Provenance 

The 1826 recipe book was donated to Historic Huguenot Street by the husband of Lois Marion Hasbrouck Simpson (1933-2017). Lois was the great granddaughter of Abner Hasbrouck Sr, a descendant of Patentee, Abraham Hasbrouck. The book was passed down from the hands of Abraham himself to his son Abner. Abner then passed it down to Miton Seymour Hasbrouck, who gave it to the donor. The contents of the book were believed to be written by Pamela DuBois Hasbrouck, wife of Abner, who lived from 1812-1893. This would make Pamela as young as fourteen years old at the time the recipe book was being used. 

Physical Description

The book consists of a small stack of yellowing, thin, fragile papers bound together by string and encased in a cover that is sturdy only in contrast to the delicate papers. Pages are stained with brown dots and smudged ink. However, the handwriting on each page is still fairly discernable. There are rips in the pages on the outside edges, as well as where the pages are bound by the string. Still, most pages remain bound, though a few have broken off and are tucked between one another. On some pages, scraps of fabric are secured onto the paper by use of a small pin. Recipes in the book written by Pamela include a recipe for fruit cake, crackers, and instructions on how to cure smoked beef. The book fits in the palm of one’s hand and is both light and compact. 

Here, the book is open to a page with two recipes. The recipes appear to be written in ink, which indicates Pamela was probably writing with a quill and ink, as the fountain pen wasn’t as widely available at this point. The pages are stained and ripping, but the recipes remain mostly legible. 

Narrative

It’s a crisp, glowing afternoon on Huguenot Street. It’s time for Pamela Hasbrouck to make dinner. There’s a whole family to feed and a whole kitchen in which to prepare. But what’s for dinner tonight? Pamela slides her brown receipt book (or recipe book, the terms are interchangeable) off the kitchen shelf. She flips through the pages, some already stained with flour and grease, deciding which recipe best lends itself to the ingredients that are already stocked on her shelves.

“Soft waffles, almond cake, potatoe pudding, bread pudding, custard, to cure smoke beef, brandy peaches, pickle plums…” 

She sets the book on the table. The pages fall open to one of her newest entries, “Amulet Omelet.” For this recipe, she’ll need “one pint of milk, four eggs, a small lump of butter, as large as a butternut.” She starts reading her own directions, written clearly for herself in quill and ink, “Put your butter in the pan and melt it first so as to grease the pan…”

Pamela has been keeping this specific recipe book for awhile. She’s still adding to it now in 1826, using it to document what she’s cooking and baking consistently, how to dye and color fabrics black, blue, and green, how to “remove grease pots from,” how to make a natural cologne water (lavender, orange, lemon, and alcohol), and even to document her spending and savings, scratching penciled addition algorithms into the margins. She’s a married woman now, but her responsibilities for keeping house began at a young age following the death of her mother. This is who Pamela is; a woman responsible for having knowledge. Knowledge that must stretch beyond the bounds of just bread pudding, that is. She clips newspapers and glues blurbs into her book, immortalizing how “To Cure Diphtheria” (smoking coal and tar out of a pipe), and keeping pages of her catechism pinned to the pages. If someone in the house or neighborhood is bit by a “Mad Dog,” if someone is hungry, if someone needs to remember how much money they deposited and when, they’ll surely come to Pamela and her records. The recipe book is essential, immortal, irreplaceable. It represents the encyclopedic knowledge of Pamela and her duties as the woman of the house. 

When it comes to the difference between the words “recipe” and “receipt,” some etymology can help us decipher why the two words arose as the names of these books. According to John Rees, “ The word ‘receipt’ derives from the Latin ‘recipere’ meaning ‘to receive’ or ‘to take.’ Both ‘receipt’ and ‘recipe’ originally referred to medicinal preparations. These would be either literally prescriptions with lists of ingredients, or loose instructions for mixing herbs, plant extractions, and foodstuffs. ‘Receipt’ was often abbreviated to a capital R with an X through it, becoming the ℞ symbol used by our modern pharmacies today” (Rees). 

