All in a Day's Work: Innovation, Labor, & Times of Trouble

This 1731 handwritten book of receipts comes from England. Although the creators are not known, it includes receipts and home remedies in several different hands and receipts attributed to a variety of women (Lady Westmorland, Mrs. Catherine Sanderson, Mrs. Allston, Mrs. Gilbert, and Sr. Orlando Gees). Handwritten receipt books like this allowed women to share recipes and knowledge across generations. The History of Food & Drink Collection contains more than 40 receipt books, household ledgers, and recipe collections. 

Letters are often stories in their own right, giving insight into families, relationships, and events in history. In October 1862, Nancy B. Harbin wrote letters to two of her sons, whose Mississippi regiment was stations outside of Richmond, Virginia. Her correspondence reveals news of family members back home, of another son either ill or wounded and dying, and examples of the need for family devotion in troubled times. 

Left, often alone, on the homefront, many wives wrote long letters to their husbands fighting in the Civil War, as is the case with Nannie Figgat of Southwest Virginia and her husband, Charles. This letter includes an update on their sick baby, who died shortly after her next letter to Charles in December of 1863.

A Domestic Cook Book, written by Malinda Russell, is the first cookbook by an African-American. Russell was born free in Tennessee in the 1820s. During her life, she worked as a cook, a nurse, and a wash-woman in Virginia and Tennessee. She owned a boarding-house, then a pastry shop before moving to Michigan, where she seems to have been a cook again at the time the book was published.

Submitted in 1868 by Elizabeth Hughes in Tennesee, this claim requested more than $1,400 in reimbursement for damages done to her home and property by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. 

In 1872, Sarah Capterton Preston's son, Hugh, was a student at VMI. Following a charge of insubordination on a holiday, for which Hugh was apparently punished none-too-lightly, his mother wrote a passionate letter to Colonel Grabowski about the incident, arguing that while she agreed her some was partially at fault, he wasn't he only one and that his superior officer should take note that a commission cannot shield one from unnecessarily insulting a gentlemen.

Many women's organizations, whether they were based around churches, schools, community groups or activism, or social institutions, have a tradition of fund-raising. One common way was through the creation, publication, and sale of community cookbooks like this one, published a Jefferston, Virginia, Ladies' Aid Society in 1913. 

In 1929, Sarah Pitts, soon to be an extension agent in Virginia, wrote to Maude E. Wallace with a variety of questions about her future role. Wallace's letter back provided her with her answers. Pitts was Home Demonstration Agent in Prince William County from 1930 until 1935, when she married and, as was the practice of the day, resigned her position. In other words, extension agents during this time had to make a choice: career or family.

Making apple butter is an old tradition in Appalachia and a variety of other locations. This photorgraph, from the Earl Palmer Appalachian Photograph and Artifact Collection, shows Nora Treece making it in a kettle. Once cooked and cooled, it could be consumed immediate, or canned and stored for future consumption.