Civil War Recipes: Receipts from the Pages of Godey's Lady's Book

Godey's Lady's Book, perhaps the most popular magazine for women in nineteenth-century America, had a national circulation of 150,000 during the 1860s. The recipes (receipts) it reproduced were often submitted by middle- and upper-class women from both North and South, and they reveal the variety of regional cooking very much in evidence before the homogenization of American culture in the twentieth century. Civil War Recipes reproduces, in their original wording, receipts that appeared in the pages of Godey's Lady's Book during the decade of the Civil War. Editors Lily May Spaulding and John Spaulding have added annotations to assist those cooks who might not know, for example, that "biscuits" often referred to what we now call "cookies". They also provide a brief overview of the technical state of cooking in America before and during the Civil War. Although leavening agents were not unknown, the recipe for "Christening Cake" requires whisking the whites of sixteen eggs into a full froth and beating the entire mixture for more than thirty minutes. Sections on both Union and Confederate army rations, cooking on both homefronts, and a list of substitutions used during the war by southern cooks round out the background material provided by the Spauldings.