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, “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.” 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 “in every sense of the word, American,” 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 “will not be found inferior to any of a similar description made in the European manner.”

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