Okay, I was cautious when the auction showed up on eBay. I was quietly optimistic when I won the auction and then prepared for disappointment waiting for the package to arrive from England.
And it finally arrived….and it’s amazing!
It’s The Carolina Housewife by Sarah Rutledge! And this one is the real deal antique. I love the stickers all over the package: “Royal Mail” and the Customs Declaration with the description of “Old Book” written on it.
I’ve been collecting this cookbook as long as I have known about it. There have been many different printings over the past hundred years or so. I’ve always been on the lookout for the original, but never knew what it originally looked like. That’s the hard part—how do you know what to look for when you don’t know what it looks like?
The Carolina Housewife was published by “a Lady of Charleston” in 1847. No name was written but apparently it was an open secret that it was written by Sarah Rutledge, daughter of the Declaration of Independence signer, Edward Rutledge. The first two versions have it titled “House and Home” but by the time the third version rolled around, they switched it to “The Carolina Housewife.” It’s been published several times over the past hundred plus years, most notably by the University of South Carolina Press. I’ve got several versions, let me walk you through them.
It started out with this one:
This paperback version with the blue spiral spine is from 1963 and is a facsimile reprint of the original 1847 publication. It has a postscript by Anna Wells and menus compiled by Mrs. Hillyer Rudisill.
Then I had this 1979 hardback version…
This is the first version of the cookbook from The University of South Carolina Press. It has taken Anna Wells Rutledge’s postscript and turned it into an “Introduction” and added in a list of South Carolina cookbooks that were published before 1935.
Then I was able to find this paperback second printing version from 1980.
There are a third (1987) and fourth (1991) printings but I haven’t come across those yet. I was able to find a nice fifth printing from 1999 with a dust jacket.
And I’ve got this one, but I’m not sure when it was printed. It’s smaller and has a golden yellow cover. The address for additional copies is for a post office box in Mobile, Alabama. I guess this was before the University of South Carolina Press? I’m not sure how it could’ve been at the same time? Or after?
Anyways, that brings us to my newest one…the oldest one yet!
And here it is!
The first two pages have been torn out, so no clue there as to what this particular publication date could be. The title page does say, “Third Edition, corrected and enlarged” and it’s written right above a publication date of 1855. So unless there were no additional printings of the third edition, this is probably a good eight years after the first one…but still firmly in the nineteenth century.
There's an inscription on the inside cover that says "Catherine Mckeone is book new York" and is dated 1866. By this time, our country had already gone through the Civil War so it's interesting to see it placed in New York a year after it had ended. Not to mention finding it from a rare book dealer in England more than a hundred years later. How does that happen?
I’m not sure if I’ll ever find an original 1847 version, but this is a pretty good one to get for my birthday!