to help alleviate the burden of recollections than in an archive?

So sit back and enjoy the visual post-game show.

While the true game of American football as we know it today did not make an official appearance until the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries (alas, out of the AAS scope date of 1876), we certainly have items concerning its early history. British children’s author Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days, enormously popular in the nineteenth century, was recalled constantly as an introduction to Rugby. AAS has not one, but two copies of School Days at Rugby published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields 1857. Also in this vein of early depictions of the game from the late 1850s and early 1860s is Haverford School, a lithograph by W.H. Rease depicting a group of young men playing a game remarkably close to football; the men are outside what is now Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania (Figure 1).

Walter Camp’s Book of College Sports, published in New York in 1893, offers an impressive overview of the history of the game as well as rich interior illustrations by Henry Alexander Ogden (1856-1936) and Irving Ramsey Wiles (1861-1948), in addition to diagrams, regulations, strategies, descriptions of costumes, shoes, and players (Figures 2, 3, 4).

Camp’s text American Football: with thirty-one portraits, published by Harper Brothers in 1891, illustrates the sport’s most outstanding figures on the field in the late nineteenth century including the player (and later coach) Hector Cowan (Figures 5 & 6).

Football for Player and Spectator, published in Ann Arbor, MI in 1905, is a heavily illustrated guide to the game with more photographic depictions than Walter Camp’s Book. The author, Fielding H. Yost, was both a player and coach; in his preface, he states that his hopes are that:

The perusal of the work will give the reader – player or spectator – an adequate idea of the spirit in which the game is both played and viewed in its best form.

Following are rules, development, formations and diagrams of play (Figures 7, 8, 9).

While our variation of the game came from the more collegiate practice, it quickly became a sport known, and played, by children as is illustrated in Farmer Gooding’s Circus by Harriet Putnam published by the McLoughlin brothers ca. 1905 (Figure 10). In the text, Jack and Bart Bailey make short work of mastering the game. Palmer Cox’s famous The Brownies also have a notable, and humorous, attempt at the game in The Brownies Through the Union (1897). Their attempts at American Football are replete with illustrations of piling-on and injuries as they attempt to maneuver their way through the rules of the game (Figures 11, 12, 13).

It’s a Leap Year!

Here in New England, we are often glad that February is the shortest month, even in a leap year. Back in 45 B.C., the Julian calendar codified the tradition of adding a day to February every four years, and the Gregorian calendar followed suit. The practice, of course, continues today and helps align the seasons and planetary rotation with our calendars. In nineteenth-century America, leap year was often used as excuse for winter parties and balls. The British tradition of allowing women to propose marriage during a leap year was adopted in the United States and resulted in many jokes and stories in the local papers, played out in the theater, and in children’s books.

To mark February 29, 2012, we selected a few items from the collection to display in our Reading Room. For those of you who can not make it to Worcester in February, this post will have to substitute. The two invitations to Leap Year parties date from the 1860s, with one featuring a quadrille band and dancing until 3:00am. The play Leap Year is a comical farce published around 1860, and was performed in Boston in 1862 as shown in the broadside playbill. The 1872 McLoughlin publication, although part of the Society’s children’s literature collection, was likely intended for an adult audience. The humorous illustrations feature all sorts of unmarried women seeking marriageable men in banks, taverns and on the street.

A search in the American Historical Newspaper database resulted in hundreds of articles and essays in January and February issues of leap years, often satirizing unmarried women and bachelors. An article in an 1804 issue of the Dover, New Hampshire Sun states:

It has from time immemorial been considered a rightful prerogative of the ladies in LEAP YEAR, without subjecting themselves to any imputation or want of modesty, to make the first advances in negotiations for matrimonial alliances.

An 1820 headline reads “Old Bachelors, Look Out!” and a mock “Bachelor’s petition” appeared in The American Citizen from Jackson, Michigan in 1852, encouraging “unmarried ladies of all kinds, sizes, and ages” to propose because most bachelors were really just shy and would make good husbands.

All of this raises interesting questions about gender roles, marriage, and American society — especially after 1860, when eligible, unmarried men were in extremely short supply due to the Civil War. The war resulted in over 600,000 male deaths in this country, knocking social mores on their heels. It is all well and good to make fun and joke, but it is very likely that for a few leap years (1864, 1868, 1872, 1876), women took advantage of the relaxation of the rules and proposed to those men that could help them build a family and a future in the healing nation.

A return to historic cooking, manuscript style

With winter upon us, and snow (finally!) on the ground, I thought it would be a good time to fire up the old hearth, so to speak, and return to some historic recipes. This time around, I decided to explore our manuscript cookbook collection. These handwritten recipes include as much variety as one would find in published cookbooks, featuring recipes not only for food and drink, but also for household products such soap, tooth powder, cologne, dye, and even medical cures. The collection features cookbooks from 1770 through 1890.

I browsed through a volume belonging to Augusta M. Boyds Tilgham of Baltimore, dated 1860. Ms. Tilgham’s book is filled mostly with recipes for cakes and other desserts, as well as a few household items such as whitewash and cold cream. What’s most interesting about her book are the recipe names. This personal touch is what makes manuscript cookbooks stand out from their published counterparts. Ms. Tilgham named many of her recipes after the women who shared them with her. She also seems to have been on a presidential kick, including recipes for Taylor pudding, Washington cake and Harrison cake.

The numerous cake recipes – Poor man’s cake, Washington cake, a cheap cake, Ellen’s wedding cake – seem to differ only slightly. They all call for the standard flour, eggs, milk and sugar, but one might call for nutmeg, the other for molasses. I’m going to give the Old Colony cake a try, whose special ingredient is lemon. Also, I couldn’t resist trying a recipe that, in 1860, was already called “old.” I’ve transcribed the recipe below. I’ll be trying it out this week and will be reporting back soon with the results. Feel free to bake along and share your results!

Old Colony Cake

3 eggs – 2 1/2 cups of sugar / 1 cup of butter – 1 ts of milk / 4 cups of flour – season with / Lemon – sift sugar over the / cake after it’s in the pan