One of my goals for 2016 is to organize all the family history “stuff” I have so I can write more posts here and decide where the original material should be donated.  I have a whole bookcase full of books originally from the collection of James Nelson Frierson, my great uncle, the subject of the first post in this blog.  Starting my task at the top shelf, I noticed a small ( ~ 3″ x 5″) bug-eaten leather-bound book titled  “Domestic Cookery”. Since I’ve been doing some cooking recently, I opened it to see if it might contain some interesting old recipes that I could try.

The first two pages revealed the full title and the signature of the original owner: my great-great-great grandmother, Amarintha Nelson.   She was the grandmother of Elizabeth Nelson Nelson Frierson (1849-1935), who was the subject of an earlier post showing photographs taken at Cherry Vale on her 85th birthday. Click on any of these images to open a larger one you can explore…

Amarintha Carson McCauley (16 Nov 1792 – 1 Sep 1875) was married to Samuel Edgar Nelson (13 May 1774  –  25 Jul 1852)  on December 20, 1810.  The publication date of the cookbook was also 1810, so I’m guessing it might have been a wedding present for the newly married couple.   Their oldest child, born two years later, was Bama’s father, James McCauley Nelson (17 Jan 1812 – 17 Dec 1855).   Amarintha’s portrait is included on page 284 in the 1996 book by the South Carolina Society of Colonial Dames of America,  South Carolina Portraits: a collection of portraits of South Carolinians and portraits in South Carolina .  I’m trying to get a copy of the book to find out more about the painting:  who did it, when it was painted, where is it now?  As to the recipes in Domestic Cookery, I don’t think I’ll be making any of them any time soon.  Two pages of the Index to the book are shown below and as you can see, many of these contain words that are not in common use today:  “soals in the Portugese way”,  ” skate crimp”, “sago to give away to poor families”, “saloop”, “sowter”, “sprats to make them taste like artichokes”, “tench broth”, “syllabub” and “thornback” .  Wow, I’m not sure where to begin with these – a dictionary might be the first step!  I think I’ll work on the one listed below on page 98 titled ” … a very good sauce especially to hide the bad colour of fowls” .  Check out the scan to the right below to see some of Amarintha’s jottings of a recipe on the last page of the book… ginger bread?

Amarintha McCauley Nelson and her husband Samuel Edgar Nelson were from Clarendon County, SC, and are buried in the Nelson – Plowden – Haynesworth Cemetery, a few miles NE of Manning, SC.  You can see their portraits and a photo of his tombstone on the Find A Grave link for that cemetery,   http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gsr&GScid=2376615