is no longer celebrated as a holiday and is instead widely dreaded for at least a year leading up to it. Many recipes in this book are practical necessities for home cooks, including extensive instructions on how to preserve a variety of fruits and vegetables, and how to select cuts of meat at a market. The election cake, however, was something to strive for, and was a showstopping dessert for the time.
The author, Amelia Simmons, describes herself as“ an American orphan” in the preface and says that her cookbook is“ calculated for the improvement of the rising generations of Females in America” before explaining that she has done her best to accurately portray what is socially acceptable in the book; if she has failed, forgive her, for she had no parents to teach her. Simmons’ preface implies that this book, aimed at helping American housewives become more literate in cooking discourse, was unusual for its time.
The book was published while America was beginning to define its cultural identity, and includes both distinctly American cuisine like corn, turkey, and cranberries and European roasting techniques and high-class desserts like syllabub. The recipes are aimed at home cooks already familiar with basic culinary skills, who want to expand their repertoire with new flavor combinations or slightly more advanced techniques. This book is the earliest American example of recipes as“ the written representation of women’ s domestic discourse”( Flietz, 1).
Modern recipes target an audience of“ anyone with an internet connection and a kitchen,” making them very accessible in the traditional sense but occasionally inaccessible in new and exciting ways. This recipe excerpt from the Baker’ s Table website came up on my Pinterest feed:
42 TEMPO MAGAZINE— SPRING 2025