House-Keeping in the Sunny South

With its roots in the meetings of the Phoenix Agricultural Club of Marietta, Georgia, Ella Ruth Tennent’s House-Keeping in the Sunny South offers nearly eight hundred food recipes, over seventy formulas for household compounds or medicines, and eight essays on managing various rooms of the house. More than just a cookbook, this 1885 publication illuminates home life in Marietta, the Atlanta area, and greater Georgia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The day-to-day details of the writing in this volume tell a larger story. When the preface states that the recipes are inexpensive to “meet the pressure of the times,” for example, it is hinting at the fact that the nation—and the South especially—was still recovering from an economic depression. Yet the cookbook also reveals a changing South. It is peppered with recipes from hotels and restaurants, claims contributors from twenty-two states, and calls for newly available commercial ingredients as well as exotic ones that demanded, at the time, global shipping networks. And the presence of chilled dishes between these covers also reveals how prevalent affordable year-round kitchen ice was becoming. But this remains a culinary guide from a time and place poised at the cusp of transition. It includes instructions for extracting the “jelly” from a calf's foot, for example, alongside gelatin recipes dependent on store-bought thickener. House-Keeping in the Sunny South was intended for Georgia’s rapidly changing kitchens, but there is much for modern audiences to learn (and taste) from these pages.