We at AAS are excited to be embarking on a culinary road trip this summer! What’s a culinary road trip, you might ask? A culinary road trip is an AAS social media series featuring AAS staff members traveling back in time and across the country (we’re not really doing either, but it’s fun to imagine) by ...
Kristina Bush is a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College. She majors in medieval studies and minors in public history, museums, archives, and digital humanities. Kristina is currently working at the American Antiquarian Society as a summer page in readers’ services. Being an avid book-lover and history nerd, Kristina has greatly enjoyed her time at ...
As visions of baked goods dance through the pages of holiday Instagram, we bloggers at Past is Present have decided to take a look at some of our historical manuscript cookbooks to see what early American bakers were cooking up instead. Like our fellow bloggers at Cooking in the Archives and the experts at Colonial Williamsburg, ...
We are going to brave the waters of wartime Christmas. In the next few days, there will be three posts examining Confederate-printed items in the Society’s collection. This season of festivities is also one of commemoration and reflection as we are squarely in the War’s sesquicentennial. A glance over the pages of the nation’s most popular ...
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 ...
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 ...
Recently we acquired an interesting new addition to our ever growing scrapbook collection. In 1869, Mary H. Hill of Nelson County, VA, somehow got her hands on a salesman's sample book and proceeded to use it as a scrapbook for her favorite recipes over the next decade or so. What makes her book stand out ...
Ever wonder what Susanna was chewing on in Stephen Foster’s famous folk song? Curious about how women occupied their days at home in early America? Interested in learning more about the relationship between early American housewives and their maids? Whether you are interested in the history of American cooking, women’s history, domestic history, or the ...
