Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, & Sweetmeats

This nineteenth-century cooking manual was America's first baking cookbook and the first to organize recipes by listing ingredients first. Eliza Leslie's Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats was the first distinctively baking cookbook published in America, as well as the first to share ingredients in a systematic list order at the beginning of each recipe. As Eliza recorded at the time of initial publication, "e;All the ingredients, with their proper quantities, are enumerated in a list at the head of each receipt, a plan which will greatly facilitate the business of procuring and preparing the requisite article."e; Not only was this collection of recipes and tips Leslie's first cookbook, it was her most popular and influential cookery title. Featuring recipes ranging from Preserved Pine-Apple to Gooseberry Jelly, Curds and Whey, and Butter Biscuits, Eliza stressed that the recipes within the collection are "e;in every sense of the word, American,"e; as opposed to the many British and French cookbooks being produced at the time. She adds that if exactly followed, the articles produced from this book "e;will not be found inferior to any of a similar description made in the European manner."e;This facsimile edition of Eliza Leslie's Seventy-five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, founded in 1812