As Joan Fitzpatrick writes in an essay included in Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550 –1800, “Recipe books have not hitherto received the attention they deserve, yet they are important historical documents as well as being records of what and how people might have cooked” (Fitzpatrick, 1457). To view these recipe books as just tools from the past would be to discredit their nuance and overall storytelling capabilities. Recipe books are more than just decaying papers bound together, they’re primary historical documents. To experience the handwriting of Pamela herself is to experience more than just the reiteration of a two hundred year old recipe. Fitzpatrick continues on to say, “Anyone interested in writings about food knows that they are almost never just about food but also signal historical and cultural phenomena” (Fitzpatrick, 1458). Leafing through the pages leaves a door to the world of Pamela Hasbrouck and her home on Huguenot street open for us. 

Though Pamela’s recipe book is unique and irreplaceable in its own right, it is far from the only one of its kind. Women who kept house for their husbands, fathers, and families all over the country kept recipe books that were, on the outside, extremely similar to Pamela’s. In Bertha E. Josephson’s Notes and Documents – An Ohio Recipe Book , a recipe book from Ohio is physically described. “Indeed, what was it like to live one hundred and twenty-one years ago? That is the question that comes to mind upon examining an inconspicuous, brown leather-bound booklet, five and one fourth by seven and three eighths inches, with seventy hand-sewn pages of watermarked paper’ interspersed with blotting sheets and nearly filled with neatly written cooking and baking recipes, or ‘receipts’ as they were then called” (Josephson, 98). This quote describes a book that is nearly identical to Pamela’s. 

While her experience keeping her own book and house was unique and tells a story about Huguenot Street itself, the fact that the book was kept at all tells us a larger story about the universal experience of being a woman keeping house in the early nineteenth century. To be a woman with a recipe book was to be a woman with the responsibility of upholding her family. 

References

Fitzpatrick, Joan. Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1456–57. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/679885. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.

Josephson, Bertha E. “An Ohio Recipe Book of the 1820’s.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 1949, pp. 97–112. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1895697. Accessed 27 Apr. 2023.

Rees, John. “Digitizing Material Culture: Handwritten Recipe Books, 1600–1900 – Circulating Now from the NLM Historical Collections.” U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 13 Apr. 2017, https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2017/04/13/digitizing-material-culture-handwritten-recipe-books-1600-1900/. 

For my analog experiment, I chose to listen to a record all the way through. While this sounds like it wouldn’t be quite the feat I think it is, there was an incredible amount of attention and intention that went into this experiment.

I have a few records hanging on my walls, and I’ve probably listened to them a few times (once), but I rarely have the means or time to sit and listen to a record all the way through. I’m also a chronic shuffler. I make a new playlist at the start of every season and put all the songs I’m currently listening to at the time in the playlist. That’s how I listen to music. Random songs from random albums, only placed in the order I found them, creating a perfect sonic representation of the season itself and where I was in life at the time. It’s a wonder to go back and listen to previous seasons, remembering where I was when I heard the songs for the first time, remembering why they were resonating with me, etc. But listening to an album all the way through is a different experience. Intended order is huge. Rarely do I listen to songs on an album in the order in which the artist wanted me to. On Spotify, you can listen all the way through in the correct order, but you can also skip. That’s one thing about listening to a record. You can’t really skip. 

My roommate Claire has a cute, vintage-looking (though it surely is not) record player in her room. For my experiment, I decided I was going to listen to music. Just listen. Not listen and scroll on my phone, not listen and read, not listen and do homework, not listen and talk to my friends, not listen and fall asleep, just listen. I was going to plug my (Dad’s) headphones (from 2005) into the record player and just listen. For the duration of the album. Uninterrupted. Because I can so do that, right?

