An Antebellum Plantation Household

At the age of nineteen Emily Wharton married Charles Sinkler and moved eight hundred miles from her Philadelphia home to a cotton plantation in an isolated area in the South Carolina Lowcountry. In monthly letters to her northern family, she recorded keen observations about her adopted home, and in a receipt book she assembled a trusted collection of culinary and medicinal recipes reflecting her ties to both North and South. Together with an extensive biographical and historical introduction by Anne Sinkler Whaley LeClercq, these documents provide a flavorful record of plantation cooking, folk medicine, travel, and social life in the antebellum South.

The receipts offer valuable insight into the melding of diverse cultural and ethnic influences - French Huguenot, African, Lowcountry, Virginian, and Pennsylvanian - and reveal Sinkler’s reliance on locally grown ingredients, success in devising substitutions for items that had been readily available in Philadelphia, and skill in treating a myriad of ailments.