I was fortunate to visit an old house in Delhi, NY that belonged to my 5x great-grandparents Gideon Frisbee and Huldah Kidder. It is now a museum and cared for by the Delaware County Historical Association. You can view more photos of the house as I have previously written about Gideon Frisbee here. I also wrote about how the house is supposed to be haunted by Huldah Kidder here. It is a Federal style house built around 1798. Let me turn our attention to the kitchen in this house. This is the first room I entered because I went in through the side door.
The rooms looks like they are staged and not the original set up but there is still interesting history here.
There is the sink with the pump.
Then there is the wood burning stove.
And the pantry.
I went looking for a recipe that may have been used in the area and came across a few that were in the papers of Laura Bostwick who lived in Delhi, NY in the 1800s. Laura is the 4th cousin of Jabez Bostwick who married Freelove Frisbee-Gideon and Huldah’s daughter. Jabez and Freelove are my 4x great-grandparents. I chose one recipe to feature here and left the spelling as it appears on the page. There are no instructions as to how to mix the ingredients or what temperature or how long to bake. They just knew.
Chocklate Cake
1 cup of sugar
butter the size of a egg
1 egg 1/2 cup butter milk
1/2 teaspoon soda
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 cups of flour
the cream
1 cup of sweet milk
1 cup of sugar
1 square of chalket
Go check out what other people are cooking up at Sepia Saturday.
How amazing to be able to walk through a house that your ancestors once lived in…What I’d give to be able to do that!
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What a great chance to see how your forebears lived all those years ago. The recipe for Chocklate Cake looks rather interesting. I like the “butter the size of an egg” measurement. 🙂
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What a great stove.
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A wonderful old stove, but can you imagine cooking on or in it? I like the two spellings of chocolate.
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I love seeing recreations of old kitchens, but I also wonder how accurate the staging is.
I am glad that recipes are more explicit now.
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I, too, have an ancestor named Huldah! I thought I was the only one! And I really like the pie safe and the treadle-operated churn — what a labor-saving device that was!
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The recipe is interesting.Love the spelling. We had a pump at the sink at my grandparent’s farm.Also remember those butter churns. Remarkable to have the family home preserved as a museum.
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Great photos and story. Kitchens are my favorite room to visit when touring historic homes. Very few survive in near original condition like this. My grandmother had a similar farmhouse kitchen with wood stove. It took a lot of kindling to keep one of those at a proper temperature to bake a cake.
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A beautiful kitchen, a sink with a water tap and the stove must have seen a lot of cooking and baking.The most amazing, that it was in your family. You must have heard whispering from the corners when you visited! The recipe sounds good and as you said one is supposed to know how to bake cake.
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How wonderful that you were able to walk through the house (even if the furniture was staged).
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What a wonderful old wood stove. I would give my soul to have that in my kitchen
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I love looking at old recipes when everything was done by memory leaving those of us who never cooked on a wood stove completely confused.
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