The album of choice was Joni Mitchell’s “For the Roses.” This is Joni’s fifth album. I found it in a $2 bin at the local antique barn, took it as a good omen, and bought it immediately, despite not having the immediate tools with which to play it. As an artist myself I see Joni as an embodiment of what it means to be a woman and singer/songwriter at once. And as fans of Joni know, her music is no longer accessible on Spotify, which is where I do all my listening. The album had been stuck to my wall with duct tape for about two months, and now it was time to listen. JUST LISTEN. 

It was seven o’clock. I’d gotten home from my long day of classes, made myself dinner, and warned my roommates. 

“Nobody knock on my door until I text you. I have to listen to music,” I said before going upstairs. 

“You have to listen to music? You always listen to music,” responded Lia. It’s true. My whole life is underscored. Music is playing at all times; in my headphones, on my laptop, from my guitar. But in this moment I realized that that might not mean I’m always listening to music. It means music is always playing. 

I moved Claire’s record player into my room and placed it on my floor. I sat cross-legged in front of it, plugging my headphones in. Shoot, I barely know how to do this, do I? Slide the record out of the sleeve. Place it on the turntable. Lift up the arm that holds the needle. The record starts spinning. Now comes the part where I can feel my Dad over my shoulder, reminding me to place the needle down correctly so I don’t scratch the record. 

Shit. I totally just scratched the record. 

I try again. This time, I get it. There’s a gentle hum before the music starts. Okay. It’s go time. 

I listen. Side A plays in little scratches and hums. It’s beautiful. It’s loud. I close my eyes and it feels like Joni is sitting right next to me. I realize that for all the Joni I grew up hearing in the kitchen, this album almost never played. I don’t recognize a single song on Side A. Not only am I listening, I’m listening for the first time. I feel myself paying more attention to the music than I’ve paid to anything in a long time. It’s hard to think of a single task I complete on a daily basis that can’t be done while I also check my phone. But if I check my phone now, I’d surely miss a crucial word, note, moment. I wouldn’t be listening, it would just be playing. In fact, my phone was still downstairs for this very reason. 

Now for Side B. I flip the record knowing I was halfway done. How am I feeling? I realize, in horror, that I feel kind of anxious. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I sit on them. I don’t know where to look. I just watch the record spin. 

Man, I think. I must look crazy right now. 

Is that even true, though? Or is that just a product of growing up in a world in which anyone could take a picture of me at any given moment and show me what I look like? Also, why does that matter right now? Why is that on my mind at all?

I take a deep breath. Finally, a song I recognize. “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio.” I hum along. And this is when I truly fall into the experience. The anxiety melts away once I stop thinking about myself, how I look, what I’m doing. I’m just listening now. And when I start just listening, it goes by so much faster. 

I’m not watching the needle anymore, so when the last song fades out, I’m expecting another one to start. But then the hum dies down and I hear it stop. It’s over. I listened. I just listened. 

I realized at that moment that I don’t have a clock in my room. I only know the time from my phone, which was still downstairs. So I don’t even know how long that was. I just know that I could feel every muscle in my body when I got up to put the record player back in Claire’s room. I could hear the rustling of the paper sleeve when I slid the record back into its case. I was tuned in. I was listening. 

For this assignment, I decided to shop for something I’ve needed for awhile: a new dish rack. The prospect of getting a new dish rack for my roommates and I is actually deeply exciting, which is how I know I’ve officially transitioned out of teenhood. I decided to start by just googling “dish rack” and seeing what the internet’s first ideas for me were. Of course, the top hit was an Amazon link, which would surely lead me to the most extensive plethora of options. So I bit. Shapes, sizes, colors, and prices varied. The price range sat at a pretty consistent $20-35, but for name brands like KitchenAid, we were looking at about $50. What did I want out of this dish rack? I had to decide after being presented with the existing options. Ooh, shelves? A drainer? A place for knives to drip dry? Amazon was presenting me with options I didn’t know existed until I’d begun scrolling through the page. This complicated things. I thought I knew what I wanted, but Amazon opened so many doors for me in terms of what a dish rack could truly be. There was, of course, the $13 “Amazon’s Choice,” but now that I’d seen what beautiful dish racks existed, I didn’t know if I could settle for the silicone option. Sure, if I’d seen that one first, maybe, but Amazon strategically stuck it at the bottom of the page. My roommates and I deserve something a little flashier, right? And isn’t it an investment? We’ve been laying our dishes out on the limited counter space. This is a purchase that’s granting us space and efficiency. When did this get so complicated?

