Breakfast, Dessert, Supper

Four hundred recipes from Auburn, New York, 1881 — the oldest cookbook here, and the only one written by a woman for herself.

Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each one links straight to the page it comes from.

  1. Angel food cake, when it was brand new. Angels' Food Cake — whites of eleven eggs, no butter, no yolks — was a novelty in 1881, tested "with a broom splint" and cooled upside down on a pan with inch-high tin feet. Read it in the book →
  2. Baptist Cake is fried — that's the joke. Rolled dough cut in squares and fried in lard "as you do doughnuts": dough fully immersed, like a Baptist. Read it in the book →
  3. Root beer, from actual roots. An Excellent Summer Beer boils burdock seed, dandelion roots, butternut bark and sassafras root bark, sweetens with a quart of molasses and works it with a teacup of yeast. Read it in the book →
  4. The 1880 election is preserved in batter. Garfield Cake (raisins and walnuts) and Hancock Corn Cakes share the book the way the candidates shared the ballot — and Garfield was president when it was printed. Read it in the book →
  5. General Grant got a pudding. Eight tablespoons of tapioca soaked overnight, two quarts of boiled milk, six yolks — a pudding sturdy enough to carry the general's name. Read it in the book →
  6. The Birds Nest Pudding has eggs of apple. Whole pared, cored apples sit in the dish as the "eggs"; a batter of eight real eggs and a quart and a half of milk almost covers them. Read it in the book →
  7. Hard times, softened. Hard Times Cake substitutes sour cream or buttermilk for richer things — though the book allows it "can be baked in layers and spread with jelly if preferred." Read it in the book →
  8. The Breakfast section opens with an advertisement. The first thing under the BREAKFAST half-title is a full recipe for Baker's English Breakfast Cocoa "in tin cans" — advertising and instruction were not yet different things. Read it in the book →
  9. The Tipsy Squire confesses in his name. Sliced sponge cake "saturated with wine" under a rich boiled custard, iced, browned, and served cold with whipped cream — the American cousin of England's tipsy cake. Read it in the book →
  10. A marble cake in two voices. The book prints Light and Dark recipes to be layered "a tablespoonful of the light in, then one of the dark" — spice and molasses marbling, mixed at the pan. Read it in the book →
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of Breakfast, Dessert, Supper (1881) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.