Once upon a time, in the mid-1800s, a New Yorker named Eliza Duane put pen to paper to record her most beloved recipes.
A Jenny Lind bread, named after the celebrated Swedish opera singer, calls for “a lump of butter the size of an egg.” A fruit cake calls for the yolks of 30 eggs, three pounds of butter and currants that are “perfectly dry.” And a very plain loaf cake is very plain indeed — basically just butter, flour and eggs.
On Tuesday, members of the New-York Historical Society’s email list will receive a transcribed recipe from one of six handwritten cookbooks and a handful of loose recipes partially attributed to Ms. Duane: a lemon cake, which calls for “2 1/2 tumblers of powdered sugar” and the juice and peel of one lemon. It is the first of an initiative to share a different historical recipe every week, in a nod to the cooking frenzy of life during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I never really baked very much before, but there’s something therapeutic, I think, about doing things with your hands,” said Louise Mirrer, the president and chief executive. “It just seemed like this would be a really great opportunity to engage people who are at home, thinking about cooking and baking, with history.”
Each week, the society will post one recipe from the Duane Family Cookbooks, which date from 1840 to 1874 and are also attributed to Mary Wells and Fanny T. Wells. Such collections of handwritten recipes are often called “manuscript cookbooks.”
“Their great advantage is that you know people have cooked these recipes,” said Paul Freedman, a professor at Yale University and the author of “Ten Restaurants That Changed America.”
Taken together, the recipes offer a window into the tastes and trends of fashionable households in 19th-century New York. Manuscript cookbooks were mainly kept in elite households, Dr. Mirrer said, often as guides for the hired chefs who would feed the family. The lemon, an ingredient that might have been difficult to get in the mid-1800s, could also offer a glimpse of Ms. Duane’s financial status, said Laura Shapiro, a culinary historian.
“That’s the joy of it, to live somebody else’s life,” said Ms. Shapiro, the author of “What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories.” “It’s a way to cross a border into another world.”
Some recipes in the collection were thought to be medicinal at the time. A cholera mixture, which calls for camphor and essence of peppermint, is an eerie link to another outbreak that ravaged the city.
Other recipes are patriotic. Ms. Duane was related to James Duane, who served as mayor of New York City after the Revolutionary War. There is a Washington cake, which was often made in February to celebrate the first president’s birthday, and two different recipes for an election cake, both of which were dense, spicy and filled with fruit.
“She was considered a good baker, because people asked her for her recipes,” said Thomas K. Duane, a former New York state senator and a member of the Duane family. “We’re New Yorkers. We persevere. And if a little lemon cake will help us to feel better, that’s a good thing.”
But Sen. Duane might have some issues, as making old recipes can prove difficult. Many are written in a sloping cursive, and while a quick online search will tell a reader that “tumblers” are about equal to today’s cups, there is no cooking time included in the recipes.
“Those things really get to people,” said Stephen Schmidt, the principal researcher and writer for the Manuscript Cookbooks Survey, which features a database of handwritten cookbooks begun by 1865. But figuring out how to make the recipes shouldn’t be too hard, he said. Most cakes bake for around half an hour, and an attentive cook can always smell and see.
The society made a conscious effort to preserve some residue left on the pages. One volume is particularly stained and splattered with what might be remnants of batter or a trace of an eggy fingerprint. When Alan Balicki, the chief conservator of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library started working to preserve it, he made a rare choice to keep the smudges.
“As a conservator, that’s usually the stuff that I want to get rid of,” Mr. Balicki said. But in this case, he said, “we just decided the stains, the encrustations, the scribbles, all of that, are actually part of the artifactual evidence.”