I settled on a $25 silver dish rack with two shelves and, yes, a special place for our (dull, breaking) knives. And I felt winded from the search, but then I took two seconds to really reflect on it. It was a seven minute ordeal. I looked at probably fifteen dish racks in that time. Dish racks that completely presented themselves to me as I sat in the same place I’d done the rest of my homework and eaten my lunch. I just conjured them with their name like a wizard. 

As for my browsing, it was a completely different experience. It was different mainly because I didn’t go in looking for anything at all. I woke up early on Saturday morning with some extra time and realized it would be a perfect time to walk over to Twice Blessed, the church thrift shop on Huguenot St, and just poke around. So I did. I left my phone at home and walked over at 10 am. It was hopping. The old folks in town come from far and wide to browse on these Saturday mornings. It was also the iconic basket sale, meaning patrons can fill an entire basket for a flat price of $15. But I wasn’t even planning on doing that. I picked up a basket and it remained empty. Something I realized, actually, was that nobody really goes to Twice Blessed because they need something. The promise of nothing being new kind of eliminates that. It’s a treasure trove. You really have to dig, which makes the prospect of finding something all the more rewarding. 

It’s hard to compare ease because one experience felt like leisure and the other felt like a task. I had to find a new dish rack. It was on my to-do list. But the trip to Twice Blessed was honestly just to kill some time and maybe see some of my peers who I know also love to make the Saturday morning trek to chat with the church ladies. It was nice. When I journaled about my day later, I found myself writing about the twenty minute experience more than I thought I would. But it felt like hanging out with myself, which I forget to do. And interacting with little objects is fun. Imagining where the items came from, thinking about how disastrous it would be if I dropped the ceramic hummingbird, trying on little golden rings, these are things I can’t actually do on the Amazon storefront. I think Guriel is onto something. When I found myself on Netflix later that day, I noticed the tab at the top of my laptop said “browsing.” It made me laugh. I wasn’t browsing. I was looking for something to satisfy my exact mood, though I didn’t know what it was. But I was looking for something. That’s the difference. I wasn’t looking for anything at Twice Blessed, I was just looking. I was having an experience, as Guriel urges us to do in his writing. 

What I understand about this object is this:

My great-grandfather, George Dannecker, was randomly part of a group of young men that became the first Navy SEALs. They weren’t called Navy SEALs yet, but they were all young, impressionable, and frankly disposable. They became the men who dove underwater to deconstruct bombs before they could explode. They were called the UDT, “underwater demolition team,” later the SEALs. Their training took place in Hawaii and then they were on boats, I’m not sure exactly where. 

Sticking a bunch of young men on a boat in the middle of the ocean ensures one thing: tomfoolery. George had actually lied to join the navy, so he was significantly younger than the other men, standing at a cool seventeen years. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old boys will always find a way to play games. 

And so they played. The game of choice turned out to be ping pong. My great-grandfather turned out to be pretty good at it. He was good enough, in fact, to be crowned a “Ping Pong Doubles Champion” on October 23rd, 1944. Lucky for me and my research, this date is inscribed right on the trophy, which is shaped like a ping pong racket. His name is also inscribed in the metal, proving the original ownership. 

The trophy is made of scrap metal from shell casings. 533, the numbers inscribed front and center on the trophy, indicates either the number of his ship or his unit. “CB,” which is inscribed above the numbers, or “seabees,” stands for construction battalion. “MU,” which sits below the numbers, is for “munitions unit.” 

