HOUSEHOLD WORDS: Women Write from and for the Kitchen

One of the ways in which women converted printed cookery books into a facsimile of manuscript receipt books was by clipping and pasting recipes from other sources to the front and back covers. Often straight pins were used to affix a recipe to a page. At times, the holdings were kept according to category or type of food in the fashion of the day. At other times, placements of these appended recipes appeared to be random; however, they reflect, in some measure, the organization of a woman's work. Marginal commentary or bolder strikings in the text itself indicate the women's editorial changes as they rendered books their own.