Talking Turkey in Pre-Revolutionary America

For the holiday, John Overholt at Harvard’s Houghton Library shared a look inside one of only five surviving copies of a cookbook that Edes and Gill reprinted for pre-Revolutionary Boston:

Susannah Carter’s The Frugal Housewife, or Complete Woman Cook (1772) [was] just the second cookbook printed in America. Carter was English, and only in later editions did distinctively American dishes like pumpkin pie begin to appear, but her book was highly influential and went through numerous editions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries before cookbooks by American authors began to predominate.

In addition to its collection of recipes and household hints, the book includes two illustrations by a man then best known as a silversmith and engraver, Paul Revere.

Those pictures show how to prepare turkey, various other fowls, and hare or rabbit for cooking.

The holiday also offers a chance to quote Samuel Adams’s advice to a new husband about preserving a happy house:

Of what Consequence is it, whether a Turkey is brought on the Table boild or roasted? And yet, how often are the Passions sufferd to interfere in such mighty Disputes, till the Tempers of both become so sowerd, that they can scarcely look upon each other with any tolerable Degree of good Humor.

Plus, Benjamin Franklin’s struggle to electrocute a turkey.