When I asked my father, the current owner of the trophy, what “munitions unit” meant, he texted back, simply, “go boom.”

I had the great fortune of knowing George for a lot of my life before he passed away in 2019. It took him a long time to be able to talk about his time in World War Two. In fact, he didn’t talk much about it at all. My cousins and I interviewed him for middle school projects, but that was about it. This trophy is one of the only tangible pieces of evidence I have seen that he was truly there, young, and maybe even having fun at some points. 

This trophy made it home from the war with him, which meant it eventually fell into the possession of his daughter, my Grammy. It’s been in my Dad’s office in my house for as long as I can remember. He said he took it from his mom’s house when he moved out, which would have been upwards of twenty-five years ago. 

The trophy itself is in fine shape. The black metal of the handle has rubbed off to reveal more silver, and I’m sure it has never seen a duster or any sort of cleaning supplies, but it has a sort of indestructible air to it. I picked it up and spun it in my hands long before I truly understood what it was or what an incredible history it has behind it. 

My Dad admired my great-grandfather in a way that I always noticed. George became a firefighter when he returned from war and started a family. My Dad is a retired fire chief. George tied flies and fly-fished his worries away. My Dad retreats to rivers and keeps George’s jars of rabbit hair and twine to do the same. As you can see in the picture, the trophy lives in my Dad’s home office, where he spends most of his days. He keeps it near him. 

The trophy does a lot of storytelling on its own, which is convenient for me, the researcher, but I’m positive there’s more to be uncovered. It’s touchy to think about telling too much of a story that George wasn’t telling himself, but something about the trophy feels lighter. It’s a 79 year old bragging right. Don’t worry, George, I’m showing everyone how good you were at doubles ping pong.

I’m describing a ring I wear every day (and never take off). 

The metal band has a diameter that is about as wide as a single key on a laptop keyboard. The metal is silver. It remains untarnished. The band is extremely thin. One could slide it under the top of their fingernail. The circle isn’t smooth or perfectly round. It looks as though the parallel sides of the shape have been pushed away from one another, creating almost more of a triangle shape than a perfect circle. The band is slightly flat on the bottom, allowing it to stand up on its own flat surface. The band itself has a rectangular shape to it, meaning the band is not exactly cylindrical. This allows for space on the inside of the band for an engraving. 

On the inside of the band, “925” is stamped into the metal. The stamp is about the size of a gnat. The numbers are stamped in a dark black color, contrasting them against the silver metal. 

Three metal cone shapes protrude from one quarter-inch section of the silver band. They are small, smaller than the letters on the keys of the mentioned keyboard. They are only distinguished as three separate cones by the engraved lines on them. Without these lines, the cones are connected as one, three-pointed shape protruding from the band. One can discover this upon turning the band around to view the back of the shape, which is smooth and without engraved lines. 

The three cones are embellished with the same color engraving as the “925” on the inside of the band. They don’t all peak at the same height. From right to left. The cones are short, tall, and short again. The rightmost and leftmost cones peak at the same height and are slightly smaller than the middle cone. The engraved lines accentuate the wide bottoms of the cones, which sit closest to the band itself, and then taper up the sides of the cones. The lines also carve out small stem-like bases on the cones, which connect them to the band itself. The three cones are uniform; they look the exact same despite the varying sizes. There are six lines on each cone, all situated at a slanted angle on both sides of the cone as they taper upwards. This leaves a triangle shape at the top of each cone. 

Due to the engraved lines, the cones are left in arrow-like shapes, pointing up towards the sky when it sits on the table. The band is not displaced by the weight of the cones, and sits upright on the table due to the mentioned flat surface of the rectangular-like shape of the band itself. The design is fairly simple, and vaguely resembles a crown of sorts when it sits upright. When it is slid on a finger, it gives the illusion of there being no metal band at all, leaving just the cone shapes in the front.