I opened a box with some of my grandparents’ books this week, and here’s another bit of book/family history. This recipe book is marked as a gift from my grandmother’s aunt Mary to my grandmother’s little sister Jean, and it has a back story told by Mary in a note pasted inside the cover. (Mary was the family historian and archivist, and many of the heirlooms from that line have her labels, written in that big round hand.) The book was a gift to Mary from her husband Richard Bishop, who evidently called her Queenie. They married in Independence, Missouri on June 28, 1896; the other date is presumably when he gave her the book. He died the following winter, leaving her pregnant with a baby who also died, and Mary returned to her family in Spokane.
In widowhood Mary worked as a housekeeper for a widowed attorney in his 70s, and they married in 1902. He died a couple of years later, and his children by previous marriages refused to accept Mary (there’s a letter from their lawyer requiring her to return a painting he had given her), but she insisted on using his surname MacBride for the rest of her life. So now, in the 1930s or ’40s, she gives this book to her niece Jean.
The interesting bit is in the back of the book: there were several blank pages, partly filled with handwritten recipes from Mary’s family and friends. Most of them have a name attached (in Mary’s handwriting), but the first one (Boston Brown Bread) is anonymous. No problem! I know that hand: it’s Mary’s father, William McCoy Wheatley, whose papers we have. So here’s an 1890s father contributing the first family recipe to his daughter’s cookbook, which is rather lovely.
Strikingly, there’s no recipe from Mary’s mother Mildred. She was from a slave-owning Virginia family who had moved to Missouri, where she met William, a Pennsylvanian. At the beginning of the Civil War they moved back to his family home in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Because Mildred couldn’t cook, William assembled a book of his mother’s recipes for her (I assume Mildred wasn’t on comfortable terms with her mother-in-law, so he had to be the go-between). I used the cookbook as a demo IIIF project.
At the turn of the century William died and was buried in Northumberland according to his wish, but Mildred told her children that her body should on no account rest there. On the front cover of William’s recipe book is a hand-drawn plan of a house which seems to match Mildred’s family home in Missouri (based on photos). There was a rumour in Northumberland after Gettysburg that one of William’s brothers, who had moved to Georgia and was in the Confederate army, was hiding in the Wheatley house; some cannon were brought up and blew out the windows with blank shot. A Missouri girl from a Virginia family who participated in slavery could hardly have felt at home there.
No happy endings. What a mess we are, in all ways other than giving each other books and recipes.